Expert strategies for baby’s growth and development beyond Wonder Weeks

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Today’s episode comes to us courtesy of listener Alison, who sent me some information on Dr. Stuart Shanker’s work on what he calls “Self-Reg,” which seems to be his branded term for “Self-Regulation,” and asked me to explore it in an episode.  And I really don’t think she or I realized what a can of worms we were opening up when she sent the question and I said I’d look into it.

According to Dr. Shanker’s Self-Regulation Institute, Shanker Self-Reg ® is “a powerful method for understanding stress and managing tension and energy, which are key to enhancing self-regulation in children, youth and adults of all ages.  Decades of research have shown that optimal self-regulation is the foundation for healthy human development, adaptive coping skills, positive parenting, learning, safe and caring schools, and vibrant communities.”

I got Dr. Shanker’s book, which is also called Self-Reg, and I have to say that my warning signals started to go off when every footnote that I went to check out led to a book, rather than to a peer-reviewed journal article.  Now journal articles aren’t perfect; I actually saw an article in the New York Times recently on three scientists who managed to publish twenty papers in journal articles across a variety of fields over the last year in which they “started with politically fashionable conclusions which they worked backward to support by aping the relevant fields’ methods and arguments, and sometimes inventing data.”  And I’ve also seen articles describing how major, respected publishers released entire publications that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer-reviewed medical journals but didn’t disclose their sponsorship.

But in general, journal articles are how scientific information gets disseminated, because they include a methods section and a results section so experts and other readers like you and me can understand how they arrived at their conclusions.  Then other scientists can replicate that work if they want to, or at least offer critiques of the methods and conclusions.  But no such system is in place when a book is published.

Craig Silverman, who wrote a book on media accuracy, says in an article in The Atlantic that he did an anecdotal survey asking people: “Between books, magazines, and newspapers, which do you think has the most fact-checking?”  Almost inevitably, the people he spoke with guessed books, but it turns out that fact-checking has never been standard practice in the book publishing world at all.  The article goes on to say that “reliance on books creates a weak link in the chain of media accuracy” because “magazine fact checkers typically treat reference to a fact in a published book as confirmation of the fact, yet too often the books themselves have undergone no such rigorous process.”  Further, when only the book title is provided in the footnotes we have no idea what in the book is being cited – whether it’s the entire premise of the book, or some obscure sentence on page 475.

So I want to be clear here and say that I don’t have reason to believe that Dr. Shanker’s book is a lie.  I also don’t have evidence to show that the books he’s relying on to support his points are based on lies, mainly because I don’t have time to read a hundred books in preparation for this episode.  But what I do know is that books are about the least reliable form of evidence you could draw on to make a point about something that’s important to get right, and that he also doesn’t cite research that I now know is available that could actually have supported his ideas.  Instead he makes statements about how he has scanned the brains of hyper-aroused children in his lab (but doesn’t describe any published journal article coming out of that work, which is pretty unusual).

Elsewhere he describes a process of physical sensations becoming associated with distinctive emotions: “For example, if an infant is hungry and her cries go unheeded, her muscles tense up, which is associated with sensations of discomfort, and a distinct feeling of anger may begin to emerge.  If a caregiver responds to these first signs of anger by scolding the child…then the physical sensations and the nascent feeling of anger that the child experiences may become further bound up with feelings of hopelessness.  As the child grows older, the same physical sensations – a stomachache, for instance – can trigger feelings of anger and hopelessness – and leave a parent befuddled, completely unaware of how a deep-seated physical/emotional association might be the culprit…” Again, there’s no citation provided for this work and I’ve yet to find any research or researcher who can corroborate that this process happens.

A third example is related to a concept called the “interbrain,” which I did find described elsewhere, and which is a kind of shared intuitive channel of communication, which is how parents sense things like tiny shifts in their child’s mood.  Then Dr. Shanker goes on to imply that for some children, minor stressors like “the gleam in a parent’s eyes or a hug or a gentle touch, which normally would be a source of positive arousal, can be more than the baby can bear.”  Once again, I couldn’t find any literature or researcher to support this claim, and my overall impression of the book is that Dr. Shanker takes research on children facing severe stressors like poverty and violence, and connects that research to minor stressors like itchy clothing labels, whirring fans, and the gleam in a parent’s eye to tell us middle class White parents that our children have severe problems, when actually the research doesn’t really support these claims.

When I went on Dr. Shanker’s Self-Regulation Institute’s website to look for evidence supporting the principles of Self-Reg I found a series of videos discussing the principles which, strangely, I can no longer locate.  One of which talked about the movement’s detractors and how people who don’t want to be convinced of Self-Reg’s benefits will never be convinced.  He went on to say something along the lines of “there’s evidence to support Self-Reg” – but nowhere is this evidence ever actually described.

If you search “self-reg” in any scholarly database, you come up with pretty much nothing except the occasional hit on a non-peer-reviewed article authored by Dr. Shankar.  And I’ve also learned in the course of researching episodes for this show that when a single researcher’s name gets too attached to a concept – if they’ve basically made their name on a concept, then that’s an extra reason to be suspicious.  We saw this in our episode on grit, where we found that the peer-reviewed papers showed effect sizes that were nowhere near as large as Dr. Angela Duckworth describes them to be in places like her book and her TED talk.  Growth Mindset may also be a useful tool but is likely not as large a determinant of success as Dr. Carol Dweck states in her TED talk.  So when I see that Dr. Shanker is essentially the only researcher whose name is tied to Self-Reg but he has actually trademarked the term “Shanker Self-Reg,” my danger radar starts beeping even more loudly.

Honestly, I find the claims about self-reg to be compelling.  I want to believe them.  They align with the way I view children, which is that bad behavior isn’t bad behavior; it’s the child trying to tell us something and what Dr. Shanker argues that they are trying to tell us is that they are stressed.

But in the absence of much in the way of real evidence in the book or on the Self-Regulation Institute’s website I reached out to the organization to ask them what they had.  I told them that I really do want to believe in what they say but I asked to see some evidence, and the very friendly response that I received essentially said two things.  Firstly, that “Self-Reg is a relatively young model and, as a whole new approach rather than a program, there is time involved in learning the model and refining how best to apply it.  We have begun this work and I am happy to share the research we do have.  I would welcome you to look at our website,” and then there’s a link to the home page, not to any specific evidence for the approach.

I’ve seen this idea of it being a “young model” bandied about a lot in the Self-Reg materials – but what confuses me here is that they somehow claim that it’s a young model and they’re still conducting research on it, but Dr. Shanker has written a book that’s at least two years old by the time you’re hearing this.  His bio on his website says he received a $7 million grant in 2005 to establish a state-of-the-art cognitive and social neuroscience centre at York University in Toronto, which was the largest gift the university had ever received.  He has advised governments on child development in at last twelve countries, and developed Shanker Self-Reg, his five domain model for understanding, recognizing and alleviating the impact of negative stress.  The Mehrit Centre, which also funds Dr. Shanker’s work, has a Foundations Certificate program that you can pay $1495 to take online, as well as a Level 2 Facilitator Program which grants you certification in The Shanker Method ® for $2,195, a Master’s Modules Program for $2,195…and the list goes on.  So my question is: if Dr. Shanker has had over a decade in his state-of-the-art cognitive and social neuroscience centre, and has had time to write a book and develop courses to train people on Self-Reg and wants to see the entire country of Canada become a “Self-Reg haven,” as he says in one of his marketing pieces, where’s the research?  How do we know this stuff actually helps?

Because so often in doing this show I’ve seen ideas that have prima facie merit actually don’t hold up when we start looking into them.  The first one of these that I ran into was on how to how to raise a child who isn’t racially prejudiced – I’d always just assumed that the best way to do this is to just not mention race, because then my daughter will learn that it isn’t an issue.  And it turns out that this is actually one of the most effective ways to raise a racist child!  And before I did my episode on self-esteem, I just assumed I’d find studies saying how beneficial it is, and then some studies on how to get more of it, and it turned out that actually – despite a massive push in California in the ‘90s to increase every child’s self-esteem as a way of solving the state’s societal problems –  high self-esteem hasn’t been shown to cause good life outcomes – it’s entirely possible that people who have good life outcomes just have high self-esteem. So while it can be attractive to jump on these bandwaggons, that’s not what we do here at Your Parenting Mojo.  We dig into what research there is and get our hands dirty and then try to make a decision based on the best evidence we can find.

Which brings me to the second major point of the email that I received from the Self-Regulation Institute, which was to direct me to their new open-access peer reviewed journal called Reframed: The Journal of Self-Reg.  The journal has a link to a page showing its editors; perhaps not surprisingly Dr. Shanker is listed first, followed by Lisa Bayrami who is the Executive Director of the Self-Regulation Institute.  The Managing Editor is Anne Showalater, a Ph.D Candidate in Canadian Studies and is the person who responded to my email.  Two of the four members of the Editorial Board are described as having explicit connections to the Self-Regulation Institute or the Mehrit Centre, so I think it’s safe to say that this journal is probably not going to publish any research that’s critical of Self-Reg.  And actually, as far as I can tell,  it’s not going to publish much in the way of actual scientific research at all – it’s essentially a series of blog posts describing different aspects of Self-reg, with sources cited at the end of each one – the majority, as usual, being books rather than peer-reviewed journal articles.  So in this episode I’m going to go through the references provided in the book, as well as in the Self-Reg “journal” articles, and from other peer-reviewed sources and we’ll see what we can find.

So what is Self-Reg?  I’ll summarize the first chapter of Dr. Shanker’s book.  He starts by arguing that while *self-control* is important in being successful in life, sometimes the more we try to control ourselves the harder it gets.  More important than self-control is the amount of stress we are under and how we manage this, or how we self-regulate.  Dr. Shanker gives the example of cold outside being a “classic example of an environmental stressor that the autonomic nervous system responds to” – in a roundabout way, he states that if there are too many external stressors like being cold on top of the usual emotional, social, and cognitive stressors then the child’s limbic system can become hypersensitive to the slightest hint of danger.  It registers the cold as a big threat that causes the release of neurochemicals that trigger fight or flight mode, and if that doesn’t work then the brain freezes – like an animal playing dead.  The oldest, most “reptilian” part of the child’s brain releases adrenaline which sets off a series of reactions that result in the release of cortisol.  You’ve likely felt the result: heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure increase; you’re alert and reactive; your sweat glands open to cool you down, and endorphins are released that increase your pain tolerance.  These are exactly the reactions you need if you really are facing a life-or-death threat, but our brains can’t tell whether a threat is real or just from a video game, or if it’ll be over in a minute or might last for hours.

When we are in this mode, all of our body functions are geared toward managing our reaction and we can’t think clearly.  Think back to the last time you got really angry: you probably couldn’t get your words out straight because your higher-order brain couldn’t control things like your language, reflective thinking, mindreading, empathy, or self-control while you were in that state.

Our brains are constantly shifting states, between being fast asleep through drowsy, calmly focused and alert, hyper-aroused, and in fight or flight mode.  All of us do this, all day every day.  But the more stressed a child is, the harder it is to manage these transitions and they may get stuck in the excessively aroused states.

The idea behind self-control is that if you can develop enough grit, determination, self-discipline, or whatever else you want to call it, you CAN learn how to deal with feelings of discomfort without giving in to them.  But if you are constantly trying to keep a lid on your feelings of discomfort so you can “be in control,” then this will eventually take a toll on us – either in our behavior in the moment (perhaps we might lash out, or eat something sugary so we feel better), or may result in a deeper problem in our physical, mental, or emotional well-being.  What we really need to do is to recognize when we are going into a hyper-alert mode by recognizing the behavior that indicates this, identify the stressor and take steps to reduce it, reflect on and understand your state of arousal, and figure out what helps you to be calm, rest, and recover.

To back up his statements in this chapter, Dr. Shankar references twenty two books, one book review, and precisely no peer-reviewed journal articles describing original research.  His source for the fact that neurochemicals raise heart rate was a book published in 1929.

The premise of self-reg is that self-control is not the answer to children’s problems.  We looked at this in our episode on Grit in which we discovered that grittiness may indeed be a useful skill, but it’s unlikely to be the determinant between success and failure.  We further elaborated on it when we looked at the Marshmallow Test, which asks children to eat a non-preferred snack now or wait 15 minutes by themselves in a room looking at their favorite snack, before they were allowed to eat it.  We found that children’s ability to wait for their favorite snack actually probably was not as important in determining their life outcomes as some other characteristics like how socioeconomically advantaged their family was, which impacts their perception of whether a promised reward will ever actually arrive, and, coincidentally, how much stress they were under during the experiment.  If the children were asked to think about or look at something distressing, or were exposed to a loud noise, a strong smell, or a hot, cold, or crowded room, they might not be able to wait as long as they could if they were told how to think about other things to distract themselves while they waited.  In essence, by teaching the children how to distract themselves, the researchers were teaching the children how to self-regulate.

I’m actually on board with what Dr. Shanker calls the “process” of self-regulation.  The five-step process is:

1. read the signs and “reframe” the behaviour;
2. recognize the stressors across all five domains of experience – biological, emotion, cognitive, social, and prosocial;
3. reduce the stressors and lighten the stress load;
4. reflect – enhance stress awareness by becoming aware of what it feels like to be calm and when you’re in fight-or-flight or freeze;
5. respond – develop personalized strategies to reduce tension and restore energy by figuring out what brings you back to being calm.

The process actually mirrors a lot of what I try to do as a practitioner of respectful parenting.  When we talked with Dr. Claudia Gold a while ago about her book The Silenced Child, we discussed how there really is no such thing as “misbehavior;” there’s just behavior that we might not like.  All behavior is trying to tell us something, if we’re willing to listen in the right way, which is the second step of Dr. Shanker’s process – trying to identify the underlying stressor.  So is our child acting up because they are tired, hungry, because Daddy has been away all week and they’ve really missed him; because they had to be on “good behavior” at school all day and they just need a release now they’re home.  But things start to break down a bit somewhere between steps two and three in the process (recognizing the stressors and reducing the stress load), as far as the research seems to go.  I will acknowledge that the literature on this field is vast and I haven’t read all of it.  One researcher looked at how many papers have been published on self-regulation over the last 20 years or so and it looks sort of like the hockey stick diagram that shows the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – it just exploded about a decade ago, and now thousands of papers a year are published on this topic.  One thing that does seem pretty clear is that the majority of research on stressors is on really serious stressors like poverty and violence, because these have a well-documented impact on children’s ability to self-regulate.  If a child is coming from a physically un-safe home, walking through a physically un-safe neighborhood, to a school where they feel physically un-safe( if they are in one of the 19 states that permits corporal punishment in schools, where over 160,000 students who are primarily Black, boys, or have disabilities are punished in this way every year), or if they just feel emotionally un-safe with their teacher and/or their peers, then it’s no wonder that they have problems self-regulating.

But the literature on the types of milder potential stressors like a chair being too hard or a label being too scratchy is much more thin on the ground.  Dr. Candace Raio at New York University exposed two groups of adults to pictures of snakes; one group was given a mild electric shock on the wrist when they saw the pictures while the control group wasn’t given a shock.  All participants were then trained to use a cognitive regulation strategy that involved reappraising their situation, which means thinking about it in a different way that makes it seem less stressful.  The next day, participants were randomly assigned to a stress group, where they had to put their arm in an ice bath up to their elbow for 3 minutes, while the control group put their arm in room-temperature water, and then they looked at the pictures of snakes again.  Participants rated how stressful it was to have their arm in the water, and the researchers also collected the participants’ saliva at different times during the experiment to measure the cortisol in it, since cortisol is produced when individuals are stressed.  This study found that the participants who were stressed by putting their arms in the ice water were unable to use the reappraisal techniques they learned to reduce their fear arousal the second time they looked at the snake pictures, but the participants who put their arms in room temperature water *were* able to use the new techniques to reduce their fear the second time they looked at the snake pictures.  This indicates that there may not be much point in teaching cognitive reappraisal strategies to children who are already stressed, since they may not be able to apply what they’ve learned in the future, but another thing I learned was that just the stress of putting your arm in an ice bath is enough to induce a reasonable amount of stress in people.

Dr. Karen Lindquist at the University of North Carolina has shown that hunger can actually be felt as an emotion when a person is having a negative interaction with someone else, but only when the hungry person isn’t explicitly focused on emotions (so if you asked them to pay attention to their emotions then the effect went away).  They were more likely to say they were experiencing “hate” and to view the research assistant as judgmental when they were hungry but not focusing on their emotions.  Importantly, though, the hungry participants didn’t differ in self-regulation from the participants who weren’t hungry, and this self-regulation didn’t impact how they said they felt and what they thought of the research assistant.

Dr. Roy Baumeister, who did a lot of research debunking the excessive focus on self-esteem that was going on in California in the 1990s, did a study with some colleagues which had undergraduates do some personality tests, and then a research assistant told some of the students that the test results showed they were likely to end up alone in life because they might marry or have several marriages but would be likely to be short-lived, while other students were told that they were the type of person who would be likely to have rewarding relationships throughout life.  The students who thought they would end up alone answered significantly fewer questions correctly on an intelligence test; the researchers summarized this finding as “social exclusion feedback produced a substantial decrement in intelligent performance.”  And it wasn’t just hearing any bad news that produced this result, because the researchers told some of the students that they would end up alone because of misfortune and accidents, and these students scored as well on the IQ test as those who thought they would have lots of friends.  Only the bad feedback specifically related to social exclusion produced a significant drop in intelligence scores.  If we extrapolate this to a school situation, we might say that a child who has few friends and maybe who doesn’t get along with the teacher is going to be less able to perform well on academic challenges – although this study didn’t look at self-regulation specifically.

The curious part in all of this is that buried deep in one of these research articles, I found a reference to “regulatory depletion theory.”  This is the idea that our brains have a limited ability to process a lot of tasks at the same time that require us to regulate ourselves.  One paper showed that children who have a difficult relationship with their parents are more likely to have difficulty paying attention at school.  The researchers hypothesized that children who have difficult relationship with tier parents may be “primed” to scan and interpret other challenging settings they encounter for similar threats, and that attention spent processing threats detracts from attention that can be paid to other topics.  The relationship with their parents didn’t explain all of the problems paying attention, though, so the researchers believe there are other cognitive factors at play too – perhaps because the parental relationship causes the child to lose sleep, which may cause the attentional problems.

Dr. Roy Baumeister, again, actually published one of the first papers discussing the idea of regulatory depletion theory, although he seems to conflate self-control and self-regulation to a large extent.  In one early paper he describes four conducting related experiments: in the first, people who were told to change their emotional response – either positively or negatively – related to an upsetting movie about the impacts of radioactive waste on wildlife were able to squeeze a hand strengthening tool for significantly less time than people who saw the film but were not instructed to change their emotional response.

In the second study, participants were asked to either think about a white bear as much as they could, not think about a white bear, or were not given any special instructions about controlling their thoughts.  It turned out that expressing thoughts about a white bear didn’t have any impact on the participants’ willingness to keep trying to solve unsolvable anagrams, but the participants who were told not to think about the bear gave up on the anagrams sooner than either of the other groups.

In the third study, participants were asked to either not think about a white bear or do some moderately difficult math problems, because both of these tasks were considered to be about equally difficult and unpleasant (in their words) but suppressing thoughts about a white bear should involve more self-regulation.  Participants in both groups then watched skits from Saturday Night Live and a Robin Wililams stand-up act and were instructed not to laugh, smile, or respond in any way to the videos.  The students’ mood was tested and didn’t differ between groups, but participants who had to avoid thinking about the white bear smiled more overall than those who did the math problems, indicating that the participants who had had to regulate their behavior by not thinking about the bear were unable to continue self-regulating when watching the movie.

Finally, the researchers asked participants to write a story about a time when they were able to control their emotions, as well as a time when they were not able to control their emotions.  As one might expect, stories that involved feeling tired, stressed, or being drunk, or having other emotions or regulatory demands present, were associated with regulatory failure, while exerting self-control and feelings of calmness were associated with regulatory success.

The researchers’ conclusion after the four studies was that after people exercise self-regulation, they are subsequently less capable off regulating themselves, at least for a short time.  They hypothesized that repetitive exertions of self-regulation may lead to fatigue in the short run but may build up strength in the long run and the flip-side may also be true: not exercising self-regulation may lead to less fatigue in the short-term but a decreased ability to self-regulate in the long-term.  But I think that Dr. Shanker would argue that these experiments don’t actually describe self-regulation; they describe self-control.  The key seems to be that rather than just exert more self-control in a situation, we should recognize why we feel like we need to exert self-control and interrupt the cycle.  This is pretty difficult to do in the kinds of studies that Dr. Baumeister does, where he rewards undergraduates for participating in his research by giving them course credit, and where they likely feel as though they have to do exactly what the research assistant says to make sure they get that course credit.  But out in the real world, we have the power to change some of the things in our lives that these students found stressful.  We can think about a distressing topic for a while if we need to, and then decide to move on when we’re ready.  If we know that a particular type of movie will stress us out and doesn’t have any benefit for us, then we don’t have to watch it.  Children may be less able to do this in some circumstances because it isn’t necessarily common practice among parents and teachers to try to understand the underlying sources of stress; we tend to tell them “your behavior needs to change” instead.  As we noted in the episode on grit, we’re on board with the idea of teaching children to exert self-control because it fits with the Puritan work ethic that founded this country as well as the meritocracy on which it claims to run now, which says that if you try hard enough then you can do anything you like.

So when we’re thinking about what is our role as parents in all of this, it seems to me as though the key is to figure out what are the potential sources of stress for your child, and how much of that stress they can handle, and what, if anything, you should do about that stress.  It seems to me that Dr. Shanker is on one rather extreme end of this spectrum, with all of his mentions of stress being caused by things that seem apparently relatively minor.  The most comprehensive list of potential stressors that I found in his work is actually one that was generated by students who are taking one of the paid Self-Reg courses; these include strong “city” smells, preholiday buildup, walking into a room to get something and then not being able to remember what it was you came in the room to get, reading social cues, and unfairness.  These are most definitely adults thinking about adults’ needs (the stress of internet dating is also on the list), and there’s no effort to understand how applicable they are to children, if at all.

Dr. Shanker does say that ultimately we want to be able to help our child to learn how to self-regulate but in reality it’s probably us who are going to end up cutting the tags out of our child’s clothes and asking the Principal if a softer seat can be procured because the standard school seats are too hard for our child.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University has a website describing toxic stress which says “learning how to cope with adversity is an important part of healthy child development.  When we are threatened, our bodies prepare us to respond by increasing our heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormones, such as cortisol. When a young child’s stress response systems are activated within an environment of supportive relationships with adults, these physiological effects are buffered and brought back down to baseline. The result is the development of healthy stress response systems.

The Center goes on to distinguish between three types of stress.  A positive stress response is “a normal and essential part of healthy development, characterized by brief increases in heart rate and mild elevations in hormone levels. Some situations that might trigger a positive stress response are the first day with a new caregiver or receiving an injected immunization.

A Tolerable stress response activates the body’s alert systems to a greater degree as a result of more severe, longer-lasting difficulties, such as the loss of a loved one, a natural disaster, or a frightening injury. If the activation is time-limited and buffered by relationships with adults who help the child adapt, the brain and other organs recover from what might otherwise be damaging effects.

And a Toxic stress response can occur when a child experiences strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity—such as physical or emotional abuse, chronic neglect, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence, and/or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship—without adequate adult support. This kind of prolonged activation of the stress response systems can disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and increase the risk for stress-related disease and cognitive impairment, well into the adult years.

In a Q&A section the site goes on to say ask “Is all stress damaging?”  the response is: No. The prolonged activation of the body’s stress response systems can be damaging, but some stress is a normal part of life. Learning how to cope with stress is an important part of development. We do not need to worry about positive stress, which is short-lived, or tolerable stress, which is more serious but is buffered by supportive relationships. However, the constant activation of the body’s stress response systems due to chronic or traumatic experiences in the absence of caring, stable relationships with adults, especially during sensitive periods of early development, can be toxic to brain architecture and other developing organ systems.

So when I read this, I’m looking for mention of clothes labels and hard seats and hunger and fatigue and anything else that we might consider a mild daily stressor, and I’m not seeing it. I did actually write to the Center for the Developing Child to ask about whether there were any circumstances where a combination of mild stressors could build up to impact a child in the same way that a more major stressor might, and unfortunately they didn’t respond.

I had an email conversation with Dr. Jennifer Silvers, who is an Assistant Professor at UCLA and who studies how what leads to differences in emotional regulation between children.   She was actually the one who directed me to the studies on stress caused by looking at pictures of snakes and hunger, and she said that “given that these studies are conducted on adults, and children are still developing their ability to self-regulate, I would expect these effects to be larger in them.”  I asked her if it’s possible that a piling up of small stressors could have the same effect as a larger, better researched stressors like poverty and violence, and she said “I know this is an unsatisfying answer but I don’t think we can easily say how much stress is too much. That is partially because two children who experience the exact same amount of stress may respond very differently to it. Even in extreme cases not everyone who experience trauma develops serious mental health problems. That said, there is a strong relationship between more stress exposure or more serious stress predicting worse outcomes. We don’t know as much about how mild stress impacts children in the short or long term.”  This reiterates a lot of what we learned about in the episode on intergenerational trauma, where we talked about how some people experience extreme violence and distress and go on to be fine, while others experience relatively less stressful situations and have a much more serious reaction.  She also mentioned some research done by Dr. Karen Parker at Stanford showing that mild stress can inoculate animals, in a way, and make them more resilient in adulthood which reminded me of the monstrous amount of literature on resiliency that could form at least one episode by itself.  This is the flip-side of children who face serious stressors when they are young and become sensitized to acute stress later in their lives, which implies that we’re looking for some Goldilocks-like “just right” amount of stress to increase resilience but not overwhelm the child.  We touched on the idea of resilience in our episode on Divorce – and I think I actually owe you the second part of that series – where we looked at what factors can buffer a child from experiencing stress from divorce and what factors increase their experience of stress.

So the hard part for parents, and this is something that Dr. Shanker doesn’t give us much help figuring out, is what is a reasonable amount of stress for a child to tolerate, and what we stress we should try to prevent.  There will be some children who cannot tolerate a label itching their neck, and if your child is one of these children then you may well have known this about them for some time.  But I suppose it’s possible that there are also some children who cannot tolerate the label but don’t know this about themselves; they just know they’re irritated and they don’t know why.  It’s these children that we need to figure out how to help – to help them in regulating their own emotions in the short term, and in transitioning that regulation to themselves in the long-term.  I do want to be absolutely clear that we are not trying to reduce *all* stress from children’s lives.  Children do need to learn how to understand and manage their own stress and it is not our job to make sure the path before them is completely smooth.  If we do that, they’re going to fall flat on their faces when they leave our house and we can no longer do this for them.  It may be children who experience severe stressors like poverty and violence who are in the greatest need of our help to address “minor” stressors that pile on top of the major ones.

A paper by Dr. Jamie Gross at Stanford University that reviews the status of current research and potential future directions provides us with some help on HOW to address stressors.  Dr. Gross observes that the defining feature of emotion regulation is that the individual sets a goal to change their emotion in some way – sometimes changing the emotion is the end goal; in Dr. Shanker’s terms, we are activating a goal to change our stress level, usually so we can feel less stressed.  But stress is not the only emotion we regulate, and just changing the emotion is not always the end goal – for example, sometimes a child might try to appear more interested in a conversation with a teacher (or maybe even a parent) than they really are so a teacher (or parent) will help them with an assignment.

Dr. Gross gives us five strategies that we or our child can use to support us in regulating our (or their) emotions.  The first is situation selection, which is among the most forward-looking and success-inducing strategies.  Selecting the situation our child finds themselves in makes it more or less likely that they will find ourselves in a situation that helps them to avoid increasing their stress level.  So they might avoid a certain group of peers at school who tend to increase their stress level or, I suppose, ask you to cut their labels out of their shirts.

The second is situation modification, which means changing a situation to change its emotional impact.  So if our child finds themselves with this group of peers they might decide to turn around and walk away instead of engaging.

The third is attentional deployment, which means once your child finds themselves in a stressful situation, they can take action to change that situation in a way that will change its emotional impact.  So once our child finds themselves among this group of peers, they might decide not to pay attention to certain things their peers are saying that typically cause an increase in stress in our child.  You might remember from the marshmallow studies that this approach can actually be quite successful.

The fourth strategy is cognitive change, which means shifting your appraisal of a situation to change its emotional impact.  Sometimes this cognitive change is applied to an external situation, so a child might say “they’re saying mean things about me, but they’re not really my friends so I shouldn’t listen to what they’re saying.”  At other times, cognitive change is applied to an internal situation – so our child might think “My heart is racing right now but rather than just responding to these peers I can use this signal to tell me to do something differently.”  One particularly well-studied form of cognitive change is reappraisal.  This term has become kind of loosely used at this point to mean anything in the family of cognitive change strategies, including how a person thinks about their capacity to manage situations: for example, our child might think “my peers are trying to get under my skin, but I know that I have techniques I can use so that doesn’t happen.”  I should note, though, that Dr. Silvers did a study with both children and adults as participants where the participants were asked to mentally distance themselves from a picture of a stressful situation (like a smaller child about to be hit by a bigger child), and she found that children under about age 10 were not successful at using this strategy to reduce their feelings of stress.  She said it did work to some degree in children who were 10 and older, and younger children are able to use the strategy in other situations, for example, when they were reappraising unhealthy food to reduce their craving for it.  Her lab is currently planning studies to test the effects of training to see if they can teach children to use these strategies more effectively at younger ages, but for right now it’s possible that this strategy might or might not work in children – although some approaches do work – one meta-analysis of the literature on interventions by researchers and teachers designed to improve self-regulation had small to medium positive effect sizes which means that some interventions to teach these skills to children are quite successful.

So the fifth strategy is response modulation, which means influencing the experiential, behavioral, or physiological components of the emotional response, when the person is in the thick of feeling the emotion.  So our child might use deep breathing to alter their physiological response to stress, or perhaps eat a sugary food to change their how they feel.  As we’ve seen, trying to inhibit the expression of emotion is one of the best-studied ways of modulating your response, and as you might recall, this has a variety of negative impacts on a person’s ability to perform a whole range of tasks.

Dr. Gross goes on to outline the points in an episode of behavior when it’s possible to intervene to change it.  The first of these is the identification stage, when we first feel a new emotion and decide whether or not to regulate it.  In some cases this may feel like an automatic process – we are triggered and we get angry.  Our challenge is to feel the tiny space there is between the trigger and the anger, and maybe make that space a little bit bigger, which can give us the time we need to decide whether we want to escalate or deescalate a situation.  In our child’s case, their challenge may be to identify the emotion in the first place, which is something children may not know how to do.  We may be able to support them in developing this capability by pointing out their own emotions as we see them arise, as well as ours, and also emotions of characters in stories.  Children may also not fully understand that emotions change often; they may think that because they are angry now they will always be angry.  One study showed that people who believe emotions are changeable may be more able to change their emotions.  We can help our children to understand this by telling them things like “You’re so angry right now, and I know it feels like you’ll always be angry.  Our emotions do change, and you may feel differently about this later on.”

The second step is the selection stage, where we select a strategy from the ones we described – situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, or response modulation.  Failures to regulate emotions at this stage may come from our inability to recognize all the potential regulation options open to us – we might rely on the same strategy all the time, or perhaps we just don’t see all the options available in the moment.  I would think this is especially difficult for children, who may be even more challenged to evaluate all their potential options quickly in a stressful situation and select one that will work.  And as we saw from Dr. Silvers’ work, it might be possible to coach children to use some of these strategies, but it also might not be possible until they get older.  We might try to coach them and see if it sticks, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t stick and be willing to gently revisit the topic again in the future rather than exasperatedly saying “why didn’t you just walk away from them like we talked about?”.

In the implementation stage, we take the general strategy (like cognitive change) and translate it into a specific tactics (like saying “my heart is racing right now but I’m not going to hit my classmate; I’m going to walk away”).  We might do this for several of the general strategies, and then select the most appropriate tactic to use.  Once again, we or our child may struggle with this if we can’t think of any tactics that could work, or we may not implement them well so they don’t work as we hoped they would.

After the implementation stage we may cycle through the stages again as we see the impact of our actions and decide to change these based on how effective they are both at changing our feelings and at changing the situation.

OK, so where do we parents go from here?  Well, we can start by looking out for things that seem to be a source of stress for our child, especially patterns of things that seem to be a source of stress.  We might choose to withdraw our child from that situation in the short term while we talk with them about how to avoid or manage this stress, but if this is a situation they can’t avoid then pretty soon we need to start talking about how to support them in managing their stress, by changing the situation, modifying the situation, and so on.  We also need to look at our own behavior – are we contributing to the stress in some way?  Are we modeling appropriate ways of managing stress?  (You might want to listen back to my episode on modeling emotion regulation for more on that topic.)  This is not to put all the pressure or blame on you, but our children do look to us to understand how we regulate our own emotions, so if I’m telling my child one thing about regulating their own emotions but I use a different approach when I encounter stress, my child may have a hard time learning the lesson I’m trying to teach.

I also think it’s important to note that we don’t want to remove every single potential stressor from our child’s path.  There’s a lot of research showing that an optimal amount of challenge is important for people to be interested in learning about and doing tasks, and that optimal amount of challenge is not zero.  Too much challenge isn’t good, but too little challenge isn’t good either.  The research coming out of the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard says that children can even cope with pretty major challenges if they are adequately supported by caring adults in their lives.  To do this we need to acknowledge our child’s emotions, rather than dismissing them or being uncomfortable with them, be honest about situations we can’t change (like death) and ones we actually do have the power to change, and how we might go about changing them.  But even then, our child may not learn to regulate their emotions as much as we or they might like – Dr. Jenalee Doom of the University of Denver was kind enough to  help me think through some of the issues we’ve discussed in this episode and reminded me that the prefrontal cortex, which allows us to regulate emotions, won’t be fully developed until around age 26.  But she does say that “children can certainly start developing patterns of behavior starting at a young age so when they experience a negative emotion they have more tools to draw on that they have been practicing.”

We also might not need to do a lot of teaching to support our children in developing emotional regulation.  One meta-analysis of 394 studies found that parental warmth, responsiveness, and sensitivity predict self-regulation development and may buffer the effects of other serious stressors in the family and environment.

I also want to acknowledge the bigger picture here.  The self-regulating child in Dr. Shanker’s book is one who is able to self-regulate their stress, with the apparent goal of sitting still in class and listening to what the teacher says so they can learn what needs to be learned.  This is particularly important to you, my listeners, the parents of relatively young children, because self-regulation is seen as one of the key indicators of kindergarten and school readiness.  Far fewer teachers care about children being able to count to 20 or knowing the letters of the alphabet but a lot more of them care about whether a child can communicate their needs, whether they can pay attention, not be disruptive, and be sensitive to other children’s feelings.  These self-regulation skills are key to whether a child is going to be able to learn the counting and letters down the line.  Many children struggle in school because of the emphasis on sitting still and focusing on the teacher for many hours a day, and I was pretty disappointed that Dr. Shanker puts all of the emphasis on teaching students how to reduce their stress levels so they can sit still in school, and really doesn’t even look at how we could make learning situations more appropriate to children with different needs.

So as we wrap up this episode I find myself in a position I’ve never been in before in the 70+ episodes of the show.  As a stand-alone book, I would have to say that Self-Reg is not based on enough peer-reviewed evidence to be something that we should pay too much attention to.  I still don’t understand what his Mehrit Centre or Self-Reg Institute is doing with all its money, and why it isn’t publishing peer-reviewed original research of its own.  But it turns out that there actually *is* research to support the ideas in the book, and if Dr. Shanker had actually cited it then that would have saved me about two weeks of really hard work to locate it myself so I could try to figure this all out for myself and for you.  And if there’s one idea I can leave you with, it’s something that Dr. Doom from the University of Denver told me that also reiterates a message that Alfie Kohn has said many times: “our behaviors are just as real as our brains.”  So if my child is “acting out” in some way, if I just discipline her for acting out then I’m really missing an enormous opportunity to better understand WHY she is behaving in this way and address the source of the behavior and *help her* to address the source of the behavior.  And, of course, we should acknowledge that there is no single reason that explains all of children’s behavior – just because we reduce their stress level doesn’t mean they won’t stop acting out for other reasons – young children are trying to understand their place in the world and part of the way they do that is by testing boundaries.

We should also look at the family dynamic: a now classic paper from 1990 looked at minor parenting stressors like continually cleaning up kids’ messes, sibling arguments, children’s nagging, whining, and complaining, and the like.  The study didn’t look at cause and effect, but the researchers did observe that maternal stress might be caused by these kinds of minor parenting hassles, and discussed this in the context of previous research that showed these hassled mothers were more likely to be irritable with their children, and the children were more likely to respond with aggressive behavior.  It seems possible to me that children’s stress and parents’ stress creates a kind of feedback loop that reduces the quality of family relationships.  If you’ve ever tried to change someone else’s behavior you’ll know how difficult it can be; it’s MUCH easier to change YOUR OWN behavior instead of someone else’s.  So if you find yourself in an irritable mood a lot of the time you might consider what you as a family can do to reduce YOUR level of stress, which could have a positive impact on your child’s level of stress.

To me, this working with your child to help them at the same time as looking at yourself and understanding how you need to change is the core of parenting.  This is where the rubber hits the road and parenting gets real.

One final thing I did want to mention was that if you’re using rewards to try to get your child to change their behavior, then that’s a key that things might not be working as well as they can be.  If you’d like to learn about some different tools to solve some of the kinds of problems that stress can bring about in families, you might want to listen to the interview that I did with Alfie Kohn which talks about WHY using rewards can really undermine the relationship we have with our children, and on the show notes page for that episode you can find a free guide to HOW to move beyond using rewards to try to change your child’s behavior.  So head on over and download that at yourparentingmojo.com/rewards.  All the references for today’s episode on Self-Reg can be found at yourparentingmojo.com/selfreg.

Transcript

Jen:    [00:38]

Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Following on from our recent episode on the 30 Million Word Gap, today we’re going to take another close look at a piece of classic research. This time we’re looking at The Marshmallow Study. You’ve probably heard of the study because it’s one of the most famous ones in the field of psychology. Dr Walter Mischel and his colleagues presented a preschooler with a marshmallow. The child was told that the researcher had to leave the room for a period of time and the child could either wait until the research he returned and have two marshmallows, or if the child couldn’t wait, they could call the researcher back by ringing a bell. But then they’d only get to have one marshmallow. The idea was to figure out how delayed gratification develops and in later studies to understand its importance in our children’s lives and academic success. I was actually surprised to find that the marshmallow study consisted of a series of studies starting in the early 1960s and continuing for over a decade, and my guest today, Dr Tyler Watts of New York University, has just published a new study with his colleagues to try and help us understand whether the impacts of delayed gratification really are as large as that body of research indicates. Dr Watts as a research assistant professor and postdoctoral scholar and the Steinhardt School of Culture Education and human development in New York University. He received his Ba from the University of Texas at Austin and his PhD From the University of California Irvine. Welcome Dr Watts.

Dr. Watts:  [02:00]

Thank you.

Jen:   [02:01]

So I wonder if you could start out just by sending a bit of context for us. Can you describe this series of experiments that’s become known as the marshmallow study and what was the basic procedure that was used and what did the researchers find?

Dr. Watts:   [02:13]

Sure. You had the exact same experience that I did.

Jen:    [02:17]

Yeah. Okay, good.

Dr. Watts:  [02:21]

I first heard about these studies when I was an undergraduate at UT, the University of Texas. I was a psychology student and I think I probably first heard about it in the intro to psych course and then some sort of developmental class. We probably covered it there too, and then when we started, me and Greg, the second author on this paper is trying to kind of sniffing around to decide if we wanted to to look into this. I started going back and reading Mischel’s original papers and then of course I realized the same thing. This was done over probably a decade and there were a series of different studies as he was kind of tweaking the marshmallow test and sort of figuring out what it was telling him along the way. So I think people first have to realize kind of where the state of psychology was in the sixties when Mischel first started doing this work.

Dr. Watts:  [03:10]

It was a whole nother time we were, we were coming out of, of course the sort of classic psychoanalysis, Freud and Jung and those guys. So that era had kind of ended and then we were, we had gone through this sort of behavioral scientists aspects like the behavior period, which is sort of the kind of rigid rules of sort of human learning and conditioning. And then we were, you know, cognitive psychology was really sort of coming online and we were really starting to sort of have a new approach to probing at people’s thinking and figuring out sort of how human beings, what are the kind of like limits to human cognition and the ways in which we can…we were really coming up with kind of new ways to study it. So Mischel is really kind of coming into this discussion and a really interesting time and people had I think assumed and predicted that being able to delay gratification was this kind of important life skill that probably set aside or differentiated sort of what we think of as successful adults from less successful adults.

Dr. Watts:    [04:12]

And people didn’t know if children could really do this and if they could do it, they didn’t really know how to measure it. And so in psychology, you know, measurement is, is everything. So Michelle started coming up with this test to be able to actually produce variation and kids’ ability to delay gratification and the test is known as the Marshmallow Test and he figured out that if you sat a four year old – a kid around the age of four – in front of a marshmallow and you told them that if they wait to eat the marshmallow or to touch the marshmallow until the experimenter returns to the room, then there’ll be rewarded with a second marshmallow. So basically the kid is given this test right where they have something sitting in front of them that they want and they’re told by an adult that if they can wait to engage with it or wait to eat it, that they’re going to be rewarded with a second thing, right?

Dr. Watts:   [05:08]

With the double double the amount of, of that reward. And he very kind of wisely figured out that this test illuminated all sorts of interesting stuff about the way kids think and the way they behave under kind of a sort of stressful, somewhat stressful situation. And he realized that from a measurement standpoint that the test did exactly what he wanted, which is it produced variation, right? So some kids were better at this than other kids, so there would be some kids who couldn’t wait at all. And as soon as the experimenter left the room, they reach out and grab the marshmallow. Then there are some kids who will be able to wait for a couple minutes and then there are some kids who would be able to wait for whatever length of time they were left alone.

Dr. Watts:  [05:46]

And in some of the trials I think he capped it at a pretty short amount and kids weren’t able to wait for very long and longer and longer periods of time. He would kind of test longer and longer periods of time as he went along. And then he also hadn’t figured out. And I think this is one thing that a lot of people don’t realize is he kind of put a lot of different constraints on the test as he went along. So he was interested in like, you know, what happens if you obscure the marshmallow from a kid’s vision, so are kids able to to wait longer if you don’t force them to look at the marshmallow right in the room; what if you suggest to them before they do the task sort of strategies to help distract them from the marshmallows. So if, if, if you give them strategies to help them wait longer, are they able to do it?

Jen  [06:37]

What kind of strategies would he use?

Dr. Watts:    [06:39]

Yeah, so I’m trying to remember exactly. But he would sort of give them, I think sort of ways to distract themselves. So he would sort of suggest sort of like cognitive sort of tricks for distracting. Think about something else.

Jen:    [06:53]

Okay. Think about something fun or something like that.

Dr. Watts:   [06:55]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The kinds of things that we try to tell ourselves to do today. And so he kind of put the kids through all sorts of different constraints on this measure. And you know, it’s sort of similar to the research. I don’t know if the people that listen to your podcasts would be familiar with Milgram’s famous obedience studies, right. But we always talk about sort of one condition of that, which is where the experimenter would tell the person, keep shocking the person on the other end of the line if they’re getting these questions wrong and that’s what they would do, but actually Milgram I think spent maybe 15 years or something like that, studying all sorts of different conditions around which that experiment was given and that’s. And that’s exactly what Walter Mischel did too.

Jen:    [07:37]

Yeah, and Angela Duckworth who we’ve actually done an episode on her book Grit. She did a paper on this I think a while back now, and I thought that the points that she pulled out about why this test was so successful, we’re really salient and we call it the marshmallow test, but actually the child got to choose whether they had a marshmallow or a pretzel or sometimes some other food, I think in another study. So the fact that they get to choose means that they get…if they, if they like sugar, they get to show you retweet. If they like salt, they get assaulted, treat, but they only get a really small amount. We’re only talking about one or two marshmallows, one or two pretzels. And so even if the child is really hungry, they know that this isn’t going to satisfy that hunger. So it’s not like we’re seeing the impact of their hunger on the test and (we hope anyway.)

Dr. Watts:   [08:22]

Yeah, and I think, you know, Angela Duckworth studied a few different samples of kids doing this and one of the things that she did was on the same sample that we actually used for our, uh, our replication too. So it’s important to point out that when Mischel was doing this, he was at Stanford.

Jen:    [08:39]

Yeah. It was already fairly successful from my perspective. And he was sampling kids from the Stanford Business school community primarily. I think there were some kids that were, that were from outside of it too, but basically it was that community, predominantly kids of professors. So they were fairly well off kids obviously, whose parents, at least one of their parents was…had presumably a high level degree and was working at one of the best academic institutions in the world. So this is a fairly selective sample of kids that, uh, that he was working with. But that’s not to deride those studies because that’s exactly what you did is that, I mean we, you know, we’ve had so much work, it’s hard to put in perspective. This was going on 50 years ago. We had so much work that’s sort of changed our thinking about how we should sample, how we should design experiments. And so Mischel was really sort of a pioneer in this, in this work. So that was completely normal at that time that you would just take the kids that were around.

Jen:     [09:37]

Yes. And I think it sort of speaks to the White middle class view that, that their way of parenting is the right way and this we should…it’s appropriate to measure White middle class children because anything that deviates from that approach to parenting is different and potentially in a deficit. And I think we’ve become better at seeing that and working with it now and trying to overcome that limitation, but I definitely didn’t realize when I started doing this research that we were essentially looking at a tiny sample of children who came from a very advantaged background, and that these results are being extrapolated out as if they are relevant to all of mankind.

Dr. Watts:   [10:16]

Yeah. And that’s one thing I, I want to be sure that we mentioned to be fair in the years since Mischel did this work with the Stanford kids, the marshmallow test has been given to lots of different populations and Michelle has been involved in a lot of those studies. So they have done populations with both older kids, kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, kids of various racial and ethnic backgrounds. I think I just got a notification that there was a recent study where they were doing it in I think Cameroon. So, you know, there’s, so they’ve done all sorts of different sampling designs. The key, the key things though is that the longitudinal findings, which means what happens when we follow up with the kids that were given the Marshmallow Test, to my knowledge, almost everything we know about the longitudinal nature of what sort of gratification delay and the prediction between the marshmallow test and later your outcomes. Almost all of that is derived off of that Stanford sample.

Jen:  [11:14]

Yeah, so the researchers, they actually didn’t design it as longitudinal study, did they? So they didn’t even bother to collect the addresses of the people that participated and then they to go back and try and find all these people again.

Dr. Watts:   [11:26]

Yeah, and again, and at that time it was really innovative to even think longitudinally. So you know, we didn’t have a lot of longitudinal data sets and the way that we think about data today is so different largely because of the advances that we’ve made in technology. So what Mischel and his colleagues at the time, which I should mention, Yuichi Shoda, who is the second author or first author on a lot of these papers. So they worked really closely on many of these, so we had other collaborators, they realized that we would be really interesting to follow up with the kids who did the Marshmallow Test when they were in preschool and see if there was a correlation between the length of time that the kid waited and other stuff going on in their life. So they, you know, 15, 18 years on decided let’s follow up with the kids and let’s see who we can get in touch with.

Dr. Watts:   [12:16]

So of course they only ended up with a small fraction of the case that originally did the test and then the really famous paper, which is the Shoda, Mischel and Rodriguez paper from 1990. That’s the one that reports on the follow up data. And that’s the one that we were really interested in sort of probing and giving a second closer look to. And so what they find there was that basically they contacted the mothers of the kids that are originally participated and they gave them a survey. And among the things that they asked for were SAT scores. And then they also ask for mothers to rate their kid’s behavior and personality on a lot of different dimensions. And what they found was one that they only found correlations between wait time at age four; how long did you wait on the Marshmallow Test at age four and later outcomes for what they call the diagnostic condition, which is the kids who were in this sort of what we think of as the classic example of the Marshmallow Test they’re put in the room with the marshmallow.

Dr. Watts:    [13:19]

They can see it or whatever other treat they wanted. They can see the treat, they’re not given strategies with which to help them delay. And the treat is in plain sight for them. That’s not obscured from their vision. And then, and then the experimenter doesn’t tell them how. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t tell them how long they’re going to be. And so then they’re just kind of left to wait. That’s what Mischel and colleagues ended up calling the diagnostic condition because they found that was the only condition with which waiting, predicting later outcomes. Right? So for the kids that they were able to follow up with and among the kids that were in the diagnostic condition, it was only about 30 to 50 kids, right? But they found that among that sample it was a really large correlation between the length of time that you waited and SAT scores in both math and verbal SAT, and then they also found a correlation between how long you waited and later measures of personality, what mothers are basically rating things like how socially adjusted as your kid; are they sort of doing what you would think of as sort of good student behavior in school; things like that and they found pretty sizable correlations among all of those aspects.

Dr. Watts:    [14:30]

I wonder if I could actually read some of that paper because it’s kind of mind blowing. It says, “according to parental ratings, those who delayed longer, are more verbally fluent use and respond to reason ar attentive and able to concentrate are planful and think ahead. Competent, skillful, resourceful, and initiating activities.” I mean it goes on for another 10 lines. It’s of mind boggling that all of this stuff is apparently correlated in some way to the length of time that somebody can wait for a marshmallow.

Dr. Watts:    [14:59]

It is. It’s really impressive. In the SAT score correlation was like 0.6…

Jen:    [15:04]

Which is pretty high.

Dr. Watts:   [15:06]

Yeah. You look at a lot of statistics, behavioral science stuff. I mean, you know, that’s, that’s a huge correlation

Jen:  [15:11]

Yeah. Yeah. So I think I just to put that in context for anyone who doesn’t read as many papers as I do, I think point three is sort of where, where you started to say, okay, that’s weakly correlated. Right? And 0.3 to 0.6 is more sort of okay, we’re pretty sure there’s an effect here.

Dr. Watts:     [15:28]

Yeah. There are these kind of like sort of guidelines that are sort of old for how to discuss the size of a correlation, but I think everyone’s expectations have kind of come down on that over time. So if I were to see a 0.3 correlation between something like the marshmallow test and a later SAT score, I would say it was huge.

Jen:   [15:46]

When there are so many other potential variables that could impact that sat score to have a higher impact. Yeah.

Dr. Watts:  [15:52]

Even if you don’t adjust, even if you know that you’re getting something that we would say is sort of biased that’s not adjusting for other variables, just the fact that you’re able to get that kind of signal would be pretty impressive. So they got something twice the size of that.

Jen:   [16:05]

Yeah. And they, there was also another study that found that each additional minute that a preschooler delayed gratification predicted appoint to reduction in BMI, body mass index and adulthood presumably because you’re better able to control your food intake,

Dr. Watts:  [16:21]

Well that’s probably the finding that’s the most intuitive, right?

Jen:  [16:22]

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Watts:  [16:25]

Yeah. So that’s important to note that they kept following this study. So the study or they, they kept following that sample of kids from Stanford into adulthood. So the study has had many lives because I think they found them in adolescence and then when they saw those results they thought, okay, we need to stay in touch with these people. So they’ve sort of kept reporting on them into middle adulthood as far as I know. And then interest, in public interest in this study has kind of risen up and at different times, which I think seven or eight years ago it sort of peaked again and I’ve been kind of speculating that that was partly due to probably YouTube because people can start watching videos of kids taking the Marshmallow Test…

Jen:  [17:04]

Some of them are pretty funny.

Dr. Watts:   [17:06]

Yeah, and they’re great and you know, if you haven’t seen them, you absolutely need to them; they’re wonderful. So we could start watching those videos and then I just think sort of public interest sort of swelled yet again. And we started having these theories like Grit come online, which is probably related. Yeah. So, so now we’ve been in kind of a phase where, you know, the Marshmallow Test is wildly famous. Again, it’s just, it’s really unusual for psychology studies to have that kind of attention and that sort of lifespan.

Jen:  [17:33]

Yep. Okay. Alright. So I want to sort of step back from the longitudinal stuff for a minute and go back to some of the potential criticisms and clarifications of that original study. Now we talked about the small sample size drawn from a very non-representative sample of the general population. I know that when Professor Duckworth did some work on this, she used stickers instead of marshmallows and she found that the amount of time a child could wait for more stickers was actually only very weakly related to a child’s performance in a real life delay. And of course that made me immediately think of Urie Bronfenbrenner who said that “developmental psychology is the science of strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible period of time.” So I wonder if we could talk for a minute about the real world applicability of the Marshmallow Test

Dr. Watts:   [18:23]

Yeah, well, and we mention in the paper – sort of there’s been a lot of work done in the Marshmallow Test, especially in the past probably 15 or 20 years and a lot of it is really sort of digging up the question, what is this thing measure and how indicative is this test have a kid’s self control or willpower. Right? And you know, those are kind of different constructs, right? We say them in the same breath, but we could imagine sort of self control and willpower not necessarily describing the same sort of characteristics in a human being and Angela Duckworth has done a lot of really good work too. Some of it with the sample that we used trying to figure out like is it is what’s important about delayed gratification, sort of a cognitive component? So is it Michelle had theorized that it was sort of the kids’ ability to come up with these strategies to help them delay gratification? You know, if, if a kid is able to sort of recognize that there is this impulsivity rising up within them and they’re able to sort of quiet that down by singing a song or distracting themselves or thinking about something else or if you see the videos, they’ll close their eyes really tight to not look at the off. He sort of suspected maybe that it was sort of a cognitive ability that was really driving the prediction and Duckworth has looked into that and she’s found sort of evidence that statistically the way we do these things with these kinds of factor analyses and we see if like the gratification delayed tests sort of relates more to cognitive ability or relates more to maybe measures of kid’s personality and she kind of found evidence that it was maybe relating to both, both things. So, and then I think another version of the study that’s been talked about a lot recently and has been talked about in context of our findings to is some researchers thought, well maybe trust is a big element here.

Dr. Watts:  [20:11]

And if you undermine a kid’s trust in the task, like you have the experimenter sort of a lie, tell a lie, right? And the kid and views them as lying before they then tell them that they’re going to get an extra marshmallow if they wait. If you give the kid a reason not to trust the experimenter and the kid won’t wait. Right. Which is a really sort of important insight, right? Yeah. And I think the point of that was that, you know, there are kids that may come from environments depending on their home life or even their life at school where their trust in their environment and their trust in adults has been eroded and in the future isn’t easily predictable, then it may make sense not to wait and it may actually be the rational response. Yeah. So yeah, so there’s been all sorts of really interesting stuff that’s cropped up around the Marshmallow Test and on our study doesn’t directly. I think it’s kind of situated within that literature, but we were really kind of after the longitudinal component, but all of that I think is really important to keep in mind.

Jen:   [21:11]

Yeah, for sure. And Professor Duckworth I think also found a relationship between shyness and the findings because I think she hypothesized that if a child is shy, they’re going to freeze up in the face of a researcher that they don’t know; they haven’t met before, who’s giving them instructions. And so that could be a link as well. The reason that’s completely unrelated to their ability to delay gratification, that could explain some of the findings. And then another one that I found really interesting was the way that you present the rewards can impact the results. There was a study that I think presented a sticker to a child and said, here’s the sticker you can have right now if you want it. And then they put four more stickers in that same pool. Instead of having one sticker on one side and five stickers on the other, they put all five in the same pool to identify the reward you can get if you wait. And that one actually found that the three year olds outperformed the four year olds on their desire to wait for five stickers. And so, I mean, that blew my mind again; what you think you’re looking at is changes in cognitive processes as children get older. And actually what it might be is an artifact of how the study was designed.

Dr. Watts:  [22:17]

Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Jen:     [22:21]

So, so there’s definitely a lot going on with this. So. Okay, so there are some of the criticisms and things we need to keep in mind as we’re. We’re looking at the results of these studies and so I think what it’s tempting to do and what policymakers have attempted to do is to transfer what we’ve learned from these studies to academic outcomes and one of the papers on this topic started out and I’ll quote it: “An ideal student who routinely goes home after school has a snack studies until dinner (i.e. stays on task) then continues studying until bedtime is likely more academically successful than one who is not focused on schoolwork.” And I think that what we’re trying to do here is to take the results of the Marshmallow Study, which is pretty intrinsically motivated. I want that marshmallow and schoolwork is something that is very extrinsically motivated because either your parents are telling you have to do your homework or you have to get the grade. Because a lot of students don’t know what they want to do with their lives. And so I wonder how valid is it to take this look at what seems to be intrinsic motivation and apply it to a situation that is very much more concerned with extrinsic motivation. What do you think?

Dr. Watts:  [23:33]

Well, it’s a great point and I think that the way that the test is often been interpreted is that you’re able at age four, if you’ve kind of gained this skill that it becomes this kind of internalized personality dimension so that when you’re in a situation where you know that you could do something now that may be fun or may be gratifying, but you can wait a little bit longer and sort of postpone it and get back to work, that you’re going to be more successful. So I think you’re right, I think it’s important nuance to think about sort of whether there’s an intrinsic or extrinsic reward, but I think the story about the Marshmallow Test has always been so appealing probably, especially in the United States because it kind of speaks to this sort of pull yourself up by your bootstraps, right?

Jen:    [24:18]

Yeah

Dr. Watts:  [24:18]

This ability to kind of take control over your, over your environment and your life. Sort of keep your head down and work hard, right?

Jen:    [24:27]

Yeah.

Dr. Watts:  [24:27]

And you know, I don’t want to put words in Walter Mischel’s mouth because I think sometimes he’s been a lot more careful when he’s written about this. Not surprisingly then when other people have written, but I’ve mentioned in a few other folks that I’ve talked to that as I was kind of going through the responses to the study when we released it, I found this charter school, I think in Houston. It’s a pretty large school and here’s a part of their website that’s got information for parents and they have sort of advice to parents and they put on there something…I’m going to mess up the quote, but basically to the effect of if you can teach your kid one thing, teach them delay of gratification, and then they start to talk about the results of the Walter Mischel Longitudinal work. And that’s, that’s exactly the thing that we were, that we were after that. That’s what our focus was on.

Dr. Watts:  [25:17]

Yep.

Jen:    [25:18]

Okay. So, so let’s start to get into that, then.

Dr. Watts:   [25:21]

Yeah, yeah.

Jen:   [25:21]

So you describe your study as a quote, “conceptual replication” of the marshmallow study, although when you read about it in the media, that has usually been shortened to replication, for example, in the press release on your study as well as in the Atlantic article that was published a few days ago. What is the difference in why does it matter?

Dr. Watts:   [25:39]

Yeah, I think it’s crucial and I’m learning that it’s more crucial. I think I had probably a little too blase with that early on or a little too casual, so you can imagine if your listeners are sort of familiar. There’s this phrase that goes around right now in psychology and also in medical science too, but in the social sciences, which is where I work; it’s been a big deal. There’s this thing called the replication crisis or the reproducibility crisis, which is basically to say it’s. It’s hard to pin down exactly what that means, but the gist of it is that if you…that what happens is we sort of published really flashy findings and we talked about them and make a lot out of them and then someone else will come along and try to reproduce those findings and not be able to do it. And so that leaves you thinking that the findings from the original study were somehow inflated or big by chance and it is a lot of reasons why that could happen. So everybody kind of agrees that replication is important. Once you start thinking about doing a replication, you realize how difficult it is to kind of define what you’re doing because in sense a replication would be sort of in the most narrow defined way. Well there, there could be one where you just take someone else’s data and you just analyze the statistics on your computer, right? You just do this statistical work on your computer…

Jen:    [26:56]

Which some people do do.

Dr. Watts:  [26:57]

Yeah. And it’s like kind of like same data, same question, my computer kind of thing. Right? So that’s a really narrow version of a replication. Then you could do something where you basically do the exact same study. So the very same methods say, so in this case it would be to give the very same version of the Marshmallow Test and follow up the exact same way, right? Years later; ask the very same questions with parents and report on that. That would be another kind of replication that’s also fairly narrow, but you just do it with a different sample.

Jen:    [27:31]

The original study happened fairly recently than you might expect to get a pretty similar result. Although I would expect given the distance of time from the original study, even if you use the same script and the Bing Nursery I think is still there, even if you pulled from that population, your results will probably be different. I mean just for example, kids had a lot less sugar in their diets in those days, so that could potentially impact it.

Dr. Watts:  [27:54]

No, that’s exactly right. So there’s all sorts of historical differences in cohort differences that you would expect. Yeah. And then what we did, I think we’re a little closer to this, which I think this is probably what the field actually needs, although that you can make an argument that we need all of these things is, you know, let’s look at the conclusions of the study or look at the way I study has been interpreted and the knowledge that’s been gleaned from it and let’s sort of take a different approach to trying to arrive at the same conclusion. Right? So let’s sort of see if we can go after the same question and maybe we differ and vary the methods and the sample as well. So that’s, I think we’re a little closer to that than we are to like a really hardcore straight up. we just did the same thing but with different kids. So that’s why we. The title of the paper and I think the reviewers of the article or the action editor of the article as Psych Science, I think was the one that suggested we do this. We called it a conceptual replication, right? Because really we’re kind of trying to replicate conceptually the same thing that the original study was doing, but we had to come at it both due to limitations and because we wanted, we actually wanted to change the statistical methods from a few different angles.

Jen:    [29:13]

Okay. Alright. So let’s talk about data then because I think you didn’t actually collect this data yourselves. They came from a government data set and that worked really well in your favor because the government has the money to fund these massive studies that would be incredibly difficult for a few researchers to get money for. But I think that the government scientists are also made some design decisions that impacted your findings, right. Can you tell us about those?

Dr. Watts:  [29:37]

That’s right. So this study was collected and conducted by a team of developmental psychologists who first went to NIH and asked for funding to follow a fairly large sample of kids from 10 different sites across the us from birth into -I think originally they were planning to go into sort of early childhood, like around age three or four…

Jen:   [29:58]

Sorry, that’s the National Institute for Health, right?

Dr. Watts:    [30:01]

Yeah, the National Institute for Health, which is sort of the scientific arm of the federal government or one of one of the scientific arms of the federal government. And so they got the money to do this. It was mainly to study childcare and there were a lot of debates happening at that time around whether trump care was good for kids are sending your daycare or sending your kid to daycare for the entire work day at a young age was maybe would have adverse developmental effects. So they were really interested in this question.

Dr. Watts:  [30:28]

So they collected a ton of information on parents and kids at the time of the kids’ birth and then they followed the parents and kids into early childhood and collected information on the kids early environments. And fortunately for us they decided to do this Marshmallow Test probably because the early longitudinal findings that from 1990 had just come out. So these kids were sampled at birth in 1991. So the, the longitudinal findings from the Mischel studies were we’re just getting publicized in the early nineties. So. So they, they thought it would be an important measure to collect, so they did the marshmallow test with kids at age four and then they kept going back to NIH and getting additional funds to keep to keep following the kids into adolescence. So when she did many waves of data collection in between birth and age 15, which is what we ultimately looked at as our main time of the outcome measures and adolescence.

Dr. Watts:   [31:27]

So what’s nice about this data set is, like I said, they collected a bunch of information on parents and their families, which allowed us to do the statistical controlling that that we can get into in a second, which I thought was really the key contributions of this study. And because they were collecting a whole bunch of measures and the data set was not at all focused on the Marshmallow Test. They gave a sort of shorter version of the marshmallow test and they stopped the test at seven minutes. So if a kid waited for seven minutes, then the test ended and we were at first really concerned about this and worried that that would sort of clued us being able to do what we wanted to do because the original children had waited much longer. Right. Some had. Right. I mean you can see in some of his original, his studies, he reports an average wait time of one minute. I don’t know if you, if you noticed that it’s not the early seventies. And then over time it’s interesting to think about what may have happened, but as maybe he got better at giving the tests, but it’s. Kids were waiting a little bit longer and then in the later versions of the test, to my knowledge, he was letting some kids wait as long as 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes. Which if you sit in a room alone staring at a marshmallow. Oh my gosh, it’s a long period time. Even if you’re an adult, right. So if you’re an adult, you probably can’t stay off your phone for 20 minutes right? Long enough to sit in the room. So. So anyways, so they stopped the test at seven minutes and when we first started analyzing the data, we wanted to figure out if we could still learn anything from this even knowing that the test had been capped at seven minutes and we grew more and more confident as we analyze the data that we could and that we could do what we wanted to do so we can talk about that in a second. So kids take the Marshmallow Test at age four and then they were followed periodically up to age 15 and I think they’re still planning on doing another round of data collection in adulthood. But we had data through eight slash 15 and so at age 15 they measured a math and reading achievement.

Dr. Watts:   [33:21]

It wasn’t a self report of SAT scores as lot of kids haven’t even taken the SAT by that age, but they did a sort of math and reading test. It’s called the Woodcock Johnson. This is a really famous, a cognitive battery that has been studied for a long time. And so we use that to measure a academic achievement at age 15. And then there were also mother reports of kids’ behaviors, so there was sort of a report of sorts of things that seem like antisocial behavior kind of acting out at school that the mothers reported on. Then there is a kind of something called internalizing which can be thought of sort of broadly as sort of like depressive behavior, depressive symptoms. And then we also looked at kid direct measures of behavior directly measured from the kids themselves. So the kids reported on risky behaviors; things like things that we think are risky behaviors for teenagers.

Jen:  [34:12]

So drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, sexual risk taking. And then kids also reported on their own sort of impulse behaviors. And we actually looked at someone, a developmental psychologist suggested. We look at this thing called the stoplight task, which is basically a sort of of like a game where a kid is trying to get from point A to point B and they’re told they will be rewarded if they get there as fast as possible and they encounter stoplights along the way. And the task is really looking at whether they brake and slow down or stop when they see a yellow or red light or if they try to speed through the stoplight, right? And risk getting into a car crash. And that’s kind of a measure of sort of impulsivity and risk taking as well. So anyway, so we looked at all of that at age 15 to try to, like we said, kind of do a conceptual replication of that original Mischel longitudinal study where they looked at both SAT scores and then kind of this broad like you, you read off the results earlier, that kind of broad dimensions of behavior and personality.

Jen:   [35:14]

Yeah. And so, okay. So that’s a ton of variables.

Dr. Watts:   [35:17]

Right

Jen:    [35:17]

Now I am not a statistician. Fortunately I know people are, and one of them read this study for me and I believe that when a researcher at quote “controls for a lot of variables that can impact the results by making outcomes that would otherwise appear significant look insignificant.” Or actually I think it’s the other way around, isn’t it? Look insignificant? They shouldn’t be insignificant.

Dr. Watts:   [35:38]

No, you got it right.

Jen:    [35:38]

I did get it right. Okay, thank you. So in a language that a lay person like me can understand, can you help us figure out what choices did you make here and what impact did that have on the results?

Dr. Watts:   [35:49]

Yeah, so this, like I said, was I thought the key sort of invention of our study and so all of those variables that I just listed off measured at age 15, those are the outcomes, right? That’s what we’re trying to see. Does waiting longer on the Marshmallow Test impact or affect all of these outcome measures right? At Age 15. So the control variables are all things that were measured primarily before the kid took the marshmallow test, right, or measured at the same time that the kid took the marshmallow test, so either measured at age four, or measured before. And why are these important? This is all about interpretation, so it may be the case that the marshmallow test predicts later achievement or later outcomes, but you don’t know if it predicts later outcomes because the Marshmallow Test is kind of symptomatic of other things going on in a kid’s life. Like say, kids that have really great attentive, structured parenting environments are able to wait longer on the Marshmallow Test, and those same kids also have many markers of success later on in life, but it’s not really the Marshmallow Test that is driving the later success. It’s actually the parenting, right? That’s what probably everyone listening to your podcast would want to want to hope, right, that it’s the parenting that’s really shaping everything?

Jen:   [37:10]

Well, yeah! for sure.

Dr. Watts:    [37:13]

And so you, you all these things that are sort of the result of the parenting and you can think that those are the things that are causing the later the later outcomes. But actually you would be sort of making what we call sort of a confounding error, right? In statistics like there’s a third variable that’s really explaining everything. And the third variable is what’s explaining being good at the Marshmallow Test. And it’s also explaining the markers of success later on. So what we want to do is try to control for as many of these sort of third variables as we could. So we were able to take measures of race and ethnicity. So we had, what’s the sort of identified race and ethnicity of the kid, the gender measures of family income, mother’s education measures are taken of the kid at birth. So like the kid’s birth weight, the mothers also report on a very early measure of the kid’s temperament, which is like was this kid a fussy baby or a sort of a quiet easy to please baby.

Dr. Watts:   [38:11]

They also, we also had a really pretty early measure of kids’ cognitive ability taken an age 24 months and we had this thing that was an invention for the data set that we used, which was a measure of the home environment where an observer actually came into the home environment and observed the kid interacting with the parents. Right. And was looking for sort of things known to be sort of positive parenting behaviors as well as markers of having an enriching home environment like a lot of children’s books in the home and toys for the kids to play with, things like that. So we first looked at the relationship between delay of gratification and later outcomes not controlling for anything. Right? So we didn’t adjust for any of those other variables and we just looked at the raw “do kids who wait longer have better outcomes?” And we saw sure enough that they had higher achievement scores on math and reading at age 15, but they, these relationships were much smaller than what was in the original paper.

Jen:     [39:07]

Oh, really?

Dr. Watts:  [39:08]

Right. Yeah. So it was, it was. I, I don’t want to mess it up. I’m not looking at my paper in front of me right now…

Jen:     [39:13]

You don’t have it memorized?

Dr. Watts:   [39:14]

I know; I should have by now It was, I think I’m fairly certain this less than half the size of what Mischel and Shoda had reported. Although like I said earlier, that’s still something. Right. And you know, we were still impressed with that correlation even though it was half the size and then surprisingly… And one of the really surprising findings of the paper was that we didn’t find any relationship even without any statistical controls or any of the behavioral outcomes. So all those behavioral outcomes that I just listed off, like the stoplight task and kids reporting on their risky behaviors and the mothers report of the kids’ behaviors. None of that. None of it. No. I think there may have been one loan variable that had a significant effect on it, but no, for the most part we found no effects.

Jen:   [39:57]

Okay. Why? What’s going on?

Dr. Watts:  [40:00]

That was really puzzling and, and you know, I mean we weren’t expecting to find that. I think our prior hypothesis going in was that we would have found bigger effects for the behavioral outcomes then for the cognitive outcomes because I think we were going in thinking of the delay of gratification as being kind of a personality or behavioral is like the economists think of these things like noncognitive skills rather than cognitive skills which psychologists hate because they would say everything cognitive. So we were kind of expecting that going in, but we were surprised that we didn’t find it and that was just one of the sort of interesting, puzzling findings with the paper. So we focus most of our analyses… We then split our sample and looked primarily at kids whose mothers had not completed college and that was about 550-something kids who were in the sample who had the marshmallow test, had measures of later outcomes whose mothers had by birth, not completed college.

Dr. Watts:  [40:58]

We did that for two reasons. One, because we thought it was a conceptually interesting sample to focus on because all of the Mischel stuff, as we said earlier, was, was mainly derived off of the sample of kids who, whose mothers were part of the Stanford community, right? So we thought that it was really complimentary to sort of look at a sample of kids whose mothers hadn’t completed college and because you know that that group, when we talk about sort of educational policy and when we talk about interventions, we’re often thinking about sort of more kids from more disadvantaged backgrounds. Right? And so that was also…we thought sort of an important group of kids from that. We also did it because of the seven minute measurement problem that I mentioned earlier. So among those kids whose mothers had completed college, almost 70 percent of them hit the seven minute mark on the measure.

Dr. Watts:   [41:48]

So that means that they waited the full length of time and, and the measure ended, right? So that the Marshmallow Test ended. So from the statisticians point of view, that’s a major problem because you need variation in order to do all of this. Right? And so if most of the kids are sitting at seven minutes, you don’t really know who’s better at delaying gratification among those kids, right? Because they’re all sitting at seven. So in the lower socio-economic status sample. But the kids have mothers who hadn’t completed college, they were much less likely to hit the ceiling. So I think only about 40 percent of them waited the full length time. And then among the other 60 percent of them that didn’t wait for seven minutes, there was really nice kind of variation. Right. In how long they waited. So there was like kind of what we say in statistics, like a nice distribution.

Dr. Watts:   [42:37]

So there was sort of kids that didn’t wait at all. Then kids that waited for one minute or two, three, four, five, six, so we can really get a much better gradient of gratification delay. So there was kind of the conceptual reason that we focused on that sample. And then there was also kind of the statistical measurement reason. So what we found, like I said, was that waiting longer among those kids did predict later achievement. And so then we started introducing these control variables. So what we did was we sort of added to the model all the measures that I listed off earlier. So measures of the home environment, measures of the kids birth weight, race, ethnicity, gender, income, family income, measured between birth and age for that early cognitive measure taken at 24 months. And so what that model does is it says, let’s take two kids who have the same parenting environment, the same race as race and ethnicity, the same gender, the same early cognitive skills.

Dr. Watts:  [43:37]

And let’s say that one of them is able to delay gratification a little bit longer than the other. Does that difference matter? Right? Once you’ve set all those other things equal, then does the difference in delayed gratification actually matter over and above all of those other factors and what we found was a much smaller, again, prediction to the academic achievement. It was still statistically significant, but it was fairly small. We have a fairly big sample, so so a small effect could still be statistically significant, so the size of that correlation got much smaller than in the model where we didn’t control for anything, which means that those other factors were largely driving the prediction to later academic achievement and we still found no prediction to the later behavioral outcomes. Then we tried one more model that was a more rigorous controlled model, which is where we also controlled for measures taken at preschool, so measures taken at the same time as the Marshmallow Test of kids math achievement, reading achievement and sort of a measure of their behavioral adjustment at that time.

Dr. Watts: [44:43]

So that’s basically saying like, if we also control for sort of other characteristics of the kid at age four, then does being able to delay gratification matter over and above their kind of general cognitive ability and their behavioral adjustment at that time. And then we found that it was a pretty well estimated zero to later academic achievement. Right? So what we’d like to, you know, we had a pretty decent confidence interval around that effect and it was not statistically significant, which means that, you know, it just means that again, it doesn’t mean the delayed gratification doesn’t predict, it just means that when you sort of control for other characteristics of the kid, delayed gratification doesn’t seem to be sort of uniquely important on top of those other characteristics.

Jen: [45:29]

Right. Okay. Alright. So we’re, we’re heading rapidly here towards where I want to go, which is what message should we take home from the body of work on this? And I’m going to tell you what message I take away from it and then I want you to tell me if I’m right. So it seems to me as though the message is that some rich children can better resist the marshmallow than others, and that all of those rich children, the ones who can resist the marshmallow may be more likely to have better life outcomes as best we can tell from a pretty tiny sample size, but we really don’t know as much about how poor children will respond to the marshmallow and we might not even be able to teach poor children to resist the marshmallow because of how their life experiences have shaped them. And even if we could, that resisting the marshmallow is unlikely to be the key or even an important key in helping them to achieve better life outcomes. In contrast, I should say to the Houston school that you mentioned that it’s telling parents, if you teach your child nothing else, you should teach them to resist the marshmallow. So are you taking the same message out of all of this as I am?

Dr. Watts:  [46:30]

I think much of what you said is highly plausible and could be interpreted from both our study mainly, you know, and some of the other ones that we talked about earlier. I think the main takeaway is sort of what you said at the end, which is question of even if we can teach this and we decided that we should, is teaching this going to make much of a difference. Right. And that’s where I, that’s where I think our study, it really has something to say and it’s sort of saying that if you worked to create a program that say provides kids with strategies to delay gratification, right? You give them strategies to help them figure out how to do better at the Marshmallow Test, but you don’t change other aspects of their life. Right. Whether that be their sort of general cognitive ability or other behavioral aspects or their parenting environment

Jen:  [47:23]

Or poverty…

Dr. Watts:  [47:23]

Right…or their parenting environment or their socioeconomic situation, family income, mother’s education. If you don’t change any of that stuff, the fact that you changed their ability to delay gratification probably isn’t likely to have much effect.

Jen:  [47:35]

Yeah.

Dr. Watts: [47:36]

Right. And so I think that to me is, is the key finding. That’s not to say that it’s not a worthwhile life skill, or that there are times when you need to be able to do this. I mean certainly any adult in the working world today who’s constantly online in front of their computer, in a space with, you know, notification after notification in email and something to click on. You know, you’re constantly kind of faced with this task really all day long. I’m not saying that it’s not important at all. What I’m saying is just is it something that we should be worried about teaching four year olds in isolation if we want to really get an important developmental outcomes later on. I think that’s where we would say that’s probably not the first thing that we would choose.

Jen:    [48:22]

Gosh, I hope there are policy makers listening right now who preferably ones who have gotten growth mindset instituted in schools in California and are rating teachers on children’s growth mindsets…

Dr. Watts:  [48:34]

Right and I. So, and I also want to be careful that the model that we were sort of had different interpretations for the different models that had different variables controlled. So you know the model that just controlled for kids’ background characteristics from their home and family, that early measure of cognitive ability, but it didn’t control for sort of other factors measured at the same time. This is a little bit nuanced, but we still did find a statistically significant prediction to achievement for the gratification delayed tests…for the Marshmallow Test with that model, which to us meant that to the best we can tell what the state and other state or does not really allow for causal claims to be ironclad. So you can’t…You have to kind of say all of this with the big caveat that nothing here was experimental.

Jen:   [49:22]

Yep. So we can’t say that delay of gratification caused the better. Okay.

Dr. Watts:  [49:26]

Yeah. So even though we’re trying to scratch it that by introducing controls, we’re certainly trying to push ourselves in a causal direction. We’re still not all the way there, right. An experimental study is really the only way to really start to, to know. But the fact that controlling for the background characteristics didn’t kill all of the prediction to later achievement suggested that if you had an intervention that probably changed gratification delay, but also change other aspects about the kid, yet at the same time, broader aspects of the kid, broader behavioral and cognitive capacities of the kid at the same time, that may actually, you know, we can’t rule out that that wouldn’t have an effect. Right. So, but then you’re thinking about probably delayed gratification as a component of something broader and larger rather than just a sort of narrow intervention than just teaching that skill. Does that, does that make sense?

Jen:   [50:17]

Yep, Yep. Absolutely. So I think the ultimate take home message then for parents is don’t worry too much about the Marshmallow Test…

Dr. Watts:   [50:24]

Exactly.

Jen:     [50:24]

It’s a good skill to have, but don’t freak out if your can’t resist gratification yet; they’ve got a long way to go and there are many other skills that are also important.

Dr. Watts:  [50:32]

No, that’s exactly right. If you’ve got a four year old who doesn’t want to wait. You don’t need to be too concerned. Yeah.

Jen:    [50:40]

Yeah. Okay. All right. And on that note, thank you so much for helping us to understand all this and really get to the bottom of what’s going on. I’m so grateful for your time.

Dr. Watts:  [50:48]

It was fun. Thank you.

Jen:   [50:49]

And so our listeners can find all the references for today’s episode and there are lots of them at YourParentingMojo.com/Marshmallow, if you can resist it.

Transcript

Jen:    [00:40]

Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is on the topic of compassion. I actually need to thank Dr Tara Callahan, whom I interviewed way back in episode four of the show on encouraging creativity and artistic ability for bringing us this episode. She met today’s guest Dr Brendan Ozawa-de Silva at a conference and was kind enough to put us in touch. Dr Ozawa-de Silva is the Associate Director for the Emory University Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, where he’s responsible for Emory’s Social, Emotional, and Ethical learning program, or SEE Learning; a worldwide kindergarten through twelfth grade educational curriculum based on compassion and secular ethics. He received his doctorates from Oxford and Emory universities as well as master’s degrees from Boston and Oxford Universities; I think you’ve actually got more degrees than I do. His chief interests lies in bringing secular ethics, which he calls the cultivation of basic human values into education and society. I’m excited to learn more today about his work and the benefits that it has for children. Welcome Brendan.

Dr. de Silva:   [01:42]

Thank you Jen.

Jen:   [01:43]

So can you start by telling us what are secular ethics, what do these have to do with social and emotional learning that parents might already be familiar with?

Dr. de Silva:   [01:51]

So secular ethics means basic human values, so things like compassion, gratitude, sense of common humanity, a recognition of our responsibility to one another and to the environment. And if we look at the two words, the word secular means that we approach these ethics not on the basis of any one religion or ideology, but in a broad way on the basis of science, common Sense, common experience. So what we have in common with each other rather than what kind of separates us, which religion and ideology can do, but it doesn’t mean secular in the sense of anti-religious. So secular ethics doesn’t mean anything against religion, but it’s rather what we all have in common despite our religious national cultural differences. And then when we talk about ethics, it’s important to state that we’re not talking about ethics as a set of rules or principles that are being handed down by an authority that this is right and that is wrong; this is good and that iss bad, but really exploring the dimension of what contributes to individual and social flourishing. So what’s beneficial for us, what are the kinds of common values that we would share that will be beneficial to us. So we agree on those values politically and legally. For example, we have laws saying, you know, you can’t steal and you can’t murder people. And those reflect our common values independent of religion. So that’s what we’re approaching it. And the connection to SEL is that we believe that the cultivation of these basic human values is very linked to social and emotional intelligence and social emotional skills. So these moral emotions are actually social emotions, just emotions that involve how we relate to one another. So it’s a kind of different approach to ethics.

Jen:    [03:40]

Yeah. And as you’re listing off those components, compassion, gratitude, responsibility, individual and social flourishing, I’m going down that list thinking, Yep, I want that. I want that for my daughter. So that gives us a framework to think within and to me, that sounds. Yes. I want to know more about that. So can you tell us why this kind of learning is important for children? And specifically I’m interested in it seems as though not all of these concepts are a component of the existing SEL programs. And by SEL we mean social and emotional learning programs as they’re typically taught in schools.

Dr. de Silva:   [04:15]

Yeah. Well, I’d like to just very briefly give a story of myself when I was a child when I was growing up because it’s kind of a funny story and it kind of explains why I’m doing this. I remember when I was probably 10 or 11 maybe I first had these thoughts. Even earlier I was kind of thinking and I know what children think about this. Even at a much younger age, I was thinking about what’s important in life and what am I doing here and what am I supposed to be doing? What’s going to happen when I grow up? And I was asking these questions and wondering when in school we would actually be learning about these things. So I thought, well, they’re going to teach us. The adults are going to teach us about the meaning of relationships and loves and meaning in life and what life is about and all these things.

Dr. de Silva:    [05:03]

And I thought you know; we’re too young right now, so they’re going to teach us later. So maybe when we get to middle school, they’re gonna teach us these things and got to middle school and I said, no, they’re not teaching us that. And then I thought, well maybe in high school they’ll be teaching us those things and know it’s the same thing. Math, history, biology, you know, and by then I was old enough to realize that even looking at college that we would never be taught these things. So not only are we not taught them, but there’s no space in the school day to even talk about them or discuss them. But I think that as human beings, we all have a need to find meaning in life as you said, as parents. We always want the best for our children. We want our children to have happy lives and we know that there’s a connection between character and flourishing; being a good person, however we define that.

Dr. de Silva:    [05:47]

We know that there’s a relationship between that and leading a happy life. So why don’t we make space for that in education and maybe in previous times that’s a space that would have been held by the family or extended family, the community churches, but what we’re seeing in today’s pluralistic society is that increasingly these things aren’t talked about and so kids don’t have a space to talk about them and since all children go through school in some form or another, why not allow school to be the place where we do that. Social and emotional learning is a step in that direction because it creates a space in the curriculum and in the school day for kids to talk about emotions, talk about relationships, but SEL has stayed away from the kind of more thorny question of values and things like compassion and things like meaning because you know that’s moving in the direction of ethics and to some people that starts sounding like religion, but we think that there’s a way to talk.

Jen:   [06:49]

And dangerous, too…

Dr. de Silva:   [06:49]

Yeah, exactly. And we have a history of people trying to indoctrinate our kids in various ways and of course we should be very suspicious of that, but we believe that there’s a way of doing it, which is not about indoctrination at all, but about exploration. So our program is very much not about teaching children how to think or what to think, but creating a space where they can explore these questions for themselves to talk about their own anxieties, their fears, their hopes and these deeper questions of meaning so that they can kind of get a jumpstart on those things. And also we think it might be protective against some of the problems that we’re seeing among kids and in schools with regard to anxiety, bullying and just a host of various issues that we’re dealing with.

Jen:   [07:33]

Okay. Your anecdote reminded me of my own moment where I thought the grownups had it all figured out. I was in geography class when I learned about climate change and it was just before the 1992 Rio climate conference and my teacher told us about the conference and I thought, Oh okay, well the adults are going to go and figure out what to do about this and they’re going to come back and tell us and we’re going to do it and climate change will be solved. I believe that’s probably not what happened at the Rio conference or we wouldn’t still have climate change today, but yeah, so when that leads us to the broader issue of the fact that the grownups don’t always have all the answers and that can be uncomfortable I think for teachers and also for parents. And so what would you say to parents who are thinking, oh, I do not want to open this can of worms with my kid because I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what the answer is.

Dr. de Silva:    [08:22]

I think that’s a great point. I think there’s a moment in every child’s life. Probably when they have that Aha moment, they realized that the world is a lot crazier than it should be and that means that the, the grownups have not figured all things out. I remember going to school in the seventies and eighties and being taught stop, drop and roll. You know, what happens if a nuclear bomb falls on you learning things like MAD; Mutually Assured Destruction. So if the Russians fire warheads at us in the States, then that’s no problem because we will fire warheads back at them and everyone will die. So yeah, you learn this, you hear these horrifying things as a kid and you realize, yeah, the adults don’t have all the answers but there’s no place in school to talk about that. And for a lot of kids sometimes there isn’t even a place at home.

Dr. de Silva:    [09:07]

So I think it is very important for parents to make that space and be courageous enough. It also takes courage from our teachers also to walk into this space where they know they don’t have all the answers. You know, we haven’t figured out our own emotions, our own relationships certainly, but just creating that space is so important and to allow children to explore that. Children have an incredible amount of wisdom on their own and it never ceases to amaze us that when that space is created, the things that they come up with and the learning that takes place just through the conversations. And we also find that parents learn a lot. So a lot of children who go through our program…we’ll bump into the parents and the drug store or at a yoga studio if it’s a school here in Atlanta for example. And they’ll say, you know, my kid was teaching me this about stress and teaching me this about what I can do when I get upset. And, and you know, was seeing me stressed out and saying, know mommy, you can take a few deep breaths now or you can push against the wall. You know, we teach them all these various techniques and those, they get deeper and deeper and deeper. And so the parents, you know, that’s the funny thing is that the parents can also learn, so if parents are open to it, it’s a great opportunity for growth for themselves and their kids and their relationship with their kids.

Jen:  [10:21]

Yeah. And you know, your curriculum addresses kindergarten through age 12, but I think it’s important to note that this isn’t something you have to wait until school age to start. Actually in an astounding moment of coincidence. I was just browsing Facebook before we got on this call and a friend of mine posted a discussion he’d had with his son who’s four and his son, they were just eating lunch. His son said what’s the best thing to do Papa? And he said, I think the best thing is to keep asking questions and his son said Oh, why? And he said, because if you keep asking questions you understand more. And with understanding you become more compassionate. And his son said what’s compassionate? And he said, what do you think it is? And his son said Well, compassionate is when you hear more laughs and more crying and, and, and he said, yeah, that’s right. When you hear more laughs and more crying, you’ll understand yourself and the people around you better and with that more love goes around and I just thought, wow, this kid is four years old and he’s already having conversations like that with his father. So shout out to my friend – you know who you; are not going to out you on the show, but yeah. So yes, we’re talking about a curriculum that’s used in school, but this is also relevant to kids younger than this, right?

Dr. de Silva:   [11:31]

No, absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. It’s a grades K through 12 program, but children’s first learn about compassion from their home environment and from their parents and they first learned the sense of how to get along with others and how to interact with others in the home environment. So absolutely one can and should start earlier. And that little anecdote that you shared is exactly our approach. I mean, we want kids asking these questions. We see kids as little scientists, kids are little scientists, you know, trying to figure out the world and we can teach them one way and say this is the right way, but they’re going to learn pretty quickly that what we have taught them as the right way is only partially true and partially helpful and ultimately they’re going to have to find things out for themselves. So that attitude of questioning and exploring is very central to what we’re doing.

Dr. de Silva:   [12:26]

And it’s interesting because some teachers have…we’ve run several workshops over the past several years. We’re still in the pilot phase and the preliminary phase of our development, but we have about 460 counselors and teachers working with us; we’ve done trainings for around the world and are giving us feedback and some of the feedback that they’re saying is, oh, this is very different because we’re used to teaching kids, you know, this is right, this is wrong about math, about history, social studies, science. You know, and this is more exploratory and less definite and there are no right and wrong answers. But the thing is actually we should be teaching these other subjects in the same way also; a lot of the things that we teach in our history books and in our physics classes are wrong, are outdated, and they’re not actually, you know, physics is actually a lot more complicated than your high school physics textbook; history is a lot more complicated than the way we teach it. So that spirit of questioning. Yeah.

Jen:    [13:22]

I recently learned electrons do not orbit protons in shells and that’s what all the textbooks tell us. So you may think, how could the textbooks be wrong? You’re absolutely right. They’re wrong.

Dr. de Silva:     [13:35]

Oh completely. Yeah. I mean, uh, I’m reading a fascinating book on physics called Reality is Not What it Seems. It’s written for laypeople by Carlo Rovelli; he’s an Italian physicist. It’s a beautiful book. And if you read this book and your whole sense of reality is not shaken than you weren’t paying attention.

Jen:   [13:53]

We’ll put that in the references list.

Dr. de Silva:   [13:55]

But it basically says that all the things we were taught in school; most of them are completely wrong; our understanding of the universe and it’s actually I’m reading it for our program because we want to teach children to question and we also want to teach children about systems. Now preschool children; this might be on a very preliminary level, but one aspect of our program is actually systems thinking and that’s thinking in a scientific way about complexity.

Jen:   [14:24]

Okay, so I want to get into the weeds a bit here because I want to help parents understand what are some of the elements of this program that they can use to help their children with and where are they going with this. So if asking questions is one and not just the parent asking questions, but hearing the child’s questions and supporting that process. If that’s one area. What are some other types of topics that parents can do to help the sense of compassion and their children?

Dr. de Silva:    [14:53]

So one thing I wanted to say is that all our materials are free and available. So this is a worldwide program and if people go to our website, they can download the framework and pretty soon they’ll be able to download all of our learning experiences, what we call learning experiences also and, they can adopt them for their own use. So that’s one thing I wanted to mention and if people do kind of go and look they should be able to find a lot of practical resources and helpful resources. But I think that one of the important things is we begin the whole program with a discussion of what is kindness. Compassion is the term we use with older children; when we’re talking about very young children we just used the word kindness and what is kindness and how is it related to happiness. So we believe that as human beings we all seek safety and happiness and what’s good for ourselves and for those we love and we don’t want pain and suffering and heartache and you know, bad relationships and all these kinds of things.

Dr. de Silva:   [16:00]

And this is a basic orientation of life. This is something that we share even with nonhuman life, with animals. For example, you know, in the winter they seek warmth and food and safety and in the summer they want to play around in the sun and you know what I mean? That’s natural if you’re living being. But we are as human beings, we’re also social animals, so we need each other to be happy and to be safe. So in just discussing kind of these very basic things about what is happiness, what contributes to our happiness, what contributes to others’ happiness. So other people’s kindness contributes to my happiness and is actually essential to it. So it’s only natural that I should extend kindness to others also. You know, so we introduced that concept is reciprocity and we introduced that from a very early age and kids get this from a very early age that, you know, why should you help others because you’re going to need their help, and a world in which we help each other is a lot better than a world in which nobody helps anyone else. So kids get that very early on and we make agreements in the classroom and there’s no reason why parents couldn’t make agreements also with children that are similar, that are rooted in these ideas of kindness, what do we want for ourselves and therefore what would we want for others because we share this space, whether it’s a home or whether it’s a classroom.

Jen:    [17:21]

Okay. So when you say reciprocity as an adult, I understand what that means and it’s not necessarily a tit for tat kind of thing, but I’m just wondering…does a child see it as a, well, I helped you earlier and so you gotta help me now. How do you get beyond that? Is that an issue?

Dr. de Silva:  [17:38]

It is, yes. Well, I think that a lot of these are developmental issues, so children go through a stage…my friends who are developmental psychologist. I’m not a developmental psychologist, but my friends in psychology who studied development say that, you know, there are just phases the kids go through where they are self-maximizing and so sharing is not really top most among their priorities. And they do really interesting studies where they sell them kids, you know, when the kids don’t think anyone’s watching and distributing candy in a fair way and you know, there’s a certain age where the kids are much more likely to take a few more for themselves than distribute it evenly. There’s really nothing wrong with that. I mean, we go through developmental stages where we hit adolescence, teenage years. These are just natural stages. If a parent understands this within the context of development, I think it’s going to be a lot easier for them because the question is not to undo that developmental trajectory, but just keep reinforcing these ideas as the children go along and they will get them, they will get them and their understanding and their sophistication of it will go deeper and deeper and deeper.

Dr. de Silva:[18:49]

So in the beginning it might seem like it’s a tit for tat kind of thing, but eventually it can be expanded that this person might not help me immediately, but they might help me later and eventually it gets expanded even beyond that, which is that this person who I’m helping might never helped me, but someone else might help me later or this person might never help me, but somebody else helped me in the past. And that’s enough, you know. So this idea of paying it forward even across generations, you know, I mean, as kids grow older, recognizing the way their parents would help them in infinite ways and then recognizing that that means they have a responsibility to future generations. If we encourage that way of thinking, it can become very vast. And you know, one of our assumptions in creating this program is that our society needs much more of this.

Dr. de Silva:    [19:39]

You know, we have a very independent, shortsighted view of well-being. So we think that people on the other side of the earth nothing to do with our well-being. Why should we help them? They could never help us. And that’s just not true and it’s actually that kind of narrow self-centered thinking, narrow self interest that we think is really at the root of a lot of the problems we see in society. So if we do think that we need to teach our children and encourage them to think in a more farsighted way, in a more expansive way, and they’re fully capable of doing that if they’re given the opportunity.

Jen:   [20:13]

Okay. And so when parents go to your website and you gave me the site compassion.emory.edu, is that the right site where they can go to download those resources? That’s right. Okay. And so what are they getting? Is it a series of conversation openers? What kind of resources do you have there?

Dr. de Silva:    [20:29]

Sure, right now at the present moment, we’re still in development. So what we have is we have our framework which is a document that kind of outlines all the various things we’re trying to teach in our program, how we teach it, why we teach it some of the evidence based in research for why we’re approaching it in this way in the fall go up on there is the actual curricula which are a series of lessons that teachers can do; some of those parents can also use. But really since we’re still in development, the full suite of resources is only going to be available when we launched the program publicly, which will be in March of 2019. So there’s not going to be that much there for parents right now unfortunately. But you know, we’re developing that and we’re also developing a series of online modules which will have videos and other kinds of training resources that people will be able to use. But again, this is all being prepared for a public launch in March of 2019. We didn’t want to launch the program until we had tested it out in multiple schools, in classrooms, in different places and in different countries.

Jen: [21:37]

So nerdy me wants to know some more about that testing, so I’ve read a decent amount of studies on social emotional learning programs and some of them actually probably a lot of them don’t end up having results that are statistically significantly different from a program that’s administered to a control group where they just sort of sit together and talk about something unrelated to social and emotional learning for an hour and I’m wondering does that matter or should we look to Carol Dweck comment… she is the originator of the research on mindset, on growth mindset and when she heard that as study showed that it didn’t make a significant difference in economic outcome, she said, well, they just didn’t implement it right. So how do you go about testing these things to make sure they’re effective?

Dr. de Silva:  [22:21]

Yeah, that’s a great question. The quality of implementation is very, very important. And Research on social emotional learning is still quite preliminary. So social emotional learning has been around for about 30 years, but the research is still in a preliminary stage because schools are very difficult places to do research. So, you know, if you ask any psychologist, they’ll say, you know, I mean the best place to do research in your lab where everything is controlled and of course it’s completely artificial, but that’s the good thing about it. Once you go out into the real world, things are messy and schools are just about the places you can go. So I’ve done a few studies in schools and it’s um, I always vowed never to do one again. But here we are.

Jen:    [23:04]

You keep going back!

Dr. de Silva:    [23:05]

Yes. So I would say that the research is helpful, but I would say that the fact that the research isn’t showing statistically significant benefits, we can’t really evaluate that one way or the other.

Dr. de Silva:   [23:18]

We can’t say that the programs are not good because of that. Because we need to know how they’re being implemented. And sometimes a principal or an entire district will say, or an entire state will say, we’re going to do Social and Emotional Learning and suddenly thousands of teachers are just handed packets that have to do this. And you’ll be surprised.

Jen:   [23:36]

Hello, State of California!

Dr. de Silva:     [23:37]

Yeah! We shouldn’t be surprised that that’s not a terribly effective way, especially if they’re not trained, they’re not interested in it. The kids sometimes see this as a distraction from more important work and studies. I think that the thing that is undeniable is that, you know, we need to educate our children in social and emotional competencies and there’s a cost for not doing that. So we see this in many, many different ways. Employers, I mean this is much later in the developmental spectrum, but employers are increasingly saying we want a higher, some people coming out of college or out of high school who know how to get along with one another, who have the ability to cooperate, have the ability to manage their emotions, who are responsible, who have a sense of integrity, who aren’t just looking out for themselves.

Dr. de Silva:   [24:26]

And this doesn’t just happen magically, you know, if we’re not focusing on this issue at all in education, why would we expect our kids to have all those things? And I also mentioned the issue of anxiety. If we look at anxiety, depression, suicide; we’re really facing an epidemic among young people. I was at a conference recently, and someone was showing statistics on suicide among adolescent and teenage girls and the rate has tripled in just 12 years and I have many friends who were children of colleagues of mine, so their parents are professors and kids who were very, very bright who are dropping out of high school, not going to college, not able to deal with the stress of the school environment. So I think she had parents of younger children need to be thinking ahead that this is the environment their children might be going through, particularly if they’re going to public schools and particularly city public schools, that we are in a crisis mode and we have to…it’s our responsibility to provide whatever methods we can to children to navigate that space and that means navigating their emotions, navigating their relationships, and on a deeper level navigating their sense of meaning in life. You know, their attitudes. How important is it to be the best at everything? How important is it to be number one? You know, is it realistic to have this kind of attitude that I need to be a superman, superwoman and excel in all these different ways, you know, so if we’re not addressing those issues, I think we’re really failing young people and if the programs are not good enough and are not being implemented well enough, then that just means we need to do better. And that’s the motivation behind our program at Emory too is that we’re looking at all the SEL programs out there and there are now hundreds and hundreds of programs in the U.S.; different SEL programs and we’re saying we need to take a step forward and one of the ways we’re trying to do that is by going deeper and also going a bit broader. So we have added certain elements that we think are missing in existing SEL programs and we’re addressing those issues of implementation as well as we can also.

Jen:   [26:39]

Okay. So I want to push a little deeper on that and challenge just a little bit. I’ve read that some of these “interventions,” which is what they’re typically called short term programs, could potentially be replaced by drum roll…more unstructured, outdoor playtime, and that the outdoors part is important because parents exert so much control over the home and what happens in it and teachers exert control over the classroom and what happens in it, but the outdoors is sort of this nebulous, not really controlled space and that the unstructured part of that means we’re not taking the kid out and saying, okay, we’re going to go and find snails and draw them, but we’re just going outside and seeing what happens and it gives the children an opportunity to develop games and develop their own rules and see what works for them and Oh, that person looks really upset. They don’t want to play and the game, doesn’t work without them, and what do we need to do to fix that? And all those kinds of skills that develop when they have to encounter these problems and solve them for themselves. What do you think about that?

Dr. de Silva:    [27:43]

I think there’s a lot to be said for that. I don’t see it as an either or thing.

Jen:   [27:47]

Yeah.

Dr. de Silva:   [27:47]

Probably we need both. I was just talking to a woman who started a school, a Sudbury model?

Jen:    [27:55]

Oh, yes. We are familiar.

Dr. de Silva:    [27:57]

Yeah. I think our discussion led to the question of scale. So the smaller scale the situation is, I think the more unstructured it can be because you have parents or teachers who can kind of just provide enough guidance to resolve a conflict and to kind of bring about the learning and the kids can learn on their own. And I think that’s very, very valuable. When we get to say school environments where you have thousands of kids in this school, this becomes much more difficult to do. So I’ve seen this… I think just can work on a small scale, but one of the things about education is that there’s so much variety across the U.S. As you know, our schools are so different and they have different resources. They have different types of students, different types of teachers, different facilities. And then when you go internationally, things become even more varied. So we don’t see our program as the answer, but we see it as a resource that’s there, but there are much, much larger structural issues that need to be addressed and that what you just said is pointing to one of them, which is that our approach seems to be like trying to cram more into the school day and we’re not seeing better learning outcomes, I think as a result of that. So it’s almost like we need to take a step back and really rethink just what are we doing in the first place.

Jen:    [29:16]

Okay. So one of the articles that you had sent me for prereading said, and I’m going to quote, “young children may have an innate ability to tune into their bodies signals as they grow older. They get messages from the outer world to turn off their natural sensitivity.” And I thought, oh, did I miss the window? Did I already do something to turn this thing off? What kinds of messages are these that we’re sending to our children? And what more productive messages should we send or tell them instead?

Dr. de Silva:    [29:42]

So that’s a great question. We take a multitiered approach to the cultivation of resilience and emotional intelligence in children, and we start with the body and the nervous system and sensations. And we actually draw a lot of this work from research that’s happened in trauma care because one of the interesting things about trauma is it disrupts our connection with our body and with sensations because the nervous system has experienced a threat to survival and then kind of recalibrates itself accordingly. And we have to kind of ease it back. But what’s interesting is that this is true not just for people who have suffered from trauma, but it’s true of really anybody who has a body and has a nervous system because we’re always experiencing threats, threats for us are not just physical threats, but also social threats, meaning just, you know, not meeting someone’s expectation or threats of social rejection or judgment.

Dr. de Silva:    [30:40]

So, we all have experienced these things. And the interesting thing about the older parts of nervous system and things like the autonomic nervous system is that it exists on the level of sensations. And if we start to pay attention to our sensations…they actually tell us our inner sensations inside our body. They tell us the state of our autonomic nervous system, which is really interesting. So if we look at our breathing, if we look at our heart rate, if we look at tension in the body, any sensations that we notice inside the body, we can categorize them as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral and unpleasant sensations are sending danger signals to our autonomic nervous system and saying, hey, you know, things might not be okay, but pleasant sensations and neutral sensations. If we focus on them, they actually create a sense of safety. And so in teaching very basic skills about how to pay attention to our body and develop body awareness, body literacy, we’re actually learning about the way our nervous system as a whole is kind of navigating the world.

Dr. de Silva:   [31:43]

And that can be really, really helpful. Kids are very, very sensitive to sensations. And you know, parents definitely know this, you know, and little babies cry when they have sensations that they don’t like or their bodies rubbing up against something that they don’t like or they’re uncomfortable in their bodies, but over time we kind of tune in less and less to our body and we learned to ignore those sensations and they’re actually giving us a lot of information. So we believe that if we first started paying attention to the sensations in our body, they tell us a lot about whether we’re sensing safety or danger, what’s going on, we can then regulate our nervous system better. And then that serves as a great foundation for developing emotional awareness. Because when our body is dysregulated, it’s much more easy for our mind to become dysregulated. And then as we develop more emotional awareness, that helps us with social awareness, how we’re interacting with others. We gain insight to our own emotions; that gives us insight into other people’s emotions that helps us cultivate more empathy for them because we understand what’s happening inside them emotionally instead of just treating them like they’re crazy. And so it builds up from there.

Jen:   [32:54]

My mind is going absolutely crazy making connections with previous episodes we’ve done. So we did an episode on risky play lately and in the research on that, I learned that children actively seek out that edge between the pleasant and the unpleasant sensation, the excitement and the fear and they’re very adept at finding it and walking along that edge and sometimes they fall and sometimes they don’t. And our job is to support them in exploring that edge rather than saying, don’t do that, you’re gonna hurt yourself. So that was one example of a physical thing and then we did another episode on modeling emotional regulation and how parents sort of feel as though they can’t let their child see them angry, you know, I don’t want to smack my child so therefore I’m just going to say that I’m not angry even though I am. And what that must lead the child to do is, you know, they obviously see you’re angry, if my precious vase got broken or whatever. My daughter can see that I’m furious and I’m sitting here with clenched teeth saying “I’m not angry.” And my daughter, I imagine from what you’re saying, what she learns is I can’t trust my gut, I can’t trust what I see in my mom’s face and therefore she must be right because she’s my mom. She’s saying she’s not angry. My gut must be wrong, and so I must not trust it on this. And are there other elements where I contrast it as well? Does that kind of process sort of ring true for you?

Dr. de Silva:  [34:17]

Yeah, yeah. I think those are great kind of teachable moments because if the parent in that moment, and this is not easy, I’m not pretending it is easy, but if the parents say has practiced, you know, to some extent self regulation awareness themselves, awareness of their emotions and their own bodies themselves, then you know, the parents might have the option of saying to the child, well, I am angry. I am upset right now, but this is how I’m going to deal with it. I’m not going to deal with it by hitting you. I’m going to deal with it in this way. I’m going to do this thing that helps me calm down. And then we’ll talk about it.

Jen:    [34:54]

Deep breath; step away for a minute…

Dr. de Silva:    [34:55]

Yeah, yeah, because then the parent is teaching that you can have emotions, you can notice them, honor them, express them, but then also deal with them in a constructive way rather than a destructive way.

Dr. de Silva:   [35:09]

And that’s a very important lesson for children to learn because the ability to deal with difficult emotions in some cases inhibit the behavioral response that that emotion is provoking, like lashing out. That is really, really important. And that there’s this famous marshmallow study which you might have talked about in some of your earlier episodes showing that that ability to, you know, hold back from an impulse is with all sorts of positive benefits later in life. And it really makes sense. It only makes sense because if every time you get angry, you shouted somebody or hit somebody, you know, you’re not going to last long in a workplace or, or in a relationship or anywhere.

Jen:[35:47]

So just as a reminder to listeners that study was a researcher put kids in a room with a marshmallow and said, if you don’t eat this marshmallow, you can have three marshmallows when I come back in five minutes and how many kids were able to resist that temptation for five minutes was really predictive of their executive function skills and whether they were able to control their emotions even though in a lab it’s not very realistic situation.

Dr. de Silva:   [36:11]

Yeah. Yeah. But I mean it’s, there’s so much face validity to this, you know, we know that young children who can’t inhibit their emotions in any way whatsoever, and they’re just running around, you know, kind of just lashing out whenever they feel like it are going to struggle later in life that you have. You have to learn that one way or another. But we talk about, and just in terms of the parent getting to the point where they can do that, we use an analogy was kids that we call it the spark and the forest fire and we say, you know, when a forest fire is raging, even several fire departments can’t put it out and it just burns itself out. And it can be very destructive. It’s just out of control. But when the forest fire is just a spark than even a child can put it out and there are many ways of putting out and our emotions are like that.

Dr. de Silva:    [36:58]

So the key is not suppressing the emotion, but recognizing it early and then having the freedom to do what we want with it. If we only recognize that anger when it’s full blown. And of course this happens very fast. So if you know your child just broke your exquisite vase, this is going to happen really fast, but if you train in doing it than even those fast moments, they almost appear to slow down and this space opens up. And so this is one of the things that we teach children, is that they can learn to watch their emotions, to watch their minds, watch their bodies and catch the spark before it becomes a forest fire. And if parents learn how to do that better then they can teach that to their children also.

Jen:   [37:40]

Okay. Just by modeling it.

Dr. de Silva:  [37:41]

Yeah.

Jen:    [37:43]

So let’s talk about who owns emotions. My daughter has got…I don’t know if she’s fond of saying it, but she likes it. She’ll say, you made me very frustrated, or you made me very angry and part of me is so proud of her for recognizing that and being able to say it to me and part of me wants her to understand that those are her emotions and things that she controls and yes, I might have done something that makes her frustrated, but the frustration is her response, is there something I can do to help that process along?

Dr. de Silva:    [38:11]

Yeah, so it’s a great question. I mean I think that…so one of the things that we’re trying to teach is emotion regulation and part of it is understanding that the spark and the forest fire also happens along a timeline, so there’s some kind of trigger. There’s some kind of experience that’s the initial trigger and then there is an appraisal or a judgment of that and then there’s this emotional reaction. If we noticed that emotional reaction, we can have awareness about it and we can choose how to regulate it or how to behave or what to do. If we have no awareness, then it can just build and eventually it kind of burns itself out. But then we have to deal with whatever consequences happen. So I think teaching that timeline and that ability to regulate emotions is very empowering for children because your daughter in in some ways is right.

Dr. de Silva:     [39:05]

I can’t say she’s completely wrong. Yeah. I mean, our emotions are triggered by face and that isn’t kind of completely within our control, right? We can’t just decide not to be angry or you know, I would love to decide, well, I’m just never going to be angry or jealous ever again. That’s not gonna happen. So people are going to do things that annoy us definitely throughout our whole lives. But learning that there’s something I can do about once that emotion is arising, there are things I can do about it that’s very empowering. And that’s where these techniques come in. I can take a few breaths, I can go for a walk, I can drink a glass of water, but in order to do any of those things, I first have to be noticing that spark; that flame. If I don’t notice them, that I’m just carried along as if it’s completely against my will.

Dr. de Silva:  [39:52]

I’m not in control of myself really. I wish I had a better answer. That’s definitely one of the things we’re exploring is, you know, we do scenarios where we asked children; we read them stories or the teachers read them stories of kids like them going through a day and then asking, you know, asking them first to notice in another child, where’s that trigger? Where’s that spark? And they can notice it right away. It’s always easier to notice another people to know ourselves. And then we asked them, what could this other child be doing? And then they have learned all these techniques so they learned first by watching someone else and then they do it themselves. I mean, so, you know, there’s so many wonderful children’s books and movies and so forth. So even just having a conversation with your child, like, Oh, what could that child have done?

Dr. de Silva:    [40:40]

What do you think they’re feeling? Do you think they could notice something like that?

Jen:  [40:44]

What could they do when they feel that way?

Dr. de Silva:    [40:47]

Yeah. And we also teach kids practices of just observing and watching their mind, which we called meta-awareness or metacognition, and this is increasingly being recognized as a very important skill for children to develop. They have metacognition or awareness. It’s not something they need to create from scratch. So if you ask kids, you know, hey, what are you thinking about right now? Or what are you, what are you feeling right now? They have that ability to look at their own minds, but we don’t teach children to practice that as a skill. We even as adults, we don’t practice that as a skill. So we believe you can practice that as a skill. You can just sit there for moments and just watch your mind and the better you are at watching your mind, the better you are at not reacting instantly to what’s happening in your mind and in your body. So these practices of body awareness and emotional awareness are skills that can be cultivated over time.

Jen:    [41:42]

And in new agey circles that’s called meditation, right?

Dr. de Silva:    [41:46]

Yes. Yes. Right. Exactly. So it is. It is, yeah. There are forms of meditation that are just about that, but you know, we believe that those techniques, uh, they don’t have to be practiced in a religious way at all. They’re just basic practices include attention training practices. These are actually attention trading practices, paying attention to your body, paying attention to your mind and um, they definitely can be used and there’s a lot of meditation research showing that these are skills that can be practiced and they even result in measurable changes in our brain, including measurable changes in cortical thickness. You know, the brain, you know, appearance more and more just like a muscle that actually grows depending upon what we practice. So that’s very exciting and encouraging.

Jen:  [42:30]

Okay. So moving more from looking at the individual to looking at more than one child. And another of the articles that you sent me opened with the statement: “Teachers spend a considerable amount of time mediating disputes between students.” And I think every parent of preschool is who’s listening to this show right now is thinking “teachers, but I think they spend a lot of time mediating disputes? They should come to my house!” And I’m wondering if there are specific techniques or things that you would say to parents who have more than one child who just find themselves constantly mediating these disputes between children. What tools can we give these children so they’re not at each other’s throats constantly?

Dr. de Silva:     [43:14]

You’re asking so many great questions; difficult questions.

Jen:    [43:20]

Otherwise we’d be doing it already!

Dr. de Silva:    [43:21]

Yeah. Yeah. Because all the skills that we’re trying to incorporate into our program are building up to that. So one of the things I think that we look for in education as teachers or parents might be looking for this is to kind of the kind of silver bullet. Like if I just do this one thing, everything is going to be fine.

Jen:    [43:41]

But no! Darn it!

Dr. de Silva:   [43:41]

And you mentioned meditation and mindfulness; there has been a trend to introduce mindfulness into schools and I think mindfulness is a good thing, but some people just think, well, if you’re, if everybody just did this then there would be no conflict and everything would be perfect. We believe that you have to develop a whole host of capacities because there’s nothing more complex than the interaction between two different people. There’s nothing more complex than a human being, and so you put two of those together and that’s why relationships are so hard, but we think…so there’s several different skills.

Dr. de Silva:   [44:15]

So one is just the body awareness, right? When we get into conflict, our bodies are actually responding with sensations and if we know how to notice those and regulate our body, our ability to communicate with other people enhances dramatically because conflicts are tense situations and our bodies respond, as I mentioned to social threat, just like physical threat, so your body, if it’s a tense conflict, your body is literally gearing up for a physical altercation and that can be very unhelpful sometimes, so noticing that, being able to regulate the body, the emotional awareness, of course, because a lot of emotions come up in any conflict situation, so noticing those sparks and being able to deal with them. We also teach something that we call mindful dialogues, which we’ve borrowed from elsewhere. It’s a known technique, but it involves listening in a nonjudgmental way, so we have children practicing in pairs, sharing things, asking a question to the other student and then just listening without interrupting, without commenting on it, without responding, but just listening and just the act of listening can be very, very profound.

Dr. de Silva:    [45:26]

What almost always happens when we do this is that the person who was just speaking and having the other person listen talks about what a amazing experience it is to just be able to talk and have somebody listen, and knowing that that person isn’t going to jump in with a rejoinder or turn the conversation to themselves or whatnot. So you know, the art of listening is something that we’ve kind of lost because listening… The other person speaking is just an opportunity for me to think about what I’m going to say next.

Jen: [45:54]

Podcast hosts don’t do that at all.

Dr. de Silva:  [45:58]

So these are all know, empathy, compassion. We talked earlier about reciprocity. These are all things that if children are building up awareness of all these different things at the same time, then the way they’re going to handle conflicts is going to be very different.

Dr. de Silva:  [46:14]

We also do perspective taking, so switching the roles. What if you know you were in that person, why do you think they were saying things to the way they were saying them? Why do you think they were doing things the way they were doing them? A lot of times we don’t even stop to think this. We’re just reacting to what the other person is doing and we’re not even taking a moment to think about why they might be doing what they’re doing, so emotions arise in context and once we realize how our own emotions arise in context, I talked about the emotion timeline, so emotions arise in connection with an appraisal of the situation. So we appraise the situation in a certain way, positively or negatively, and then our emotion arises. When we see another person acting, we can say, okay, they’re doing this behavior.

Dr. de Silva:  [47:01]

What’s their emotional state that’s prompting that behavior and what’s their appraisal that is prompting that emotional state? And if we follow that line of reasoning, we can think, oh, you know, I can understand why they’re doing this thing. They thing they might be doing might be harmful, but I can understand and even little kids can do this. They can understand like, you know, why is an animal running away from another animal because it’s afraid that’s the emotional state because it’s appraisal is one of danger, right? Why is this person shouting at that person? Maybe because they’re afraid or angry and maybe that’s because they’re sad about something else and maybe that’s because something bad happened to them and it’s remarkable how even very small kids can engage in this very sophisticated reasoning that even as adults we very seldom do, but that’s a skill that we can practice and so we really believe that if kids are students who are practicing these skills than the way they handle conflicts is going to be very different.

Jen:   [48:03]

Okay, so no magic bullet, but some helpful tools nonetheless.

Dr. de Silva:   [48:08]

No magic bullet to world peace.

Dr. de Silva:   [48:10]

Or climate change. But anyway. Okay, so I want to bring this up to a higher level just as we wrap up here. As I was writing the questions for this episode, I actually received an email from the Yale Alumni Association and the headline article, that email was about a class called Psychology and the Good Life which had enrolled 1200 students, which was a record and so they actually put it up on Coursera. So if anyone wants to check it out, you can go find it there. And so Professor Laurie Santos’ message in that course was that human happiness is fueled more by simple acts of kindness by meditation, gratitude, exercise and sleep and then by high salaries and grades. And my first thought was “how ironic it is that most of these kids’ parents paid so much money. I spent a lot of time having their kids about grades so they could go and listen to that lecture.” But then I thought parents today are spending a lot of time worrying about getting their kid into the right preschool and then the right schools so they can get the right grades and go to the right college. And get a “good job,” and then “be happy.” So what advice would you leave us with for parents who see themselves starting to get on that treadmill? What should we tell ourselves?

Dr. de Silva:    [49:20]

So that’s a great question. There’s a whole discipline that’s kind of emerged called positive psychology that’s looking at happiness in life satisfaction and what contributes to it. And they use that term, the treadmill; the hedonic treadmill, which is that we think that, you know, well, if I had more money, I’d be happier if I had a little bit more success or fame or praise or status, you know, these are the things that bring happiness. But in reality, after a certain point, after my basic needs are met, having more money, more status, more fame, more praise, more material possessions doesn’t bring more happiness. And there’s a whole lot of research about that. There’s also research…I’m suggesting that children, not very young children wouldn’t be thinking about this, but even adolescents and teenagers who believe that the keys to happiness are material tend to need more material gains like money and so forth to reach the same level of happiness as children who don’t rate those as very important.

Dr. de Silva:  [50:22]

So in other words, we can find happiness from different sources, but material wealth by itself doesn’t seem like a very good guarantee for happiness. So, you know, I think it’s a great question for parents to ask. Parents want their children to be happy above all else, so they’re going to try to create the conditions to maximize their children’s chances for success and happiness and leading a happy life. So it’s very, very important for parents to reflect on this, that the material conditions of their children’s lives getting a good job, having a good income are only one part of the picture and they might not even be the most important part of the picture. So, and this is something for our whole society to think about because we focus so much on the economic side of things, the material side of things, and in popular culture we focus so much on praise and fame.

Dr. de Silva: [51:17]

Social media is all about, you know, how many likes and views you get and how many friends you have and followers and these are not a solid foundations for happiness at all. So what is a much better predictor of happiness are things like being able to make good decisions in your life, being able to handle relationships. So this has to do with navigating your emotional and social life and we’re really neglecting that in our schools, in our societies. And if we just paid a little more attention to that, I think we’d be doing future generations a much better service. So it’s really just a, it’s just a shift in orientation and where we’re placing our values based on what we want. So in some other countries, you know, things are even more competitive than here in the US if it’s possible.

Jen:    [52:09]

What countries? What countries! Name them!

Dr. de Silva:   [52:12]

I would say India for example; admission to the top universities is virtually impossible. And you have parents actually telling their children in middle school and high school, if you have an opportunity to cheat and get ahead, you should do so.

Jen:   [52:30]

Wow. Because otherwise you’re not going to get in.

Dr. de Silva:  [52:32]

Otherwise you’re not going to get in. You need every advantage to get in because there’s so much competition and so much at stake. So in other countries, as you know, in Japan and India and elsewhere, the university that you get into determines your whole life course. You can’t get into the top university in the country and not have a great job. In the States, you can. And of course there’s a correlation in the States, but it’s not as strong as in some of these other countries. So everything is focused on these school entrance exams. Everything’s focused on that. And the parents believe so strongly that that is the key to happiness for their children. And they’re telling their children to sacrifice character and their moral development in order to get ahead. And sadly, I think they’re doing their children a great disservice because their children might end up going to great universities and getting great jobs. But that’s not a guarantee for happiness at all later in life. I mean, I think we all, you know, you shouldn’t see people who are rich and famous who are not leading happy lives. So we need to think about that more and and talk about that with our children more.

Jen:    [53:42]

Well, thank you so much for being so willing to delve into this with us and address the thorny questions that there aren’t always really great research answers to. I’m so grateful and I’m excited as well by the conversations that I’m looking forward to having with my daughter about her questions and things that she’s interested in and how to give her tools and skills that will help her later in life and now as well. So thanks again Brendan.

Dr. de Silva:   [54:07]

Thank you Jen. I appreciate it.

Jen:  [54:08]

So all of the materials that Brendan has referenced today can be found on his website, compassion.emory.edu. And we’ll definitely send out a reminder early next year once that that selection has been built out and uh, there are lots more resources there, but that framework that he mentioned is there right now. And all the references for the show along with that link to his website can be found at YourParentingMojo.com/Compassion.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.

While I was still pregnant with my daughter, a friend showed me a video of a toddler falling down a flight of stairs.  Once he has tumbled all the way to the bottom he immediately bounces up and announces loudly for anyone who might be around: “I’m OK! I’m OK!”

At the time I thought that was pretty cool.  Who wouldn’t want a child who can roll with the tumbles of life and be fine with it?

I was working on some mental and emotional pregnancy exercises from a book at the time, one of which instructed me to write down my hopes for my yet-unborn daughter.  In the beautiful book that I made for her by hand (and that I hope to one day give to her), the third entry on my list of “My hopes for you” was “I hope you’ll be the kind of kid who gets up after a fall and says I’m OK!”

Fortunately, through studying for a Master’s in Psychology and through researching podcast episodes for you, my wishes for my daughter, as well as my skills, have evolved – but I’m still learning all the time.

Recently, one of my podcast listeners emailed me with a question:

“I hear parents on the playground all the time saying “You’re OK!” after their child falls over.  Often it does make the child stop crying…but doesn’t it invalidate the child’s feelings?”

It turns out that this question is related to a skill that psychologists call emotional regulation, and learning how to regulate emotions is one of the most important tasks of childhood. There are three major ways that children learn about emotional regulation.  The first of these is through direct teaching of emotional regulation – for example, by saying things like ‘you’re OK!.’  The second is through parental modeling of emotional regulation, and because I’ve been getting feedback from listeners saying that they LOVE my show but find the content to be very dense, we’re going to try a little experiment here and break these two topics down into two episodes.  They’re not actually going to be any less dense than my regular episodes (although I really make no apology for that), but hopefully making them shorter will help them to be a bit more digestible anyway.  I’d like you to let me know what you think about this, so do drop me a line at jen@yourparentingmojo.com with any feedback.

The third way children learn about emotional regulation is the emotional climate of the family, which includes parent-child attachment, the romantic attachment of the parents, and the presence/absence of marital conflict (and how this is resolved).  We’ve covered a lot of this information in other shows already – like in our interview with Dr. Laura Froyen on how parenting affects child development, as well as in the episode related to how divorce impacts children, which contained a lot of information on how conflict affects children, and how resolving conflict productively can actually be very helpful for children to observe.  For that reason we’re not going to do a third show on this particular aspect of emotional regulation but go ahead – show affection to your partner!  Be romantic!  Your kid is watching…

So there are three critical reasons we need to support our children’s emotional regulation.  Firstly, emotional regulation directly impacts an individual’s wellbeing, because emotions have a physical impact on both children and adults.  Stress can have direct physiological effects on a person, like increasing blood pressure, it can impact behaviors related to wellbeing like alcohol and substance use and abuse, and can contribute to mental wellness or illness, for example, depression (Butler 2013).

Secondly, emotional regulation helps children to make (and keep friends) – aggressive boys and girls who fail to share and who get peers in trouble find it hard to make friends.

And finally, emotional regulation is really important for academic achievement – pre-kindergarten skills related to emotional regulation actually predict later academic skills probably because children who can sit still even when they want to fidget and ignore a taunting classmate are more likely to stay on-task with the lesson.

What I wanted to know next was “can scientists help us to understand how our actions as parents impact our children’s emotional regulation?”  It turns out that there’s no one “aha!” study that neatly addresses these issues.  But a whole slew of studies cast light on different pieces of the puzzle.

There are two key ideas behind the incongruence of saying “You’re OK” to Western children:

Firstly, emotional expression is culturally driven.  We Westerners tend to think that pretty much everyone thinks (or should think) like us.  While differences between individuals in a culture do, of course, exist, in general researchers assume that “people strive for independence, self-fulfillment, and authentic expression of emotions based on autonomy” (Trommsdorff & Heikamp 2013, p.70) – but in many Asian societies this is not a goal for raising children.

Instead, Asian parents aim to know what their child needs before the child even says it (Tromsdorff & Heikamp 2013).  Chinese children see this control as an expression of warmth and support, whereas European-American children find it stifling.

Most psychological research that makes it into journals is conducted on Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (or WEIRD)  WEIRD college students, and then researchers assume it’s applicable to all Americans, and maybe even people everywhere.  But the ‘hot’ way of studying the cultural issues behind emotionally-driven behavior is to put some Western and some Japanese people in an uncomfortable situation and see what happens – they use Japanese people because the Japanese are typically considered the paragon of the Asian interdependent cultures.

When researchers gave Japanese and German preschool girls a task that they could not possibly complete, German girls experienced distress associated with their failure for much longer than Japanese girls, whose distress quickly disappeared – to be expected in a culture where such expression is typically avoided.  The girls’ mothers were present during the experiment: German mothers expressed warmth to their daughters after the girls failed at the task, and the more sensitive the mother the more distress the girls expressed – in other words, the girls cried more, perhaps because the German mothers felt as though the girls were expressing their authentic emotions and so did not try to get the girls to stop crying.

So if we put all this together, we see that telling a child how they feel (or should feel) is a strategy that is really not well-suited to raising children in a society where autonomy and independence are prized.  We are attempting to control their experience of the world, which would help to build warmth between Chinese-American children and their parents, but which European-American children see as overly controlling.  German mothers seem to have it figured out – their children might cry more as a result, but they learn the validity of their own emotions.  It seems as though if American parents really do prize autonomy and independence, it would be a whole lot less confusing for their children if they were also a bit more tolerant of the expression of emotions that can be seen as negative, like crying.

The second reason why it’s incongruent for Westerners to tell their children “you’re OK” is that children’s emotional regulation develops as they age.

Perhaps this won’t be terribly surprising to parents: emotional regulation before age three months is thought to be driven largely by innate processes – things like turning toward pleasant stimuli like a parent’s face, and away from aversive stimuli like a loud noise.  By age one, babies know that other people can help them to regulate their emotional states, and by age two they can use specific strategies to manage their own feelings (although they aren’t always successful, which is why they have tantrums) (Calkins & Hill 2007).

The way children think about controlling emotions also changes as they get older.  Young children seem to believe that parents can actually change children’s emotions simply by saying “stop crying,” but older children and adults recognize that you don’t stop feeling something just because someone else tells you to – you just stop expressing the emotion.  As we’ll see in our next episode, this can have very negative impacts on a person’s mental and physical wellbeing.

So we do need to adjust our approach as our child gets older, and we can use what psychologists call scaffolding to offer our children more support when they are younger (or hungry, or tired) and gradually withdraw that support as they get better at regulating their own emotions.  As a reminder, we did a whole episode pretty early on in the show on how to use scaffolding to increase children’s abilities.

So what should we understand from these studies?

Firstly, we socialize our children to succeed in our culture, and we should use strategies to help our children succeed in our culture (unless we might think that our culture relies just a touch too much on individualism, in which case we might want to adjust our approach slightly…).

Telling Western children “You’re OK!” when they’re clearly not flies in the face of all the other lessons we try to teach them about living their own experience and respecting their feelings.  It might stop them from crying, but it’s incredibly conflicting for them – we’re suddenly using strategies more suited to socializing in Asian cultures for no apparent reason.

Secondly, while our youngest children might think that we can change how they feel just by telling them, but eventually they figure out that we can’t, and they feel gypped.

Finally, by supporting our children as they develop their own emotional control skills (rather than just telling them they’re OK) we equip them with critical skills they need to succeed in learning and in life.

So why do we continue to tell our children they’re OK when they clearly know they’re not (and, if we’re honest, so do we)?  The only explanation I can come up with is that we really hate to hear our children cry.  We’re wired to make it stop as fast as we can, which we do by soothing our infants, and when they get old enough that we can’t easily soothe them any more we try to get them to stop using whatever means we can – even if it doesn’t benefit our children at all, and may instead impede their emotional regulation skill development.

Al well and good, I hear you say, but what should we do instead of saying “You’re OK?”

So next time your child falls at the playground, consider taking these four actions:

1. And Watch

Don’t go running over.  Cement yourself to that park bench if necessary.

Look to see whether your child is really hurt.  If he really is, go over immediately.  If it’s more likely to be just a bump, sit tight a little longer.

2. Set an Intention

Use this time to check in and see how you’re feeling.  Bring your full awareness to the moment and set an intention to respond with your child’s best interest in mind.  Are you anxious?  Take a breath.  Resolve to not say “You’re OK.”

3. Act

Reassess what your child needs.  If he’s not already up and running around, walk over and sit next to him.  Say something like “Ouch – that looked like it hurt.  Do you need a hug?” (for younger children).  “Is there anything I can do to help you feel better?” (for older children).  Provide a hug (or not) accordingly.

Sit quietly until your child seems to calm himself.  When your child is ready, consider replaying the incident without judgment: “It looked like you were walking along the beam and you lost your balance.”  Empathize and acknowledge any new feelings that occur.

4. Move on

When your child is ready, ask a question.  “Would you like to sit here with me for a bit longer or are you ready to play again?” or “Would you like to play some more or would you rather go home now?”  He may have other ideas about what he wants to do, but you may find giving him ideas to be more effective than just asking “what do you want to do now?,” which may simply elicit an “I don’t know.”

When you have time, you may find deeper reflection on this topic helpful.

1. You may find that saying “You’re OK!” has become reflexive for you – you don’t even think about it before you say it. If this is the case, try first simply to notice when you say it – without judging yourself.  Then try to institute the pause that gives you the time you need to think and say something different.

2. Spend some time thinking about what skills you think feel are important for your child to learn, and how you can support those through your relationship. If emotional awareness is high on the list, think about the messages you send your child when you discuss those emotions.  If you find that you frequently invalidate those emotions (e.g. “Of course you want to go to school!  You love your teacher!” or “Why wouldn’t you want to go to the party?  All your friends will be there!”) then your words may contradict your intention.  Don’t be afraid to let your child experience her own sadness, frustration, and anger, even as you support her by empathizing with her.  Your child learns more by experiencing them and dealing with them than by suppressing them because you don’t want to hear about them.

3. Cultivate a practice of mindfulness – of being in and experiencing the present moment, which can help you to institute that all-important pause, as well as develop your own healthy emotional regulation skills. I’m working on finding someone who might be interested in talking with us about bringing a practice of mindfulness to our parenting, so stay tuned for that.

As always, the references for today’s show can be found on my website at www.yourparentingmojo.com/youreok, and please do let me know your thoughts on this shorter episode format by sending an email to jen@yourparentingmojo.com

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We have a pretty interesting topic lined up for today, or I think so at least: we’re going to talk about grit.  If you’ve heard about grit over the last couple of years it’s probably because of one woman named Angela Duckworth, who is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and who invented what she calls The Grit Scale – she won a MacArthur Genius award for her research on grit in 2013.  She tells a story about how she developed this scale that goes like this: several years ago the U.S. Army was having trouble figuring out which of their 1200 new cadets were going to make it through the grueling 7-week training program at West Point, and which were going to flunk out.  They had developed their own measure called the Whole Candidate Score, which was a weighted average of SAT or ACT exam scores, high school rank, expert appraisal of leadership potential, and performance on physical fitness tests, but it turned out that the Whole Candidate Score actually wasn’t very good at predicting who would make it through the 7-week training.  In 2004, Professor Duckworth gave the Grit Scale that she’d been developing to the incoming class of West Point cadets which asks questions like how likely you are to get discouraged by setbacks and how often your interests change, and it turned out that while the quitters had indistinguishable Whole Candidate Scores from the cadets who made it through the training, the Grit Scale was an “astoundingly reliable” predictor of who made it through training and who did not.

At this point you might be wondering how gritty you are yourself which is easy to test: just Google “Grit Scale” and hit the first link that pops up; I’ll put the link in the references as well.  (I just took it and I scored 4.5 on a scale of 1-5, which is apparently higher than 90% of the population “in a recent study” that isn’t named).  I guess I’m not enormously surprised; I think of myself as a pretty determined person; I think carefully before signing up to a project or a goal but once I sign up I’m *in* and am 100% committed to the end.  So grit isn’t about talent or luck or how intensely you might want something *in the moment,* but instead it’s about your passion and perseverance for long-term goals.  The test is pretty easy to fake, though – it’s not hard to guess what the ‘right’ answer is when you have to rate your response to the statement “I am a hard worker” or “I am diligent. I never give up.”

Professor Duckworth wrote about all this in her 2016 book “Grit: The power of passion and perseverance,” which I read recently.  My first instinct after reading a book that seems pretty good and is well-referenced is to reach out to the author and ask if she might like to be interviewed, but then I started doing some reading around.  The first thing I found was a long profile of her in National Geographic, of all places, saying that she routinely declines requests for interviews, including the one from the National Geographic journalist, who finally tracked down her personal phone number and reached her directly – apparently the journalist’s grittiness persuaded Professor Duckworth to do the interview.  And then secondly I found some studies saying that maybe – just maybe – grit isn’t quite such the big deal that Professor Duckworth makes it out to be – she hopes it will be the thing we can teach poor children that will help them to succeed in school, and it turns out that that is far from clear.  So ultimately I decided we could have more fun by digging into this ourselves and seeing, by the end of the episode, whether grit is a trait we want to try to encourage in our children – or not.

So we’ve said that grit is about passion and perseverance.  Professor Duckworth spends most of her book talking about the perseverance side of the equation, so we’ll just touch briefly on passion first.  Passion is sparked by an interest; an intrinsic enjoyment in what you do.  I wrote my psychology master’s thesis on what motivates children to learn so I can say she’s right on the mark here; we don’t know much about what it is that get us interested in a topic, but once we are interested in it if we learn more about it (and are encouraged to learn more about it by the people we love), that interest can blossom into a passion.  Professor Duckworth provides case studies throughout the book of highly successful people she’s interviewed, as well as some highly successful people who she apparently wasn’t able to interview but she read their books and quotes them as if she had interviewed them, and I think it’s fair to say that all of them were passionate about their work.  This isn’t too hard to wrap your head around; a lot of studies have come to the conclusion that people are not only happier but they perform better when they are interested in their work.  For many people, this interest is linked to the concept of purpose – the idea that their work somehow matters in the world, because it’s connected to the wellbeing of others (or, I suppose to another thing, like the planet).  As a side note, the book never resolves the tension between applying the concept of grit to classroom-based learning, and the fact that interest and passion are a key component of grit.  Unfortunately, much of learning in school is not based on students’ interest; it’s based on what other people say they think students *should* find interesting.  So in a way, if we’re looking at grit as a way of improving student outcomes (which Professor Duckworth apparently hopes we can do), we’re trying to improve students’ perseverance on things they don’t care much about.  It seems like that could be a problem.  But we’ll come back to that later.

In addition to passion and purpose, Professor Duckworth briefly mentions that hope is apparently important as well; a rising-to-the-occasion kind of perseverance that keeps us going when things get tough, and to get back up when we get knocked down.

But the bulk of the book is dedicated to the perseverance component of grit, so that’s where we’re going to spend the most time as well.  Professor Duckworth describes perseverance as the capacity to practice – after you’ve developed an interest in an area, it’s the devotion to a rigorous, committed, never-ending practice that leads to mastery.  It’s finding your weaknesses and addressing them, day after day, and saying “whatever it takes, I want to improve!.”  Our society is actually quite biased against the kind of practice it takes to be great.  We want to believe it happened because a person was deeply talented.  Professor Chia-Jung Tsay at University College London conducted an experiment where she had professional musicians listen to clips of two musicians playing the piano – one is described as an innately talented player while the other is a ‘striver’ who has worked hard.  The professional researchers didn’t know that the two players were actually the same player, playing different parts of the same piece.  In direct contradiction to their stated beliefs about the importance of effort versus talent, the professional musicians said the naturally talented pianists to be more likely to succeed and more hireable.  In a follow-up study, a set of adults read a profile of a ‘striver’ entrepreneur, while another set read a profile of a ‘naturally talented’ entrepreneur.  All participants then listened to the same audio recording of a business proposal and were told it was made by the entrepreneur they’d read about.  Again, the naturally talented entrepreneur was judged as more likely to be successful and more hireable.  When the participants were asked to back one entrepreneur or the other, the striver had to have four more years of leadership experience and an additional $40,000 in start-up capital before the participants were as likely to invest with the striver than with the natural.  As a profile of Professor Duckworth in The Atlantic so eloquently put it, “We don’t like strivers because they invite self-comparisons.  If what separates, say, Roger Federer from you and me is nothing but the number of hours spent at “deliberate practice” – as the most extreme behaviorists argue – our enjoyment of the U.S. Open could be interrupted by the thought There but for the grace of grit go I.”

So as a society we value natural talent, but if hard work gets people to the same place and they can just hide the hard work, we can be accepting of that as well.  We don’t want to see those hours of practice or the mistakes that went into making something great (the Atlantic article author, Jerry Useem, did as Professor Duckworth suggested and tried to find video footage of people practicing, and wasn’t able to find much at all.  He said the closest he got was the discovery of an early Rolling Stones draft of “Start Me Up,” which apparently does not work at all well as a reggae tune).

The attractiveness of the perseverance narrative, of course, cannot be underestimated for an American audience.  We might prioritize talent above all else, but the country’s story is built on the idea of the value of hard work and its ability to lift you out of whatever circumstances you might find yourself in.  It’s the old Protestant work ethic in new clothes.  The narrative isn’t always true, of course: there are plenty of people who find themselves in circumstances that hard work cannot get them out of, despite what conservative politicians might have us believe.  But I think the idea that they should *try anyway* is very American – perhaps this partly explains why Professor Duckworth’s book is ranked number 286 in all books on Amazom.com, but only number 764 on Amazon.co.uk.  Hardly a scientific study, of course, since Professor Duckworth is American and does a lot more publicity work here, but perhaps the difference in culture is one factor.

Professor Steven Maier at the University of Colorado has done a lot of work on understanding how rats respond to stress.  He found that if he gave young rats electric shocks that they could switch off by turning a wheel, they grew up to be more adventurous than normal rats.  But young rats who had no control over the duration of their electric shocks grew up with what psychologists call “learned helplessness” – if they were shocked as adults, they behaved very timidly.  When I think about the cultural implications of this, I imagine American children in disadvantaged circumstances pushing against the sides of the box in which they find themselves, getting shocked over and over again, and learning not to push any more.  But being English myself, I imagine English children looking at the box in which they find themselves and thinking “yup, it’s a box.  I’m supposed to be in a box.”  And they don’t even try to touch the sides.

So there are a number of ideas to explore here.  Professor Duckworth was a math teacher before she went back to graduate school; first she taught in a private school (although its website says it is not and has never been a “fancy private school” that is “chiefly interested in serving whoever wishes to enroll.” Later, she taught in the only public school in San Francisco that admits students on the basis of academic merit.  As an aside here, Professor Duckworth doesn’t mention that the school in New York was private and actually implies it was a pretty gritty public school when she says that most of her students “lived in the housing projects clustered between Avenues A and D” in Manhattan, which made me think that her students were from a disadvantaged background but then I found out that the tuition is listed on the school’s website as $20,500/year for incoming kindergarteners.  When she got to San Francisco, one of her students was in her ‘regular’ math class rather than ‘Advanced Placement’ math class but he turned in consistently perfect work, so she got him transferred to the AP class.  He didn’t always get As in the AP class, but he went to the teacher and asked for help when he needed it, and he ultimately ended up getting a PhD in mechanical engineering from UCLA – he quite literally became a rocket scientist.  This is just one example of how some of Professor Duckworth’s former students appeared to be using effort to overcome potential deficiencies in talent and effort.  Now isn’t that an attractive idea?  That just through persistent, dogged, hard work, students who are at some kind of disadvantage can overcome the shadow of their backgrounds?  Even though the public high school in San Francisco that Professor Duckworth taught at was the only one in the city that admits students based on academic merit so once again, these are hardly highly disadvantaged students.

Because it is such an attractive idea, some schools are already beginning to implement curricular changes to teach grit.  Professor Duckworth is affiliated with the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP group of charter schools, which actually grades children’s levels of grit.  The tests for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is how we say “54% of American fourth graders read at a basic or below-basic level in 2015” – which is a true statistic, by the way – is going to start including measures of what is known as “noncognitive skills” – which are grit, desire for learning, school climate, technology use, and socioeconomic status.  The Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which is the test that compares how badly our students are doing compared with those in other countries (we’re around number 22-24 for reading literacy based on 2015 data, depending on how many of China’s different territories are separated out or lumped together) is going to start measuring grit too.  Schools in nine California districts have started teaching grit and are going to test students on it as well, although in an irony of ironies, they’re using behavioral modification techniques to do it.  So they’re not teaching students to be gritty for the sake of getting better at something that’s important to them, but to see how long they can behave respectfully in class so they can win a prize like 20 seconds of putting their feet on their desks or playing rock-paper-scissors.  Seriously, I couldn’t imagine a worse way to implement this.  It also reminds me of the failed attempt to instill self-esteem in Californian students in the 1980s and 1990s as part of an effort to make Californians more responsible and productive citizens – and save the State a bundle of money by doing so that we discussed in our earlier episode on self-esteem.  It turned out that self-esteem wasn’t causally linked with academic performance at all; we still can’t say whether increasing self-esteem will cause a child’s academic performance to improve; it might just be that students who do well in school have high self-esteem as a result.  We covered that in much greater depth in the episode called Don’t bother trying to improve your child’s self-esteem.

And it turns out that even Professor Duckworth is against this – she has resigned from the board of the group overseeing the roll-out in California, saying she couldn’t support using grit tests to evaluate school performance.  (As an aside, when I was doing research for a paper on multicultural issues in education I was surprised to find a statement from a coalition of civil rights groups representing minorities opposing programs to opt out of standardized testing, because standardized tests are the best measure that these groups have of the disparities in educational outcomes that their students attain.  I do wonder if testing for grit could achieve a similar aim?) Professor Duckworth went into much more detail about her hesitation to measure grit in a paper she co-authored with Professor David Yeager of the University of Texas at Austin, which she wrote after she was summoned to the White House to discuss how grit could be used to improve achievement in schools.  The paper provides a non-exhaustive list of 12 limitations of questionnaires and performance tasks used to assess things like grit.  These limitations include the teacher or student (whoever is doing the reporting) misinterpreting the researcher’s intent in asking the question, the questions may not take into account changes that occur over time (so if I just forgot my homework once last week I might say I’m “less reliable” than if I forgot my homework once last year), and, as we’ve seen, the tests are ridiculously easy to fake.  Professors Duckworth and Yeager suggest several elements of a path forward, firstly arguing that if we must measure grit, we should use multiple measures of the characteristics we’re interested in, which can be more reliable than just using one measure.  Secondly, if we can come up with a way to measure grit that yields acceptable results and overcomes issues of differing language ability, cultural norms, and the like, we don’t yet have great information about what to do with that information on a state-wide or nation-wide basis.  We can’t say “students who scored below a 2 on the grit scale should get intervention X to improve their grittiness” because students have different reasons for not being gritty and won’t all respond to a specific intervention in the same way.  Thirdly, it is likely to be far more practical to assess an individual student’s grittiness as part of the “web of daily instruction” that can tailor instruction to a student’s individual needs.  Finally, the authors conclude their introduction to the paper by saying that “not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts,” which I think we should take as a maxim.

But what if we were somehow, magically or otherwise, able to overcome the issues of measuring grit, would that help struggling students to get ahead?  Once again, the allure is strong – could we give students from poor backgrounds?  Professor Maier – who did the experiments on shocking rats – says about these children: “I worry a lot about kids in poverty.  They’re getting a lot of helplessness experiences.  They’re not getting enough mastery experiences.  They’re not learning: ‘I can do this.  I can succeed in that.’  My speculation is that those earlier experiences can have really enduring effects.  You need to learn that there’s a contingency between your actions and what happens to you: ‘If I do something, then something will happen.’”  The problem here is that the approach assumes that poor children and prosperous children are essentially the same except for their lack of mastery experiences, and if we could shift that, we could shift their outcomes.  But David Denby, writing in the New Yorker, argues that this is not the case.  Kids who grow up in harsh environments can be badly hurt before they even leave infancy, and those harsh environments are often associated with poverty.  It’s not to say that poverty causes stress in children, but that conditions children find stressful are often found in poor households (although they can certainly also be found in some rich households too).  David Denby’s argument is based on journalist Paul Tough’s 2012 book Helping Children Succeed which argues that stress causes at least two reactions in children: chronic stress causes chronically elevated levels of the hormone cortisol, which can compromise the child’s immune system, and also create a stress-response system that is over-prepared to fight back.  Paul Tough says “Small setbacks feel like crushing defeats; tiny slights turn into serious confrontations. In school, a highly sensitive stress-response system constantly on the lookout for threats can produce patterns of behavior that are self-defeating: fighting, talking back, acting up in class, and also, more subtly, going through each day perpetually wary of connection with peers and resistant to outreach from teachers and other adults.”  Secondly excessive stress in early childhood can damage the development of the prefrontal cortex, which means that executive functions like memory, self-regulation, and cognitive flexibility don’t develop properly, and these are exactly the types of brain structures that are needed for a person to develop grit.  So it’s entirely possible that we could ‘diagnose’ a child as having ‘low grit,’ but find that it was caused by circumstances entirely beyond their control and which they may be powerless to change because it has become a structural part of their brain.  Potential solutions to this problem abound, from improving parenting skills to providing better infant nutrition; from improving the quality of preschools to making them more affordable.  But in the current political climate, it seems unlikely that we are going to see any investment in children even if it would most likely save a lot of money in the long run.  “You’d better have that baby,” they say, “but you’re on your own in figuring out how to care for it.”

Getting off my soapbox – the political one, at least – I also want to take issue with the overall goals of developing grittiness.  The book is stuffed with case studies on businesspeople like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates. Kat Cole is also featured: she was raised by a single mother and rose from being a waitress at Hooters (which, for those of you who live in more enlightened cultures, is a restaurant where the invariably beautiful waitresses wear low-cut tops and very short shorts) to being the CEO of Cinnabon, which sells calorically intense but otherwise nutritionally devoid baked goods and is now the Group President of Focus Brands, which owns Cinnabon as well as a half dozen other restaurants serving food of suspect nutritional quality.  In her paper arguing against the measurement of Grit, Professor Duckworth says that the Grit Scale was developed through exploratory interviews with lawyers, businesspeople, academics, and other professionals.  But when you think about this some more, you come up with some troubling problems.  Firstly, Jeff Bezos appears several times in the book, and each time you get a glimpse of either his creativity or his passion.  His persistence is never discussed.  Bill Gates used to decide which software programmers to hire by giving them a task that he knew would require hours of tedious troubleshooting, to see which ones would stick with the task.  No mention is made of their passion, and did they all go on to be *incredible* programmers?  We have no idea.  So do the two really always go together?  Recruiting high-achieving people and then designing a theory to fit around them isn’t exactly a scientifically valid way to understand what really makes people successful.  How would we know what qualities other than grit contribute to their success?  And how would we know about what prompted people who have been successful but aren’t gritty to achieve that success?  We need a random sampling of successful people to understand how important grit has been to their success, not a selection of successful people who agree to be interviewed because success has been important to them, supplemented with quotes from successful people’s autobiographies that support the case for grit.

And while we can’t argue that going from being raised by a single working mother who struggled to make ends meet to a CEO probably takes both persistence and passion, is this really the kind of passion we want in our world?  The kind where our goal is to use women’s bodies to peddle chicken wings and convince people they need a cinnamon roll that provides them with almost half of their recommended daily caloric intake?  David Denby, the author of the New Yorker article, says that Professor Duckworth worked with the founder of KIPP and the head of a private school in New York to distil a long list of character traits into seven virtues.  Grit is one; the others are self-control, zest, optimism, social intelligence, gratitude, and curiosity.  Denby notes that this list is devoid of any mention of anything like honesty, courage, integrity, kindliness, responsibility for others, ethics, or moral development.  Indeed, at the beginning of Grit, when Professor Duckworth mentions the importance of being driven by a sense of purpose, but it seems as though this purpose exists only to serve the individual.  David Denby observes that the list “would seem to be preparing children for personal success only – doing well at school, getting into college, getting a job, especially a corporate job where such docility as is suggested by these approved traits (like gratitude) would be much appreciated by managers.  Putting it politically, the character inculcated in these students is perfectly suited to producing corporate drones in a capitalist economy.  Putting it morally and existentially, the list is timid and empty.”

I’ve done a lot of reading over the last couple of years about where power lies in society and in schools, and I have to say that I agree with Denby’s critique.  We might know and choose not to think about it, or we might just never have thought of it before, as I had not before I started studying for all these master’s degrees, but one of the major purposes of school is to pass on society’s culture and values to the next generation of children.  It is the government (the national government in many societies, with power increasingly being devolved to the states here in the U.S.) that sets educational policy and works with private corporations to determine the curriculum that students must learn and will be tested on.  Standardized tests are couched in the language of student success, but ultimately what we want them to be successful at is getting a job, so they can earn money, pay taxes, and create demand for American products.  And it’s not just “generic” culture that’s passed on, it’s the cultural values of the dominant culture, which is why it’s acceptable in schools to use language in the way that most White children do and not like many Black children do.  Families who don’t speak English well are assumed to have values, histories, and ways of learning that are inferior to those of the dominant culture, and *if only these families could learn to do things our way,* their children would get on so much better in our society.  Given what we’ve learned about the potential futility of telling children who have experienced emotional trauma when they were very young to “be grittier,” is it possible that children from non-dominant cultures may also find that there are reasons that they cannot or would not want to increase their own levels of grit?  Perhaps the single-minded pursuit of excellence that Professor Duckworth espouses might be less-than-compatible with the familial emphasis of Latinos, for example, who may not make decisions about individuals without consulting with the family?

Paul Tough’s book Helping Children Succeed quotes a section of a report from 2012 called Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners which was written by Professor Camille Farrington and her colleagues.  Her review of the research on grit found that it actually may not be possible to instill a universal sense of grit in children, but it might be possible to increase their gritty actions in specific circumstances, like in studying at school.  There are four key beliefs that cause a student to persevere more in the classroom, and these are firstly a sense that “I belong in this community,” secondly that “my ability and confidence grow with my effort,” thirdly that “I can succeed at this,” and fourthly “This work has value for me.”  We don’t have the time here to dissect each of these beliefs in-depth, but I want to briefly address two of them.  Let’s take the last one first: “This work has value for me.”  As we’ve already said, this is obviously a challenge in school where for most of the day someone else has determined what the student has learned and how they will learn it, and the students learn that the best reason to persevere is that they get to put their feet up on their desks if they do.  The first one, “I belong in this community,” is also a tough one for students who don’t belong to the dominant culture when *everything we teach in schools* says that they don’t actually belong.  We teach Native Americans that Whites had a right to settle across the United States through their belief in Manifest Destiny; the first – and often last – thing we teach about Black people is that slavery happened to them, and the State of Arizona prohibits students in predominantly-Latino schools from taking a Mexican-American Studies course even though students in the course showed higher academic achievement than students who didn’t.  More than half of our students are now of a race other than White, but over 80% of teachers are White.  Many studies have shown that it’s difficult for people in general and teachers in particular to have empathy for people who are different from them, and empathy is a critical precursor for developing the kind of relationship with a student that would lead them to believe “I belong in this community.”

So who, then, is grit for?  Is it possible that it’s mostly for White and Asian parents (Professor Duckworth’s maiden name is Lee; her parents were immigrants from China) who seem to care most about wanting their children to ‘get ahead’?  And how much can it actually help them to get ahead anyway?  Well, perhaps not as much as we might think from reading Grit and from watching Professor Duckworth’s TED talk.  Professor Marcus Crede (which might be pronounced “Creday”) published a study in 2017 called “Much Ado About Grit: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of the Grit Literature.”  Anya Kamenetz, a journalist for NPR, pored through that highly technical paper and simplified one of its key findings for us.  In 2009, Professor Duckworth and a co-author said that West Point Cadets’ score on the grit test was highly predictive of whether or not they would make it through basic training.  The exact phrase they used was “Cadets who scored a standard deviation higher than average on the Grit-S were 99% more likely to complete summer training.”  But it turns out that while the tables and statistics in Professor Duckworth’s paper are entirely correct, her phrasing leads us to believe that the grittiest cadets are 99% more likely to get through basic training – perhaps they bounce from 40% to close to 80%.  But what actually happened was that 95% of all cadets get through basic training, compared to 98% of the very “grittiest candidates.”  The difference is that the *odds* of making it through improved by 99% – or in other words, by three percentage points.  Professor Duckworth conceded this point in an email to Anya Kamenetz, reiterating that the tables and statistical analysis is correct, and her intent was not to mislead.  Professor Duckworth doesn’t cite the statistics in her book, but she does describe the study in a way that implies that the grit score makes a massive difference between who succeeds and who fails:  “By the last day of basic training, 71 cadets had dropped out.  Grit turned out to be an astoundingly reliable predictor of who made it through and who did not.  The next year, I returned to West Point to run the same study.  This time, sixty two candidates dropped out, and again grit predicted who would stay.  In contrast, stayers and leavers had indistinguishable Whole Candidate Scores.  So what matters for making it through basic training?  Not your SAT scores, not your high school rank, not your leadership experience, not your athletic ability.  Not your Whole Candidate Score. What matters is grit.”  The association between grit and success is held up high throughout the book, as well as in Professor Duckworth’s TED talk, where she says “One characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success.  And it wasn’t social intelligence.  It wasn’t good looks, physical health, and it wasn’t IQ.  It was grit.”  As Alfie Kohn points out, though, what does this actually prove?  That people who say on a questionnaire that they stick with things actually stick with things?  Surely what Professor Duckworth is actually testing is the cadets’ honesty, not their grit?

The effusive blurbs on the book cover go even beyond Professor Duckworth’s own dramatic pronouncements: Daniel Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness, says “Psychologists have spent decades searching for the secret of success, but Duckworth is the one who has found it…She not only tells us what it is, but how to get it.”  Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking (which we’ve looked at previously in an episode on supporting your introverted child) says “Impressively fresh and original…Grit scrubs away preconceptions about how far our potential can take us…Buy this, send copies to your friends, and tell the world that there *is,* in fact, hope.  We can *all* dazzle.”

Don’t we all want to dazzle?  Don’t we all want to know the secret that will help us do it?  Well, it turns out that grit might not actually be *the* secret.  Professor Crede’s meta-analysis reviewed 88 studies, and found the correlation of 0.18 between grit and academic success.  For those of you who have been out of school for a while, a correlation describes a relationship between two factors, or variables.  A correlation of 0 says there is no relationship between the variables and a correlation of 1 says there’s a perfect relationship.  And most importantly, correlation and causation are very different.  Just because we can say there’s a relationship, doesn’t mean we can say which variable impacts the other.  Professor Duckworth herself found a correlation of 0.2, which she says are what personality psychologists would describe as a “small-to-medium” effect.  Now a correlation of 0.2 isn’t nothing; I was recently corresponding with a friend who is on the verge of getting a Ph.D in something I don’t fully understand related to global health which has a very heavy statistics component, about the impact of homework on academic outcomes.  It turns out that the correlation there is about 0.16 – so, lower than the correlation for grit, and my friend described the homework correlation as “not a bad correlation at all in the real world; it’s the difference between failing a class and getting a C, or going form a B to an A+.”  So grit is one of a host of factors that predicts student success, and is not as high a predictor as, say, either a SAT score or a high school GPA on a student’s first year college GPA, which have correlations in the neighborhood of 0.5, and is hardly the single unique quality that will enable all of us to dazzle.

It would also be remiss of us if we failed to examine whether grit is even a trait we *want* to encourage.  Because by encouraging grit, we have to *discourage* something else.  If we encourage single-minded pursuit of academic success, we’re discouraging the other things that student could be spending time on, like being creative, or simply being a generalist: some careers require expertise in one topic, but others derive a great deal of value from pulling together disparate experiences into a whole greater than its parts.  If we encourage our children to demonstrate their proficiency on standardized tests, they necessarily have less time available to spend on something they might have chosen to study and pursued with single-minded passion, if they had had the time.  Grades and test results are someone else’s judgment of how well a student is doing.  If a student were instead engaged in something they actually found interesting themselves, it’s much more likely that they would become their own toughest critic, because they would actually care about the work products, not just the A at the end.

So, as usual, we draw to a close by asking what parents are supposed to do with this information.  Well, if you’re a White or Asian parent, I guess you should start by acknowledging that if your child is in one of these schools down the road from my house, where I know a decent number of my listeners live, and if grit is being touted in that school as the amazing thing that’s going to level the playing field for historically disadvantaged students, then now you know there’s a good chance that grit is not going to be the thing that ‘saves’ these students.  In fact, there’s a good chance that grit is going to be the thing that puts ever-more distance between these students and your student, who may come from a relatively more well-advantaged background.  And that grit may be the thing that helps your student to succeed in school, and college, and in the corporate world, if that’s important to you.

So if after all that you’re thinking grit *is* something you’d like to nurture, how do you do it?  Well, first, allow your child to experiment with lots of different activities.  If they enjoy ballet or soccer or whatever for one class then they might want to participate for a season, but they might not.  Ask your child.  Make this initial learning more like play than learning if possible.  This approach is more likely to hold your child’s interest, and experimenting with different activities gives them a chance to gain context for what they like and what they don’t.

Once the child does commit to the activity, make sure they understand the value of deliberate practice that’s designed to identify their weaknesses and work on these so they’re no longer weak.  One of Professor Duckworth’s studies found that students who had learned about deliberate practice were more likely to give advice to other students related to practicing, and were also more likely to choose to do more deliberate practice in math rather than messing about on social media.  For those who hadn’t been doing well in school, this led to increased performance as measured by their grades.  The students receiving the self-esteem message actually did worse on the next test, possibly because the message encouraged them to feel better about themselves regardless of the work they put in, which removed the motivation to work hard and resulted in lower test performance.  So once your child settles on an activity, make practice a habit; something they don’t even have to think about starting every day.

Next, don’t be afraid of allowing your child to fail.  Really; that’s how they learn.  Toddlers fail all the time; then they get up and try again.  When we rush over to help them out, we teach them that failing is shameful; something to be feared.  Once you fear failure, you won’t stick your neck out and take a risk, which makes it more difficult to get better.

When your child comes to you with a success or a failure, what you say next tells them how you view their success or failure.  If you say “You’re a natural!,” you show that you value innate talent.  If you say “You’re a learner!” you show that you value the effort it took to do the activity, even if your child isn’t a natural at it.  If you say “well, at least you tried,” your child may not learn to pick herself up and try again.  If you say “Well, that didn’t work.  Let’s talk about how you approached it and what might work better,” your child learns that failure is just another step on the learning journey.  These examples might sound familiar to you as being related to what Professor Carol Dweck calls the growth mindset; the idea that qualities like intelligence are not fixed, but can be changed through learning.  We’ll have to do an episode on that sometime  Over time, your child will internalize these ideas as self-talk that she can use to reframe her own failures into lessons from which she can learn.  But she may still need your helping hand to identify new strategies to try; to suggest people who may be able to offer expertise; to just listen while she figures things out.  In many ways, it’s a harder role than just fixing the thing for her.  In the longer run, it’s likely to pay off.

But the best lesson I got out of Grit, and one that I plan to put into effect in our house, is called the Hard Thing rule, which has three parts.  Firstly, everyone in the family has to do a hard thing – something that requires daily deliberate practice.  I’m already doing mine; my research for this podcast and my master’s in education is my hard thing.  I love it, but it’s still hard work – especially the statistics part.  Although my husband says that my hard thing should be cleaning the house.  He definitely thinks I need the practice at that.  My daughter isn’t really old enough at three to choose a hard thing, but in a few years I’ll ask her to choose one.  My husband is having a hard time deciding on his hard thing; his best suggestion yet is to stop looking at his phone during every free second of the day.

The second part of the hard thing rule is the part I like the best: you can quit, but not until a natural stopping point has arrived – the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or something like that.  Carys isn’t in any classes yet but I’d been wondering what might be the appropriate balance of *sticking with* something without forcing her to do it for my sake rather than hers.  The idea is that you have to finish what you committed to in the beginning, which means you can’t just quit on a bad day.  The final part of the hard thing rule is that *you* get to pick your hard thing.  Obviously you should pick something you enjoy and you should let your child pick something she enjoys.  You don’t get to force her into piano lessons for her hard thing if she prefers soccer (or football).  (Again, note the irony of allowing your child to pick their hard thing – but somehow hoping, without any apparent evidence, that the resulting grit will translate to environments where passion is not present that is contradicted by the evidence found in Professor Farrington’s report.)  Interest in the topic should help to get you (or your child) through the bad days so you can really make a decision when the season is over or that tuition payment is up about the totality of your experience and whether you want to do more of it, rather than just whether it sucks right now.  And by modeling a hard thing yourself, you’re providing your child with exactly the kind of role model he needs to become more gritty himself.  I plan to only ask my daughter to pick *one* hard thing, and I don’t plan to obsess over whether she is becoming better than anyone else at it.  To me, that feels like an appropriate balance of learning what it’s like to be gritty and not getting obsessed with the idea that grit is the be-all-and-end-all of success in life.  The actor Will Smith is quoted in the book as saying “I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill.  I will not be outworked, period.  You might have more talent than me…but if we get on the treadmill together, there are two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die.  It’s really that simple.”  I’m not interested in raising a child who is so caught up in proving that she’s the best at something that she has to out-compete everyone.  She might become highly successful, but it doesn’t seem as though she’d be much fun to be around, and ultimately achieving balance between being productive and being satisfied with what one has achieved seems to be a much better outcome than someone who would rather die than get off a treadmill before someone else.

So, in sum, grit may be *one* of several traits that are important to a child’s success in life, which Professor Duckworth does acknowledge in her own conclusion, after she’s spent a whole book telling us how important grit is.  Indeed, she says in the National Geographic article that “there’s more that we don’t know than we do know.”  But grit by no means the only characteristic that’s important; Professor Duckworth herself says that she thinks ‘goodness’ is more important than ‘greatness.’  Be wary of school-based interventions that promise to increase grit, especially if they are delivered on a one-size-fits all basis, using rewards to get children to do it, and doubly-especially if they promise to level the playing field between privileged and under-privileged children.  Perhaps the best thing you could do on that front would be to mentor an underprivileged youth so they, too, can learn from you what it means to be gritty, and you could also talk with them about what components of grittiness are a fit with their culture.  Don’t lose sight of the fact that committing to a goal and sticking your head down and doing the work should also be balanced by looking up every once in a while and making sure the goal is still the right one.  College and a corporate job is not the right fit for all children.  I have to assume (because Professor Duckworth’s research only focuses on high achievers) that grit can benefit people from all walks of life, with all kinds of life goals.  Finally, consider implementing the Hard Thing rule when your child is old enough to choose her hard thing for herself.  It could be just the balance you need between allowing your child appropriate choices and helping her to see the value of sticking with a thing even when it gets tough.

Thanks for listening: all of the references from today’s episode can be found at yourparentingmojo.com/grit

Transcript

Jen: [00:40]

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Regular listeners may remember that a few weeks ago, I interviewed Dr Renee Engeln who wrote the book Beauty Sick on the topic of raising girls with a healthy body image. Even though I don’t have a son, I know a lot of you do, so in today’s episode we’re going to talk about some of the challenges associated with raising sons and how we can be better parents to sons, and specifically how fathers can be better parents to sons. So since I am not a father and don’t have a son, I figured I’d better find someone who is both of those things. So today I welcome a co-interviewer, Alan. Alan grew up in New Jersey with a comfortable middle class family whose father was physically present and not physically abusive, but who had what Alan calls embarrassing spasms of anger that came with yelling and throwing things and when he wasn’t angry, he was pretty emotionally absent, so Alan feels as though he didn’t really have a great model for this whole fathering thing, but he wants to parent his own son differently and it started to take some steps in that direction, but he isn’t really sure if it’s enough or what else he should be doing. Welcome Alan.

Alan:    [01:42]

Thank you.

Jen:    [01:44]

And to help Alan and I figure all this out. I’m so excited that we’re joined today by Dr Judy Chu. I first learned of her work on the documentary called The Mask You Live In, which you can rent on Amazon or on Netflix and I would highly encourage you to do that even if you’re the parent of a girl because it really helped me to understand some of the reasons why boys and men treat girls and women the way they do. Dr Chu is featured in that film and when I looked her up, I saw she’d written a book called When Boys Become Boys, which I devoured as soon as I got it, and I knew she was the right person for us to talk with. She also teaches a course on boys psychosocial development at Stanford University. Her work aims to support boys healthy resistance against societal constraints that undermine their connections to themselves and others. Welcome Dr. Chu.

Dr. Chu:   [02:28]

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Jen:    [02:31]

So Dr. Chu. I wonder if we could just start sort of in the weeds a little bit here about your research because a lot of the studies that we cover on this show are experimental in nature and that means that some researchers take some children to the lab and maybe they do something to make them uncomfortable and then they give the children a difficult task and see how they respond and then we try and generalize that behavior out to the real world and I’m familiar with the quote from the great psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner who called this the science of behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time, but your research takes such a different approach from that. Can you just tell us a little bit about how you go about studying boys?

Dr. Chu:    [03:11]

Sure. Well, I guess the best way to describe my research is exploratory studies because like you at the time I hadn’t grown up as a boy and I didn’t have a son. And so in a way it was very much like anthropological research where I was going to learn from boys about what it was like for them to grow up as boys amidst, you know, a culture that has specific messages about what it means to be a real boy, quote unquote, or a real man. And I wanted to learn from the boys themselves, you know, what they’re capable of knowing and doing and relationships. So a lot of my methods really involved kind of like ethnographic observations. Just really trying to approach the boys as… I even told them that they’re my teachers because I don’t know what it’s like to be them. And so really looking to them as key informants and then kind of participating in their everyday lives at school as a participant observer.

Dr. Chu:   [04:01]

So watching what they were doing, but also asking them about it and kind of really centering everything around developing kind of trusting and comfortable relationships so that they would talk to me as I was, you know, obviously different. I was an adult, I was a woman and kind of letting them get to know me so that they could feel that they could tell me things or share with me or also tell me if they didn’t feel like sharing things with me, which was also a part of the process. So I really wanted to respect and honor their wishes and their levels of comfort and then following up those observations later in the year once we had established relationships with interviews that I did – conducted either one on one with the boys or the boys in groups and that just depended on their preference. I would ask them, do you want to meet with me on your own or do you want to meet with me with some of your buddies?

Dr. Chu:    [04:45]

And they would let me know what they preferred because I brought toys to my meeting and because they were some times more desirable character that each boy wanted to play with. That became a way of getting to meet with them one on one because they didn’t want to have to kind of negotiate who got to be which characters and whatnot. So, um, but it was really very much based on what’s called the relational approach to psychological inquiry, which really kind of tries to account for the fact that the stories people tell us or the things that they share with us about their lives really depends on how they see us and how they see our motives and really starts from a place of, you know, placing at the center of the relationship between the researcher and the participant.

Jen:  [05:24]

And so how many times did you meet with the boys roughly?

Dr. Chu:  [05:27]

Let’s see. I studied them throughout their pre kindergarten year and then followed up in their kindergarten year. I went at least once a week for two to three hours a week. And let’s see. I probably had about 48 days that I was there. And of those 48 I probably did interviews on 36 to 38 of those days. And so I met with them quite frequently and it was kind of eventually became on-demand, so I’d show up and the boys would kind of, you know, this was much later once they felt comfortable with me, but I’d show up and they’d come and request like, can you meet with me today, can you take me today? And then I’d try to make sure I met with everyone who had asked to be met with. And then also some of the boys who are a little more shy or hesitant, I also would ask them and when they didn’t feel comfortable, I’d let them pass and then if they wanted to then we eventually met in that way. So I tried to kind of, you know, more or less meet with at least everyone who wanted to. And eventually all of the boys did meet with me several times, so, you know, a handful but some more than others.

Jen:   [06:24]

So this is very different from pulling a kid into a lab and get spending them in a five minute experiment and generating a result at the end. And I know that with an experiment you can potentially reach a larger number of people. You studied a relatively smaller number of people and I’m curious about the generalizability of your results. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Chu: [06:43]

Oh no, that’s a great question. Yeah, of course. I’m happy to talk about that. One of the things that kind of drove my research was that at the time, and this was in the late nineties, nineteen nineties, a lot of the literature on boys was not really talking about their relationships and the centrality of relationships in their development because relationships were kind of deemed feminine. And so it’s like, Oh, if you’re going to study relationships then you should be looking at girls because that’s what girls do. And so the boys relational capabilities and kind of their styles and all those things were very much overlooked or underestimated or just kind of neglected. Like, you know, some of the books that had been written with just say, oh well boys don’t really hardwired to talk about emotions and relationships. And so there was really this missing discourse in the literature on boys.

Dr. Chu:  [07:29]

So what I really wanted to do is go in and focus on the boys perspectives to learn about their experiences and the relational approach that I adopted was very much based in studies that had emerged out of questioning traditional psychological methods which kind of approached experiments or studies as kind of what they call the black box approach where you think, okay, this person is this mysterious black thoughts. And like you said earlier, you know, we can manipulate situations and kind of see how they respond and try to guess at what they think about it. But my mentor at the time at Harvard, her name is Carol Gilligan. And one of the things that came out of her work in addition to the research on girls’ relationships and girls’ development that came out of the Harvard project on girls’ development and women’s psychology was this method that really said, you know, you can ask people about their experiences.

Dr. Chu: [08:14]

And if you create a context or a situation that is comfortable and familiar and trusting and inviting, people can tell you what they’re thinking, and you can trust that. And so the approach was really that the boys know something about their experience and they can tell me about it if I can create a situation that makes them able to be open and honest with me. And so yeah, in a way it’s probably seen as a little bit more of a radical approach to psychological inquiry. But in terms of the kinds of questions that I wanted to examine, it was really the most appropriate method as opposed to coming in and, you know, because one of the things that I document in my book is just how long it took, you know, several visits, maybe 10 to 15 visits before the boys started to feel comfortable with me because I was a stranger to them.

Dr. Chu:    [09:00]

And understandably what they wouldn’t know if they could trust me or if they even wanted to talk to me. And so really giving them time to feel like, okay, who is this person? What does she want to know is safe for me to talk to her, do I even want to talk to her? And then finally kind of realizing that, you know, because I was genuinely interested in what they had to say really coming out and sharing with me things that, you know, sometimes they would say, oh, you know, don’t tell the teachers that I told you this or, you know, don’t let the other boys know that this is happening. Because a lot of them often felt that they were the only ones kind of struggling with some of the messages and pressures that were coming into their lives. Even at the young age of four.

Jen:   [09:37]

Yeah. So you answered another of my questions, which is why did you get interested in this if you didn’t even have a son yet?

Dr. Chu:    [09:46]

That was a really wonderful question and if I could just, I’ll try to speak very briefly about it, but I was actually brought to this study by boys themselves and it actually started with work with adolescent boys because my first year at Harvard, after I went home. I was driving around my brother and his friends, they were all 13 years old so they couldn’t drive and one of his friends kind of said to me, Oh, Harvard, you know, tell us what you’re learning there, you know, basically sarcastically like “impress us.” And I said, well, one of the things I learned about was when you know, these studies of girls and how to support girls, and he, this 13 year old boy says to me, oh, everyone’s so obsessed with girls, they’re talking about girls and how to support them and that we need to support them.

Dr. Chu:  [10:24]

He goes, and that’s fine with me, but nobody’s talking to boys and we have something to say too. And he goes, “I know you should study boys; you should start with me.” And so I went back to Harvard that fall, told my advisor Carol about this, and she said, you should go back and study him. Clearly he has something to say. And so when I went home for winter break, that’s what I did. I started with an interview with this 13 year old. He talked for two hours about, you know, just kind of things that were, what was going on with him, what was hard, what was easy, what was on his mind. And I actually spent the first year of my studies studying adolescent boys, but what I found was that by adolescents they had already started to kind of reconcile the discrepancy between this is the way people think boys are and this is the way I experienced myself to be and the fact that there’s a gap between those things is just the way things are and you have to accept that gap as a part of growing up.

Dr. Chu:  [11:22]

So that was kind of what I was seeing and hearing from adolescent boys. And so Carol said, you know, you really need to start earlier when they’re still in the middle of struggling with that discrepancies when they’re not yet kind of reconciled to the fact that people just aren’t going to know what they’re really like. And so her hypothesis was that what she was observing or had observed in adolescent girls, which is kind of this heightening of pressures for girls to conform to these feminine ideals and stereotypes, that the girls then had healthy resistance against. She felt that, you know, in our patriarchal culture where men still have most of the privileges in terms of power and status, that she thinks that in patriarchy they go after the boys earlier at the boys start hearing things like, don’t be a sissy, don’t cry, don’t be a Mama’s boy.

Dr. Chu:    [12:08]

Those messages come in earlier. And her theory or hypothesis was that it came in at early childhood. So she said, why don’t you go in and find out, you know, what’s going on for these boys. And at first I was actually a little bit worried about that because I hadn’t been working with young children very much. And because I felt like, oh, I could talk to adolescents, I just finished adolescence, but I didn’t know what to expect with the younger kids. And they were amazing, you know, once we’re able to establish familiarity and comfort and trust. They were just as welcoming as the adolescent boys and it’s open to sharing. Once they knew they could trust me and that I really wanted to know what they had to say.

Jen:   [12:44]

Okay. So you mentioned about how our society defines masculinity and I’m curious about Alan’s perspective on this and I think the whole “boys don’t cry.” Is really common. Was that the way you were raised on?

Alan:  [12:55]

I think that I wouldn’t say I was raised that way by my parents in terms of, specific way, you know, criticized if I cried or anything like that, but I do think you get the cultural influence just out in the world about it’s maybe not it’s not safe have certain kinds of emotion.

Jen:  [13:16]

So if your parents weren’t giving you that message, where did you get that message from?

Alan:   [13:21]

I think you get it just through media, through interacting with other kids and adults. I would guess…and I can’t point to a specific incident, but you know, you learn by if you do express emotions and somehow you get embarrassed by it or somebody says something, then you’ve kinda learned to ratchet things back because it cannot be safe to be so open emotionally.

Jen:   [13:51]

That safety of being open emotionally seems like a pretty major theme in this work Dr. Chu. Do you see that as well?

Dr. Chu:   [13:56]

Absolutely. I think just as Alan said, I mean the boys learned very quickly through observation if not experience that you know that there are consequences to their behaviors and so they go from being really open and very kind of wearing the hearts on their sleeves so to speak, to learning that, you know, they need to be a little more selective, maybe even savvy in what they reveal about themselves and to whom you know, and they learn to anticipate the consequences and kind of modify their behaviors accordingly to keep themselves safe. And that’s smart and it’s adaptive. I mean it makes a lot of sense if you sense that you’re in a hostile or not particularly welcoming context. It makes sense not to reveal your vulnerabilities, right,

Jen:  [14:35]

But it seems as though when our culture does is sets up… Our entire culture is this hostile and unwelcoming place for boys and men to express those feelings of insecurity? Do you agree?

Dr. Chu:   [14:45]

Right. I think that unfortunately a lot of the conventional constructions of masculinity really focus on this ideal of men having to be physically and emotionally tough and stoic and kind of self-sufficient, not needing to tell anybody their problems and having to kind of bottle it all up and I think that it’s been demonstrated a lot even in the media, I think there’s kind of the popular messages just are slowly starting to deliver the message that it’s not healthy, it’s not good for them, it’s not good for their relationships and that there are long-term health consequences as well as short term kind of unpleasantries that can result when our emotional expression becomes stifled. Can you give us some examples of those? Well, I think, I mean the most kind of obvious would just be it can contribute to feelings of isolation that one is alone loneliness or even if they have, you know, a ton of Facebook friends or if they’re in the crowd, they can still feel lonely because nobody knows what they’re really like and it can just basically get in the way of their efforts and they definitely boys throughout childhood and adolescence and into adulthood, definitely continue to seek connections and to resist disconnection.

Dr. Chu:    [15:52]

So if their goal is to really connect with others in authentic ways where they feel genuinely known and accepted and they’re having to withhold certain things because standards of masculinity tell them “boys don’t talk about these things,” then it really becomes a big obstacle to achieving the things that they want to getting the kinds of relationships that they obviously strive towards and desire.

Jen:  [16:15]

So it’s like society is saying you can’t have this openness. They desperately want this openness versus it says if you have this openness, you’re not a real boy, you’re not a real man.

Dr. Chu:    [16:24]

Right, right. So there’s like conflicting messages that are confusing for them for sure because you know, they’re trying to figure out what’s the right thing to do, what’s appropriate, what’s desirable. And ironically sometimes it’s that boys get the impression that the path to social acceptance and approval is to conform to these masculine norms, but then certain aspects of those constructions of masculinity inhibit the very things that will enable the connections that they’re working towards. And so they’re kind of in this buying the conformity to those kinds of norms that tell them, you know, you’re not supposed to talk with people. You’re not supposed to reveal the fact that you need other people in your lives. That undermines their ability to reach out when they need help to offer help, when they can be of help and like to really establish those kinds of mutual reciprocal relationships that will be protective in many ways for them.

Alan:   [17:13]

So Dr Chu, in your research, you saw a big shift happening in boys while you were studying them. And I’m curious how you identified when that shift would happen and what the nature of that shift actually it was.

Dr. Chu:    [17:31]

That’s a great question. I think what with the shift, it was not something that the boys told me about. It was something that I observed in their interactions with each other and with their parents and then also experienced in their interactions with me. So one of the things that, you know, when I first started studying these boys, my mentor, Carol Gilligan actually came with me during the first couple of months and did observations and then we’d kind of talk about what we had seen. And so some of the things that had struck us, for instance, where the boys’ ability to be really self aware and sensitive to other people’s feelings and attuned to kind of that social dynamics that were going on. And also one of the things that really stood out for us was this incredible tenderness between the boys and their fathers, much more so than with their mothers.

Dr. Chu:   [18:16]

Because I think they had already started to learn that little boys aren’t supposed to cling to their mothers when they arrive to school, but somehow the message hadn’t been transferred over to fathers and so the boys were very, very tender, very loving. Some of them would cuddle with their fathers when they arrived, sit in their laps, read together and kind of settle into the day in a way that was so peaceful and loving and really kind of started the day right for them. And so these were things we had not expected to see because you know, based on stereotypes or images of boys as kind of rowdy and rambunctious and moving too much to even be hugged or held or whatever. It was so contrary to that. And so we kind of followed that and watched for that over the years because I started in the beginning of the school year. So that was the Fall.

Dr. Chu:   [19:00]

And then into Spring there was kind of this gradual, like more of a distancing. Like it’d be more of a high five instead of a hug and a kiss. And it depended; it varied by the boys. They didn’t change at the same time. Some of the boys were able to still give hugs and kisses and feel very comfortable in that, but others were like, you know, you can give me a high five or a handshake and kind of being very aware all the time. Do you know who’s watching this interaction, you know, which of my friends is seeing this, you know, who’s watching me interact with my parent and how do I need to conduct myself? And so they went from being just, like I said, one of the things that had impressed me with how just open and honest, they were, not just in terms of being positive towards each other, but also in terms of when they’re mad at each other, when they’re angry, they talk about it.

Dr. Chu:   [19:41]

They said, you know, “I’m upset with you because you did this and that wasn’t fair.” And they talk about it to kind of feeling like they couldn’t talk about it as much. That just how I described it was kind of. They went from being really fully present in their relationships in terms of expressing a whole range of qualities and behaviors and feelings to starting to adopt a pretense that sometimes word for word echoed characters they had seen on TV or heard in commercials or hurting the song and be a kind of this posturing that again, kind of imported language or phrases or attitudes and postures or poses that they had seen either in the media or maybe in older siblings or in people that they had interacted with. And that shift really reflected how they were actively reading and responding to messages that they were hearing from their peers and from adults about what it meant to be a boy.

Dr. Chu:  [20:30]

And it was never very explicit in terms of, oh well boys shouldn’t do this. Although occasionally media you’ll hear something like, boys don’t cry or boys will be boys and the implication is that boys don’t do emotions or relationships. But then and then also just kind of pressures to conform, which were really motivated by their desire to be able to identify and relate to the other boys in their class. So what does it mean to one of the boys in this class and how can I engage with them in ways that won’t make me stick out or be teased or be excluded.

Jen:     [20:58]

Alan, do you ever do drop off? Daycare drop off?

Alan:   [21:03]

I do. I drop my son off at school every morning.

Jen:   [21:06]

Okay. What have you seen?

Alan:     [21:09]

You know, my son is four, so I think he’s still on the young side and still at a pretty open point and still pretty emotionally available and so generally, you know, he always wants to give me a hug and a kiss and I see him being, you know, it works well. It’s interesting. I drop him off every morning because he can be pretty clingy with his mother and not want to separate. So while he’ll be readily emotionally available with me, he doesn’t actually have a hard time separating with me like he would with his mother, which is why I do the drop off every day.

Jen:    [21:51]

You know,, we actually face a similar thing with my daughter; I had to do drop off this morning and it wasn’t pretty. And normally my husband does it for exactly the same reason. So I guess what I’m curious about here then is as Alan’s son gets older, he’s going to start to notice probably what the other kids around him are doing and especially if it’s four year olds and five year olds in the same class. He’s probably observing what the five year olds are doing too and maybe it’s a little bit different. And is there a way that Alan can encourage his son to keep that really emotionally available quality that we feel as though we want our sons to have still have them not get teased about it when dad leaves and they have to go and be with their friends.

Dr. Chu:    [22:32]

I think in part it varies by the child, you know, and if he’s comfortable in being himself and kind of saying this is who I am, this is what I have with my dad. It actually became a point of… I think the other boys were jealous of the boys who were able to kind of have those moments of affection with their fathers. And so like for instance in my book, I know you read it, Jake and his father were just, they really stood out, you know, because Jake’s father was this kind of warm and loving and just really comfortable with himself and Jake adored his father and he would hug and kiss and climb on his back. And sometimes like when his dad was on all fours and Jake’s on his back, the other boys would come and climb on his back.

Dr. Chu:    [23:09]

And when the father left actually in addition to getting a hugging his from Jake, he’d sometimes get hugs from the other boys too who kind of wanted in on the action. And so they do crave it. And as long as there’s no one kind of gender-policing them, even when there is, I mean, in my book there was one of the boys who was a little more adherent to the codes of masculinity. And so sometimes he would question other boys like, you know, what are you doing? And Jake, because he was so comfortable with his father and because they had this amazing relationship that very much was based in their home life, but spilled out into other contexts and became wonderful protective shield in a way. And so because he had those things, people could say, oh, you know, what are you doing there?

Dr. Chu:     [23:53]

You know, when he was snuggling with his dad and goes, “I’m snuggling with my dad” because he said it so competently, you know, what can they do? Right? It’s kind of like bullies or people who want to kind of coerce you into something else. I’m going to pick on you if they think they can influence you. But that confidence, which has his relationships with his mother and father instilled in him, gave him the confidence to kind of deviate in a way that was really good for him, but in a way that also protected him from peer pressures that might otherwise sway him to say, Oh, I better give that up or I better tone that down. And so in a way Carol, my advisor, really said, you know, Jake, he’s kind of the epitome of this healthy resistor, you know, and that resistance is fostered in the home because his parents basically said if you don’t want to do something, don’t do it.

Dr. Chu:    [24:35]

And they gave him language and permission to really question things that didn’t feel right to him. And so you can definitely kind of create this bubble that they carry with them or that they kind of can live inside of. It’s just hard to protect boys from the messages that inevitably they’re going to encounter either by people that you know, because we can’t control how other people interact with our children and we can’t control what the messages the media conveys. But we can teach them to read it and to question them, to know that they don’t have to inevitably be subject to those rules, those arbitrary rules that other people say they’re supposed to be and do. And even four year olds are in a position to have that kind of competence. And I see it very much as coming from the parents.

Dr. Chu: [25:17]

So that’s one way to kind of maintain and to support his ability to be so emotionally available and say I really value this. And as he gets older, if he finds out, oh, you know, it’s not always safe, which sometimes unfortunately can happen in schools and outside in society to really kind of say, okay, well maybe you can’t be like that everywhere, but there are safe places, safe relationships in which you can bring yourself very openly and honestly and that you can always feel safe and you know, so it’s kind of creating those protective relationships for them that they then can take into the world even when the world is not as supportive.

Jen: [25:50]

Alan, have you had any kinds of conversations like that with your son? Do you feel as though you have the tools to have those kinds of conversations?

Alan:  [25:58]

We make a real effort to not stifle his emotions and to get him comfortable with just emotions generally. So, you know, there’s some good books that we have. There’s a book called F is for Feelings, which basically just goes through a feeling for every letter in the alphabet and that’s a really good book because it can get kids comfortable with identifying what the different feelings they’re having are and what they mean and by just naming things that can help them get in touch with them. And I know I always make an effort, if he’s crying to just say, you know, it’s okay, please go ahead and cry. You know, a lot of times you see parents, something happens and they want to just push their child because they want it to be over there. Like, Oh, you’re going to be okay, you’re going to be okay.

Alan:  [26:52]

You know, something like that, you know, I’d much rather say, oh, go ahead and cry and get it out. Release the emotion. So we make a real effort around that. And my wife is very passionate about child development issues and we talk about this stuff all the time and she does a ton of reading. And so she brings a lot of resources into our family and we just have a lot of consciousness about it. I think a lot of families don’t have that way of thinking about it. And you know, one of the questions I had for Dr Chu is whether she knows of resources or tools that parents have that they can use to combat these cultural influences that we might not like or when we see things in our children that you know, how we deal with hard times with them.

Dr. Chu:  [27:42]

Wow. That’s a wonderful question. First of all, I want to say that what you’re doing sounds exactly right. From what I’ve heard from the boys and from their families, that’s exactly what works is this kind of validation of their feelings. Allowing them, letting them know it’s okay to feel what you’re feeling. It’s human, it’s natural to cry. All these things. It will nurture his self acceptance, which again contributes to that confidence that enables him to resist pressures or messages that might not be helpful to him as he goes through life. But in terms of resources and tools, I mean I think the fact that your wife is reading a lot and you’re both very aware of it and kind of conscientiously making decisions about what you want to do. I think those are all exactly the right things to do. I think some of the biggest maybe missteps or mistakes or just oversight that parents do as they maybe don’t take their kids as seriously.

Dr. Chu:   [28:30]

Because I think in general people seem to think like, oh, they’re just kids and so what can they really be experiencing or feeling? I think they inadvertently or just because they get caught up in the business of everyday life or they’re tired and don’t have the time or the bandwidth to kind of devote that time and attention to every little thing. They can oftentimes miss the cues that kids are giving them in terms of I need help with this and I need to process this and kids – as astute as they are, they are still developing these skills and so that book F is for Feelings sounds great talking with them and just kind of reassuring them that yes, this is completely normal. It’s difficult, but it’s normal and you know, you’ll figure this out and it’ll get easier and giving them the language and the skills for sure and just, I mean I think more than anything is just also just that knowing that you’re on their side, that you believe them, that you’re listening to them, that you’re trying to help even if you don’t solve any of their problems for them, which isn’t necessarily the goal anyway, but to say “I hear you, I understand what you’re going through and I know, this can feel difficult, but we’ll get through this.”

Dr. Chu:    [29:33]

One of the boys in my study actually, Jake I met with last year or so because it turns out he’s living here in San Francisco and he’s now 27 years old. So I was able to have coffee with him and ask him to reflect back on what he felt as he was going through this, what he remembered and he, you know, in terms of what you remembered from when he was four, I was a little more limited, but he reflected back on his childhood and adolescence because as you can imagine, somebody who is a resistor like that who says, you know, this doesn’t feel right for me, so I’m not going to do it – it’s an endless struggle but a worthwhile one. And I always asked him, you know, so what enabled you to feel supported in resisting those things? And he very much pointed to his relationship with his father and his relationship with his mom and also his older brother.

Dr. Chu:     [30:16]

And they were just very much – it didn’t mean that life was always easy. It just meant that they could always talk about it no matter what. And one of the things that his father brings up that I describe in my book in the chapter on what the parents shared, which I learned so much, you know, you’re not expected to be perfect all the time and in fact the kids kind of benefit from seeing the mistakes that we make and knowing how we’re struggling and again just are talking through it with them, enables them to then have tools that they can then bring to their own problems and adapt and apply. So if I had an easy fix, so I would definitely share it. And then probably be very wealthy.

Jen:     [30:55]

Probably.

Dr. Chu:  [30:56]

But you’re asking the right questions though, and just even your intentions just demonstrates… Its exactly the right place to be. I mean, nobody has it figured out. I certainly don’t and I questioned myself all the time as a parent, like am I doing the right thing? Did I just say something that’s going to destroy them or whatever. And it’s very much like this sense of resilience and knowing that it’s okay to make mistakes and in fact there may be even better off for it when we’re able to turn those mistakes into learning opportunities for both of us and so…

Jen:     [31:25]

Yeah, I felt as though what Alan was hoping for and there was a book to read or some thing to do and what you’re telling us I think is kind of that he has already. He and his wife have the tools that they need.

Dr. Chu:   [31:35]

Right.

Jen:    [31:35]

His family and our family both use the same respectful approach to parenting; I actually met him through his wife in a group that I’m in and so I think what we try and do is acknowledge our children’s experiences as authentic. Yeah, we’re at the park and you’re having a tantrum because you don’t want to leave. And personally I think this is ridiculous because we’re going to be at the park again tomorrow if you want to come. But what I’m saying is: “I hear that you really don’t want to go home. I hear that this is really important to you, that you really want to stay here and play and feel free and cry if that’s what you need to do to experience that” and not to minimize that and say, “Oh, just shut up and get in the car because we have to go home.”

Jen:    [32:10]

It seems as though just that mind shift of allowing your child to experience their emotions as their authentic selves and for them to see you seeing that and being okay with that is what they need more than sort of any tip or trick or checkbox that you can go down. Am I sort of reading that back right?

Dr. Chu:    [32:29]

Absolutely. And it even matters more than, them necessarily getting their way. You know, they just want to feel that you’re listening and you’ve heard them and you’ve considered it, and if the answer is still no, but I hear you and I understand what you think, then that gives them the feeling that they matter, that their voice matters, their feelings matter, and you’ve validated that, but you’re saying, you know, the situation is just this and you can always give them like a choice, like you want to leave now or in five minutes, you know, you can, there’s ways to kind of soften it a little bit. But yeah, like you said, the most important thing is that they feel listened to and even more than they got their way. Right.

Jen:    [33:02]

So I want to look at the flip side of this a little bit. We’ve talked about Jake and his amazing relationship with his father and I want to read a passage from your book about Mike and his relationship with his father and specifically what that looks like at dropoff. So it goes “When Mike’s dad prepares to leave by asking Mike for a hug and a kiss. Mike walks slowly and self-consciously toward his Dad, stands with his arm, set asides, and allows his Dad to hug him. While in his Dad’s embrace. Mike makes a face like he slightly annoyed or feels inconvenienced by this exchange and let his body go limp like a rag doll. However, there is a brief moment when Mike smiles slightly or returns his Dad’s hug by placing his hands on his Dad’s back before letting his arms fall loosely at his sides again and resuming his air of indifference as Mike and his Dad finish their hug and begin to pull away from each other, Mike’s Dad gives me a kiss on the cheek, which Mike subtly wipes away by gently brushing his cheek with his fingertips. When Mike’s Dad catches him in the act and asks playfully. What are you doing? Mike responds with a guilty smile and they separate affably,” and so that sort of really stuck out to me, particularly in contrast with the story about Jake because it’s almost like maybe Mike was like Jake a year ago and something has shifted in Mike that hasn’t shifted in Jake and I’m wondering to what extent is it just the health, the ability to separate it from a parent and to what extent can we tease out is it that there’s something deeper going on and the Mike is beginning to deny what his needs are as a person for connection with his dad and is there something that a parent in that situation could do to sort of opened the gates back up again?

Dr. Chu:     [34:34]

That’s a great question. A little bit ties to Alan’s question about there being a single source or even a small group of sources and resources and this is why it’s hard to recommend even my book, sometimes is because it really does depend on the kid, right? You know, each individual is different and so when I used to publish about my research, I would get calls from people saying, Oh, well what should I do with my kid? And I said I’d have to meet to know what to tell you what to do, but there’s not like a universal thing like you can’t. Even for awhile one of my colleagues was saying, well just take them out for ice cream. And I’m like, some people are allergic to dairy!

Jen:   [35:08]

Cashew ice cream!

Dr. Chu:  [35:08]

So that even in terms of Mike, I think you noticed something really that was really central to what was going on for him. And for those who haven’t read my book, it’s like he was kind of seen… I saw him as the bully in the class. He was the tallest boy. He was the toughest boy. He had this just really “don’t mess with me” exterior. And oftentimes he would kind of coerce the other boys into doing things that they didn’t necessarily want to do. And so at first I wasn’t super fond of him, but then it turned out during my study, during those months that I was observing him, his parents were going through a separation which was incredibly hard for him. And so he was developing this kind of tough exterior because he was actually the most vulnerable of all the boys at that time. He had this huge concern that people were going to suddenly leave him. He didn’t want to be abandoned. And so he was really trying out this like… If I force people to stay with me then they can’t leave me kind of thing.

Dr. Chu:   [36:03]

And he also was just, you know, playing around with like, how do I deal with these…for him were probably these unbearable feelings of nothing, feels predictable. I thought my parents were going to be both in the house, all the time… And so just kind of what they’re dealing with. And I think if we’re going to compare him to Jake, I mean his parents were in a very loving, very strong marriage. And so he definitely came from a different situation. That’s not to say that they couldn’t both end up being fine, but it’s just that Mike had a lot more going on and so, you know, he was definitely kind of developing this persona that he felt he needed to project to show everyone, you know, I’m fine, I’m okay and nobody can hurt me. Everything he did kind of was about protecting himself from being hurt.

Dr. Chu:    [36:45]

And so yeah, I mean I think with every kid you need to meet them where they are. Every kid has a different personality, a different temperament. They bring something different to the situations and they also have access to different resources. And so in terms of supporting them, again, coming back to Alan’s question, it’s like I would encourage parents to really trust that you know, your kid best of anyone else in the world. You’re the one who’s going to love them the most and want the best for them. And if we’re lucky, we have other people who want to be supportive. Ultimately we are our children’s biggest champions, right? And so, and we’re the ones that they’re going to look to and rely on to help them get through whatever they’re getting through. And so it becomes very much custom tailoring our support to what our kid needs.

Dr. Chu:  [37:28]

And so I think if I were to think of like a “solution” to it is just for parents to be able to trust themselves more. I think there’s so much insecurity and uncertainty around parenting these days. I certainly feel it. And in the years that I struggled on behalf of my son and what he was going through and what I needed to give to him. I think what I kept coming back to as needing to be reminded that I know something about this. And in that sense, people always say “Oh, did studying this help you as a parent?” I’m like, if only to give me a little ounce of confidence that I might know what I’m doing because there’s so much doubt. You know, there’s other parents, there’s teachers who say, oh, your kid is this and that’s not good and whatever.

Dr. Chu:    [38:08]

And it’s so easy to get sucked into feeling like I don’t want to do more damage and so how can… I think even parents who decided: I need to toughen up my kid, it’s because they want to protect them from being bullied or picked on and whatever. And so usually the parents have these really wonderful intentions and I think the best thing to do is to learn also to kind of sit with what we know and say, you know, even though other people say this or even though the popular thing is to do this with kids, this is not for my kid to be able to have the courage to kind of say, okay, this is going to be our choice. And that’s really, really hard because there really are pressures all around not just for our boys but also for ourselves.

Jen:    [38:44]

Yeah. I obviously have no idea what happened later in that day when Mike got home from school. But I wonder, and certainly the moment at school was not the right time for Mike’s Dad to sit down and say, hey, it seems as though there’s something going on with you right now, but I would hope that maybe later in the day Mike’s dad said, “Hey, I noticed that you didn’t really want to be hugged when we left daycare or school. Is there something you want to talk about what’s bothering you?” And maybe start a conversation about what’s going on in the child’s life and really seeing that instance of behavior as a signal as your child trying to tell you something, not just as a, Oh, that was interesting, and then you go out to the car and go to work and don’t think about it anymore.

Dr. Chu:   [39:22]

Or sometimes the kids even forget and so that it’s not necessary that we analyze every situation unless there’s like a red flag or something. You can always just try to reconnect because in that sense the relationships are very resilient. The kids are resilient and the relationships are resilient and the more that we can kind of demonstrate that as well, so like if the father was to come home and if that was on his mind just find another way to kind of reconnect and to be present like, oh and that wasn’t the right context because as you mentioned that’s in his school context. It’d be Mike doesn’t want to be all vulnerable and exposed in the school setting where he feels that his peers are watching just like his father wouldn’t in his workplace necessarily be emotionally available, but then to kind of notice when the opportunities are that you can slow down and just be together sometimes that some of the parents mentioned, you know, when they’re putting their kids to bed, that’s usually a nice quiet… Everybody settled. Everyone’s calm and able to be present or bath time or sometimes car rides were they’re in the back seat and you’re in the front seat and they just are able to say whatever’s on their mind. So it doesn’t have to be like an interrogation or anything like that, but it can kind of be like, oh, you know, is there anything on. There’s always second chances and I think that’s also good for boys as well. And also girls to learn to know that, you know, it’s not all or nothing. You can make mistakes and you can still come back into relationship and it’s still there that teaches them about the durability and the strength of the relationship.

Alan:  [40:47]

I find that to be actually a really key point, you know, as a father, I really make an effort when I do something that is upsetting or I get angry or something happens where I think my son is maybe having a hard time to try to come back to when he’s in a better place or when I’m in a better place or both in a better place and just kind of process that together. I’m always surprised by his capacity to really do that at such a young age and how that yields real benefit. I plan to do that today. Actually, this morning we had a hard time getting out of the house for school and I got a little bit angry at him and I plan having a conversation with him later today about, hey, you know, let’s talk about what happened this morning. I know I was pushing you to get out the door and you wanted to jump on the trampoline and we were late and I got angry and I don’t want to do that. I’m sorry I got angry. But I also want you to, you know, when I tell you it’s time to go to be able to say, oh, okay, we’re running late. Well let’s go.

Alan: [41:58]

So you know, to have a conversation about it where we can process it in a better way than it went this morning. That I think that creates a sense of closure for him. It also brings up another point around… That’s behavior that I want to model for him because I think the modeling thing is really important just in general as a father to present a set of behaviors that I think he can witness that are healthy and then adopt. And that goes across a whole range of things, not just around if I get angry coming back to him, but just how I treat other people in general, how I am as a father and how I am as a husband, you know, doing an equal amount of work around the house an equal amount of parenting, you know, all that stuff. Like I want to model all that behavior for him because I think if that’s what he sees, then that’s what he’ll want to present himself out in the world. I’m curious what your thoughts were about the idea of modeling and how that can interacts with all this.

Dr. Chu:  [43:07]

Oh, I think that what you just described sounds perfect. I really agree with you entirely that, you know, it’s so important for boys and girls to see men doing, you know, a range of things so that this is what men can do; girls as well – because you want their expectations and conceptions of, well, what do men do? What men do as far as what the men do as husbands to really be influenced by positive role models. I think that’s incredibly important and wonderful that you’re doing that. Even if he doesn’t grow up to be exactly like you, he knows that this is a possibility and it offers an alternative to maybe some of the mainstream messages, which actually comes back to also, we talk about this concern about some of them more damaging or harmful aspects of masculinity that get portrayed in the media.

Dr. Chu:  [43:54]

And so when you ask kids any age, he said, you know, what does it mean to be a man? They do have this kind of, Oh, you gotta be tough. You’ve got to be powerful, whatever. But then if you ask them what does it mean to be a good man, they can tell you that also. And so it’s somebody that who’s loyal and loving and responsible and that those alternative… Or the fact that there are multiple masculinities. There are multiple ways to be good men or to be a man or to be a boy. And that’s exactly what you’re showing your son when you model these things and demonstrate this range for him is that there are options; that it’s not just one very narrow conception of masculinity, but that there are ways in that, you know, whatever feels right to him. And also like you said, you know, showing him how you treat people and this is how you’re in a positive, good relationship. This is what it means and what it looks like that he will definitely benefit from that. And that’ll be a source of strength and support for him as he moves forward.

Jen:   [44:49]

Alan, I have about 300 more questions for Dr. Chu, what’s on the top of your list of things to cover? What do you desperately want to know?

Alan:  [44:57]

I want to talk about the idea of how parents can deal with influences that come outside of the home. You know, if they notice that their son is having issues with other kids at school or you know, even other adults… But maybe we could just talk about that whole general issue about stuff that happened that you can’t control that’s outside of the way you would like it to be and how you can help your son deal with those kinds of things when they come up.

Dr. Chu:  [45:34]

I love these questions. I think that in terms of dealing with external influences, what you described in terms of modeling and processing together is a great example of what to do; it can be extended and applied to that situation as well, that you talk to them about it. Because we can’t control how other people behave around our children or how they treat our children unfortunately. And there’s always going to be things that are less than optimal that you hear a coach or a teacher say to your kid and you’re like, oh, I really hate that, or even even to say to someone else’s kid, that your kid happened to see. And so really invite them to talk about it with you. That it’s okay to talk about it. It’s okay to criticize it or question it and ask what’s going on.

Dr. Chu: [46:13]

Why do you think they said that? What do you think they meant? Do you agree with that? Here’s what I think; what do you think? Then that way, again, it’s not presented as this truth that they’re not allowed to challenge or question, but an instead it’s like this person is coming from here and maybe they had a hard day and that’s why they said this or something that was unpleasant. Or maybe it wasn’t about you. Even though it hurt, it was hurtful, and so kind of processing it together in much the way that you had described you do with your sons about things that happen between the two of you. You can extend to other people as well. You can help them to know again that we can’t control what other people do or how other people treat us, but we can decide how we respond to that and how we make meaning of that.

Dr. Chu: [46:53]

And so really joining them in that process of like, okay, this thing happened and unfortunately these days there are so many bad unfortunate things that are happening both on a personal level in terms of how people treat us or interact with us, but also on a wider level and so really giving your kids these tools or skills to make sense of that in a way that preserves their sense of integrity. Like this is what I value, this is what I believe, but also allows them to kind of consider what else might be going on; other people’s perspectives, why might they have done that? And even if I don’t agree with what they’ve done, I can maybe understand it or maybe you respect it depending on what the view is. And so I think in many ways what Alan described is kind of applicable to dealing with external influences as well.

Jen: [47:40]

Is there one other item on your burning question list, Alan?

Alan: [47:44]

Just as a kind of a follow up on that… In your experience in the research you did and then in your experience generally sometimes you know, it’s one thing to know that there is some kid at school that’s causing a problem for your son and you can actually actively coach him about it, but often time the parent may not know what’s going on exactly. Like in your research, did you find that the kids that were not at the top of the hierarchy, and might’ve been having a hard time, were their parents aware of what was happening? And kids are not always able to articulate what it is or they don’t want to talk about it or whatever and some parents might not… It might not be that easy to diagnose what the problem is, so I’m just curious about your thoughts about all that and how parents can best deal with it.

Dr. Chu:  [48:36]

My wish is that parents could be more like both of you where they’re just really kind of paying attention as best as they can because I think the kids do bring it up because at age four and five they haven’t yet mastered putting up a front and so you know, even like if you look at like when they tell secrets, they’re whispering so loud that everyone can hear them anyway. And so I think that when they’re struggling with something there’s evidence there and so to kind of again take a little bit of time in parents’ busy schedules. So like one of the boys in the kindergarten year, there was a new boy and he came in and because he came in late, he was at the middle or lower end of the hierarchy and he was really struggling with kind of Mike being on top and everything and kind of harassing him because he was new and not yet accepted.

Dr. Chu: [49:18]

And so this kid came in. He would always tell me, “Turn on your tape recorder. I have to tell you something really important.” And so he tells me and he goes, you know, I want to be a part of this team, but they’re excluding me or, and they’re not letting me do this and that. And I said, oh well, you know, have you talked to your parents about it? And the thing that made me so sad when he goes, yeah, I tried to tell my mom, but she said, “oh, I think you’re just kidding.” You know, sometimes they say things. And then as adults we don’t always hear them be either because we’re caught up in the middle of doing something or I always find with my son, if he tells me the most important things when I’m doing five other things at the same time.

Jen: [49:53]

He knows!

Dr. Chu:  [49:54]

Exactly. They always know that I’m going to drop the big bombshell on you. I know you can’t..[unintelligible] And then when I’m sitting there and I say “I’m 100 percent attentive now” and he’s like, “Yeah, I have nothing to say to you right now.” But yeah. So I think a lot of times boys, they can tell us what they need. If they know that we’re really interested and so I always say that, you know, what I found with my research isn’t that remarkable because anyone who’s interested and listening can hear these… Boys will tell them these things. You boys can tell us what they need, if they know that we’re interested in understanding and that we want to help. And so again, like you said, they are very astute and they know who they can trust and they’re starting to be a little more careful as well.

Dr. Chu: [50:42]

And so if they know that you’re on their side and that you’re listening, they will tell you and they absolutely have the capability to do so. Maybe they don’t have super sophisticated vocabulary, but their level of psychological understanding is actually really, really impressive. And they do know what’s going on. When one of the boys said, you know, “Oh, I’m actually friends with all the girls, but I don’t want Mike to find out. Because if he finds out he’ll fire me from his club and then I won’t have a club.” I think is pretty sophisticated that he knows exactly what’s going on and the fact that he can’t reveal certain things because there are these consequences that he really would rather not have happened to him. And so when something bad is happening… And I mean with bullying again, it’s also just unfortunately it’s such a common phenomena.

Dr. Chu:  [51:24]

I mean if not like the kind of physical bullying that happens is a very obvious problem and more visible in some ways, hopefully not more easy to deal with but just that people can recognize it. But there’s also more relational bullying and just kind of slights and taunts and teases. And so really kind of talking with our kids and preparing… Not preparing them for that, like this horrible things can happen to you. But just, you know, what can we do when sometimes someone says something that we didn’t like, you know, how can we kind of give them the tools so that they’re ready and teach them to defend themselves or stand up for themselves in healthy, productive ways. You know. And so, you know, first of all, you know, at that age, at four and five definitely report the problem to a responsible, trusted adult.

Dr. Chu: [52:02]

You want to validate what’s happening for them and how it makes them feel and this is a problem and that you’re there to help them work through it. But then the fact that even if it’s not this one particular person, maybe it’s just the whole thing like how they can kind of gather or bolster the sources from which they draw strength and that includes their relationships with you but also their own personal sources like what they know about themselves. And then when they feel they need to say something or do something, what can help them to feel supported in doing that? I think one of the things with my son who was shy at age five that I felt super proud of was some kid came up to him and said, you know, do this. And when my son said, “No, I don’t really want to.” He goes, “Well, you’re mean.” And my son said, “Don’t say that, because I’m nice.”

Dr. Chu:  [52:48]

And then the kid went away. And I thought that’s great. So you kind of… It’s not necessarily to provide them with specific scripts but then supply them with a sense of entitlement to speak up for themselves to defend themselves or one way to kind of role play with them is say, well, if you were standing next to a good friend of yours and someone said this to them, what would you say? What would you say either to the person to the bully or what would you tell your friend to do? And don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself in that same way, because sometimes we feel more entitled to help somebody else, but then we don’t feel like we can do that same thing for ourselves. And just to say, you know, that’s totally okay to do and if you need help ask for it. And if you can give help offer it. And then that again is also this way of feeling like there are things I can do. Even though there are a lot of things I can’t control.

Jen:   [53:34]

Yeah. I feel as though you’ve completely vindicated my decision not to take advertising on this show because there is nothing I need to advertise that parents need because they have what they need. They just need to listen to their kids and talk with their kids and have respect for their kids and that’s all…that’s really all a parent needs.

Dr. Chu: [53:50]

And it sounds really simple. I know, but it always comes back to that. It’s incredibly powerful. I always actually come back to Mr Rogers and his whole thing of “I like you just the way you are,” and how simple that is, but how powerful that can be as kids go out into the world, that feeling that they know they are accepted and the the confidence that comes from that, that allows them to then make decisions that feel right for them. I mean, I think so many of the problems that we see kids encountering are because they don’t feel that they have the right to say, I’ll treat you with respect, but you have to treat me with respect to and respect means I can be who I am as long as I’m not hurting anyone else, who I am is okay. In fact even good and how difficult that is to actually really foster in our kids and so if we can just get that right, I think that gives them a significant advantage as they’re entering the world and all the challenges that it presents.

Jen: [54:43]

Yep. I feel like we could talk about this for another hour, but unfortunately we’re out of time. I want to thank you Alan, particularly for just putting yourself out there and sharing your. A bit about your life with us, so thanks for taking the time.

Alan:  [54:56]

Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

Jen:  [54:58]

And Dr. Chu for helping us to think through these issues and helping us to really feel confident as parents that we have the tools that we need. We just got to be attuned to our children that we have everything that we need to be good parents. Thank you for taking the time to think through that with us.

Dr. Chu: [55:12]

Absolutely. It’s my pleasure.

Jen: [55:13]

So listeners who want to actually see Dr. Chu can rent Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s film, the mask you live in and you can remember it’s called The Mask You Live In. I saw her explain it. If you say it very fast, “TheMaskYouLiveIn” it sort of sounds like “The Masculine” so you can rent that on Netflix and on Amazon and you get to see Dr. Chu explain her research, which is pretty cool, and also her book When Boys Become Boys is available on Amazon and all the references for today’s show can be found at yourparentingmojo.com/boys

Transcript

Jen:  [00:30]

Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is called What Do Children Understand About Fairness? And I have two very special guests with me to discuss this topic. Dr Peter Blake earned has doctorate in education at Harvard University and is currently an Assistant Professor at Boston University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. His research focuses on three important foundations of human life, cooperation, fairness and ownership, and so he asks questions in his research like when should you share and when should you compete for resources? Is equal always fair or can you sometimes keep more for yourself? And how do you know when a toy is owned and what does that mean? Right now he’s working on extending projects, the different cultures, so we can better understand whether children in all cultures develop in similar ways at similar times and what cultural variables influence that development. Welcome Dr Blake.

Dr. Blake: [01:21]

Thank you.

Jen:   [01:22]

And Dr. Katie McAuliffe is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Boston College, which I just learned as different from Boston University. She two studies, the development and evolution of cooperation in humans with a special focus on how children acquire and enforced fairness norms. She’s made the rounds of Harvard, Yale, and Cambridge, and her educational career. I think the only one she’s missing is Oxford. Welcome Dr McAuliffe.

Dr. McAuliffe:  [01:44]

Hi; nice to be here. Thanks.

Jen:     [01:45]

Thank you so much for being here. So let’s start with a question that seems really simple, but I’m guessing there’s probably more to it than, than maybe I might imagine. Can you tell us what fairness is?

Dr. Blake: [01:56]

Yeah, that’s, that’s the big question and it is a very complicated answer. So fairness is a, is a very complex concept, particularly for adults and we know that equal is not always fair, but equality does provide a kind of starting point for us to understand how children figure out what is fair and what is not. So we tend to focus our research in a couple of ways. One way is that we focus on the allocation of resources which has also been called distributive justice, how you distribute resources between people. So we focus on that aspect of fairness as opposed to social status and things like that. And we also focus around this idea of equality and particularly what happens. How did children respond when they get less and get more than other kids.

Dr. McAuliffe: [02:51]

And I think studying how fairness develops in childhood is a nice way of showing how flexible the concept is. Because when we look at how children begin to think about fairness, you can see that what it means to be fair really varies depending on whether you’re a two year old or an eight year old.

Jen:    [03:08]

How does that change?

Dr. McAuliffe:  [03:09]

Well, we can kind of get into that with lots of different studies, but maybe a sort of broad way to characterize the change, and this is based on work that was really done in the seventies is that fairness tends to start out as being quite self focused. So I want to make sure that I’m getting a good deal, and it goes through a period of sort of really caring about equality as Peter said, as a sort of benchmark of justice and then it becomes much more nuanced or you can take different perspectives into account and understand that sometimes someone is more deserving or more needy and therefore inequality is acceptable under certain situations.

Jen:  [03:46]

Most of the parents listening to this show are parents of toddlers and, and some parents of preschoolers. And I know that you start to study children kind of around about age four or five years. Why don’t you study children younger than that? What is it that makes that difficult?

Dr. Blake:   [04:01]

It’s primarily that there’s very different methods that are used for, for infants and toddlers, largely because they don’t have the verbal skills yet to do some of the tasks. We have tried to test children as young as three in some of our experiments. That works fine, but younger than that, we’ve found that they don’t do well on our tasks, but other people do research…have done research on infants. And one key thing that they found going back to this idea of equality is that even at about 15 months of age, infants expect resources to be distributed equally between two people. And they expect adults to divide things like food and toys equally. They’re surprised when this doesn’t happen. And this has been shown in several different infant studies now. So that goes back to this idea of equality is a kind of foundation now where that comes from. This could have been learned through experience 15 months of age is still quite a long time of life, but they’re learning just by observing this, this isn’t based on their own behavior. So they’re not constructing this idea of equality from their own experience.

Jen:   [05:13]

So are you saying that if I always make sure that I get a bigger piece of chocolate cake than my husband does, that my daughter might not understand fairness to mean equal?

Dr. Blake:    [05:22]

I wouldn’t go that far. But by the time we get up to about three years of age you can ask it explicitly what they think is fair. And one of the things that we’ve found in some of our studies is that when we give children a set of stickers, for example, and we asked them, how should you divide this up with another child? They’ll say, yeah, I should give half. But then when we give them a chance to actually give to the other child, they’ll keep more for themselves. So they, they recognize that there’s this norm of an equal split in that context, but they don’t follow it; they tend to favor themselves. And this is, uh, this idea of a bias to favor oneself is something we see in other variations of studies, including the big ones that Katie and I have worked on together.

Dr. McAuliffe:   [06:10]

And I think Peter is pointing to a really important distinction in the types of studies that are done looking at fairness sort of this children’s expectations of what ought to be done versus what they actually do. And so most of our work really focuses on children’s behavior, so we put them into these games inspired by behavioral economics where they’re making decisions that affect both their own payouts as well as a partners payout. And I think this is part of the reason why we tend to start around for those contingencies and the payoffs and the structures of the games are just hard to understand for children younger than than that age.

Dr. Blake:     [06:45]

And when we say economics to kids, we use candy and stickers as our currency.

Jen:    [06:53]

Both things that are very attractive to kids. And so I’ve seen a bunch of, you know, I’ve read a lot of your papers and I’ve seen a bunch of diagrams of how you do these experiments. Can you just maybe talk us through one of these experiments and how you actually test this kind of thing?

Dr. McAuliffe:  [07:08]

Yeah. So the one that Peter and I started back when we were Grad students at Harvard is called the inequity game and this game that we developed that we’ve subsequently used across a lot of different papers and the way this works is we go out to different public areas and we recruit two children, typically children that do not know one another to play a face to face game. And in this game, one child makes all the decisions so they have control of this apparatus and they are making decisions that affect both how many Skittles they get as well as how many Skittles their partner gets. So they’re called the actor. They’re the one who’s making the decisions that we care about. Then the other participant is assigned the role of recipient. They’re sort of passive in this game. They just get whatever they get based on the actor’s decisions.

Dr. McAuliffe: [07:52]

Uh, and then from there the structure is really very simple. So an experimenter, we’ll put different amounts of candies on two trays, one for the actor, one for the recipient. And essentially the actor just decides, do I want to accept that allocation or do I want to reject it? And now if they accept it, they’ll get some candy and the recipient will get some candy. But if they reject it, and this is the interesting part, the candy gets put into a middle bowl and nobody gets to take those candies home. So it’s an all or nothing game. And we use this game to, to kind of understand what distributions children will accept and which ones they’ll reject. And sort of the simplest distinction is one where they’re either getting an equal pay off. So the actor is getting one candy and their partner is getting one candy.

Dr. McAuliffe:[08:35]

And as you might imagine, children tend to be very happy to accept those allocations, but then we can put them in a situation where they’re getting less than their partner. So let’s say they’re getting one candy and their partner is getting four. So this is an interesting dilemma because now you know, presumably the actor wants that one Skittle, but you know, they don’t really want the partner to get more than them. So they have to decide, am I okay accepting one thing and letting my partner have more than me or would I rather we both get nothing. And what we find is that even children at the bottom end of our age range, so four year olds will reject those allocations.

Jen:  [09:09]

Really?

Dr. McAuliffe: [09:10]

Yeah. That means effectively they’re paying the price of one Skittle to prevent their partner from getting more than them. So that’s what you might’ve seen in our papers as that’s labeled disadvantageous inequity aversion. So it’s an aversion to pay off where I’m getting less than someone else. And then we can also in using this exact same game, look at the reverse form of this allocation. So one where the actor gets for candies and their partner gets one. So now you know, they get this amazing payoff. Their partner is getting less and now they face this sort of different dilemma, which is now I really want these four candies, but maybe I know it’s unfair to my partner. So should I accept them and let them get less than me or should I reject it and make, make us both get nothing? And they’re, what you might expect having interacted with children, is that young children are totally fine with those outcomes.

Jen:   [10:00]

Did they ever take the four Skittles and then away from the game, give one to the other kid?

Dr. McAuliffe:[10:05]

So that kind of behavior actually doesn’t happen spontaneously, but part of that might be that these children don’t know one another, like those things that would happen more organically in the relationship that’s established, just don’t happen that much in this. And we also tried to discourage talking and things like that to the best of our ability. But the interesting thing about this form of reaction is that children by about eight or nine, at least in America or the U.S. populations that we studied and tend to reject those. So here is a case where they’re sacrificing for candies to prevent a partner from getting less than them, which is really costly adherence to a norm of equality.

Jen:  [10:46]

Yeah, for sure. So you alluded to a question that I had in my mind about, you know, you do these experiments and you find children that don’t know each other and get them to divide candies across them. But most of the time if I have to share something, it’s probably with somebody that I know, you know, it’s not like I get one shot to take candy from you and then I never have to see you again. So how do we mesh the economic models that talk about how I’m supposed to try and get as much as I can for myself or the fairness models that say an equal split is the best thing with the idea that, you know, I have to see you again tomorrow. Well I don’t have to see YOU again tomorrow but I have to see my daughter again tomorrow and if I give her the short end of the stick, then she, she might end up remembering that.

Dr. Blake: [11:28]

That’s a really good point. And in several kinds of games, including these more straightforward giving tasks where you have a set of resources and you can share with a strange kid or with somebody who’s a friend, kids will give more to the friend, of course. In our particular the inequity game type design…when we started out we wanted to try to rule out the possibility that kids were coming in to the game with a history and might have future interactions with this partner that allowed us to focus just on the cognitive mechanism here, which is how are you responding to the inequality? But in followup studies when we did our, we did a large cross cultural study testing in seven different societies including the U.S. And when we did this again in the U.S. We tested about 200 pairs of kids and half of them were friends and the other half were not. And we saw no differences there.

Jen:  [12:31]

Really?

Dr. Blake: [12:31]

Yes, it was surprising to us, too. We thought we would see differences, but that doesn’t mean that it, it can’t explain some of the variation that we saw in some of the other societies. So for example, in Mexico, we tested a group of indigenous peoples there called the Maya in the Yucatan peninsula and in those villages the villages are very small and all the kids know each other, so there was no way to get kids who didn’t know each other to play the game. And in this particular place we saw that the kids were much more likely to accept having a disadvantage. So it took them until about nine years of age, much later than we see in the U.S. And at much lower levels. So kids in Mexico or rejecting his bad deal offer a much less often than in the U.S.. And that could be explained by the relationship between the kids in that particular community as compared to some of the other places we were at.

Jen: [13:38]

Are you referring to the study that you that you published in Nature? Is that the big ones? Yeah, because you looked at a bunch of different cultures, didn’t you? Were there other findings that were really interesting coming from some of the other cultures that you looked at?

Dr. Blake: [13:49]

Yeah, Katie.

Dr. McAuliffe:  [13:49]

Yeah. So we tested children in seven different countries, so we tested children in the USA and Canada and then those two western cultures and then this group in Mexico that Peter mentioned and then India, Peru, Uganda and Senegal. And I can kind of summarize the two main findings are the main finding that we saw disadvantageous inequity version, so this, this thing that I described earlier where children are willing to pay the price of one skittle to prevent their partner from getting four. We saw that everywhere and there’s, Peter already mentioned that we didn’t see it at exactly the same time and it exactly the same rate everywhere, but the main finding there is that there was fairly low cross cultural variation and that it seemed to be everywhere. So that sort of a candidate for something that we might consider to be a universal human behavior.

Dr. McAuliffe: [14:46]

And our claim is that this is probably a very foundational response. This response to getting less than someone else. We see it in young kids and we see it in all the places that we’ve tested so far. But that other form of response to unfairness is advantageous and equity version where you have to give up a lot to prevent someone from getting less than you that we only saw in three places. So the USA, which we expected based on our previous findings, Canada, uh, which is not so dissimilar from the USA in many respects. And I say that as a Canadian

Jen:  [15:18]

In some respects. Yes. And others… As an English person…

Dr. McAuliffe:[15:24]

And then the sort of surprising finding to us was that we also saw advantageous inequity version in Uganda. And so there are many explanations for that, but the two kind of primary ones are… Well, the one thing is it could be that sort of norms of equality are really emphasized there as they are in the States. And so that’s why children in as they entered late childhood are starting to incur this cost to enforce fairness. So it’s possible that there’s sort of just a convergence of this behavior that we’re seeing across these societies. But another possibility, which is I think we have to consider quite seriously is that this place where we are testing in Uganda is influenced by Western teachers. So they come and they, it’s a school where Westerners will come and help with curriculum development and at the time that we were running, this was apparently a time that had been preceded by a lot of conflict between schools.

Dr. McAuliffe: [16:20]

So they’re very competitive and debating and spelling bees and uh, so apparently in response to some of this extreme competition, teachers had been really emphasizing norms of fairness and emphasizing kindness and generosity. And in fact I just went back last summer to the same school to do testing for another study. And I noticed all of these posters around that are exactly the types of posters that you’d see in a primary school here, which say like, fairness, you know, treat everyone equally, kindness, think of others before yourself. So it’s possible that what we were seeing was really sort of the Western norm that had been introduced in some respects by these Western teachers.

Jen: [17:00]

Hm. Fascinating. So it, it seems as though this is very much linked to the idea of a sharing and how you go about socializing that process and I come from a parenting philosophy that says that sharing will come with time as the child understands it in their own mind and that telling the child to share something doesn’t necessarily help a very young child, younger than in your study, because they don’t have the cognitive ability to understand that properly yet. Is that, does that have basis in, in science?

Dr. McAuliffe: [17:37]

I mean, I think what Peter mentioned earlier sort of aligns with that, but even if they do understand it, they might just ignore it. So they might say like, I know that you’re telling me to be fair. I know that I should be fair, but I’m not going to be fair. So. But I think it is really interesting to both of us right now is understanding the processes that lead to an alignment between knowing what I should be doing and actually doing what I should do.

Jen: [17:58]

Yeah. So, so how does that process happen? How, how did the kids resolve those conflicts were where they know they’re supposed to be fair, but they just don’t want to yet. And, and how does that progress into, I know I’m supposed to be fair and I’m going to be fair.

Dr. Blake: [18:12]

So I have a line of research that where we started to investigate this question and we were particularly interested in how parents might influence children’s sharing and generosity behavior. So we went to, we tested in the U.S. again and then we went to the same rural villages in India that we have tested for this other project. We’ve gone back there several times now and we ask the parents to demonstrate a generous donation. So we asked the parents secretly so that the kids didn’t know this and the parents were asked either to give nine out of 10 items to another person or just give one out of 10. So we had a generous and a stingy condition and we had kids also do a control condition where we just saw what they did on their own without seeing the parent do anything. And the question was whether kids would spontaneously imitate the parents and what we found was a real striking difference between the two cultures. So in the U.S., kids would give a bit more after they saw the parents be generous. So the parents giving 90 percent away, kids would not get anywhere near that. They would, they would give up to about 50 percent. And then they would…it’s as if they were saying, yeah, I think that’s enough. It seemed like they were using the norm of equality as in a strategic way. And then in India what we found is that the kids were far more likely to be, generous, almost as generous as the parents and a big chunk of the kids gave 90 percent away as well after seeing the parent. So this is, this was a first study and we’re trying to go back to do some more tests, but our working hypothesis right now is that this, this could have to do with the different values that are emphasized in these two places. So in the U.S., parents are encouraging their kids to be independent and think for themselves. And one consequence of that might be that the kids are actually doing that when it comes to this behavior.

Jen:  [20:25]

Darn it!

Dr. Blake: [20:29]

So do you want your child to follow your lead and being generous? It might, it could backfire, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. They’re learning something else, right? They’re learning how to be independent. And then in India we believe that based on some anthropology biological work there that the values of elders are, are emphasized to a larger degree. So we need to test this. But that’s our working hypothesis right now.

Dr. McAuliffe: [20:58]

I have data that are related to that because we also did a sharing game this time in the U.S. where we gave children explicit norms about what they should be doing. So we said, and we gave them either a selfish, normal or agenda is not very similar to what Peter described. And we also saw this effect that the, the older children, when they were told to give eight out of 10, were sort of bound by quality. You couldn’t, you couldn’t push them past the quality. But then we also found that they were not as susceptible to the selfish norm as the younger children. So if we said give two the eight year olds wouldn’t really give two, it’s like they kind of knew that that was wrong. Whereas the four and five they were like, oh, sweet, I can give two? Amazing. And they sort of, it sort of seemed like they were using that as a licensing and licensing effect where they were like, well, I know I shouldn’t give two, but if you tell me it’s okay to give two. I’m going to give to him.

Jen: [21:51]

Shifting gears a little bit. We talked a little bit about the development of racism on the podcast and how that, uh, that whole thing happens. And I had always assumed that if you just don’t talk about race to your child that your child won’t be racist. And then I did the research and found out that it was totally wrong. So if any listeners missed that episode, you might want to go out and check that out because there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there. Um, but I know that Katie, you did some research on how children perceive fairness related to in-groups and out-groups. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Dr. McAuliffe: [22:23]

Yeah, I’d love to talk about that because that’s really a very active one of my lab at the moment. If I can just ask a quick question, did you interview anyone for that?

Jen: [22:31]

I did not, no. If you have suggestions…

Dr. McAuliffe:  [22:34]

One person who’s a good friend of both of ours is Yarrow Dunham at Yale; he’s done a lot of work on the development of both implicit and explicit attitudes about race and about other types of social category. So He’d be a good one. And actually the work that I’ve done… Most of the work that I’ve done on the intergroup work is with Yarrow. Yeah. So one thing to say about the general approach to studying this question that it will at least how I’ve done it with children, is not to look at real social categories like gender or race or age, but rather to assign children to minimal groups. So this means that they come into the lab and we tell them either you’re on the blue team or you’re on the yellow team, and this really induces in-group bias in children like suddenly, you know, even if they know they’re randomly assigned to a group, suddenly they really care about the fact that they’re on this blue team which is nice because you can then study the effects of in group favoritism without the baggage that comes with known social categories. So it’s a really nice method for doing that. And um, I’ve used that method across a couple of different games. The one that you might have read is the, the third party punishment game. So this is one where the child comes in and is learning about someone who has been unfair to someone else and then they are given an opportunity to punish them for their unfair behavior or to kind of stand by and let it happen. And what we found in this study, and this was spearheaded by Gillian Jordan, who is a thesis student at Harvard at the time. What she did, she found was that children tend to be especially forgiving of in-group members who have been unfair, which means they’ve been there, especially punitive, have out-group members who have been unfair. So if you’re an out group member and you’ve been selfish, so you’ve kept all suites for yourself, you haven’t shared any, I’m very likely to punish you for that. But if you’re in my group and you’ve done exactly the same thing, I’m a little less likely to punish you for that. Which suggests that children’s sort of tendency to intervene in this kind of context is pulled by this competing motive of in-group favoritism.

Dr. McAuliffe:  [24:39]

So I’ve then done two studies, one in collaboration with Peter, looking at children in two different contexts. So one in the ultimatum game, which is where someone has been directly unfair to the target. So here a child learns that someone has offered them a really unfair split of resources and they learned that this person was either in their in-group or in their out-group. And the question is will they be really annoyed if the out-group member offered them unfairness? But maybe more forgiving if an in-group member was unfair or potentially the opposite. And what we found there, and this is a paper actually that will be coming out soon in a journal called Journal of Experimental Psychology General there we found that sort of fairness trumps group bias. So when you’re in a situation where you’re directly involved in the unfair interaction and you’ve just been treated unfairly, you know, that’s what really motivates you to respond, and that sort of overrides any existing group bias that you, you might feel. And then we found a similar thing in the inequity game. So what I’m starting to see in the work that I’ve done on this is that there’s a big difference between stepping back and watching unfairness happen between others versus being directly involved in the unfairness interaction yourself. And it seems like when you’re in that position where you’re watching and you’re, you’re removed from the situation, that’s where in-group bias matters. But when you’re right in the thick of it, in group bias doesn’t matter as much.

Jen:[26:02]

Yeah. That I’m actually thinking of a viral video that’s going around at the moment of a woman, I don’t remember where she was, but she’s in a store and there are two Hispanic ladies and it looks like one of them cut in front of her in line and she just, lets go with this tirade and all the people in the line behind her just don’t say anything and I’m wondering if there’s something there, because because the two women at the front are both Hispanic and they’re a different race than all the other people in the group, you know? Is it because of the thing that you mentioned where you know it’s. Well they’re not, they’re not my group and I’m not gonna say anything. Is that the same idea?

Dr. McAuliffe: [26:43]

Yeah. So most theories, sort of higher level theories about why we see this interface between group bias and cooperation are exactly that, that these norms should apply to your group and should not necessarily transfer across group boundaries. So norms ought to be enforced particularly strongly within the group. And that theory really makes sense for the reasons that I think are sort of intuitive. What’s interesting is that when you look at the data from adults and children, we actually don’t see that so much like it. Our third party punishment study is one nice example where you actually see more punishment of out-group members than in-group. So in kind of going back to your analogy there, you would have expected someone that was in the out-group in a line to intervene and punish these other two women. So I think like the intuition is that it should be in one direction, but at the moment that the data aren’t really lining up with them.

Jen: [27:37]

Yeah. So I’m wondering what can parents do, if anything to…maybe not override is the right word, but you know, so sort of blur those boundaries between in-groups and out-groups a little bit. Is, is that, is that a valid thing to even try and do?

Dr. Blake:  [27:53]

Well, Katie has an advantage here because she has a child.

Jen: [27:57]

Do you do experiments on your own child?

Dr. McAuliffe:  [28:04]

I think, well, first of all I should say that there are lots of people who could answer this question and a much more educated way than I could or that either of us could. I think that there’s some data to suggest that with real social categories, exposure helps, but I’m not sure the extent to which that the data are really persuasive. I mean just directly inferring from what I’ve just told you about in terms of how group bias can be eroded in terms of fairness interactions. One conclusion could be that if you encourage children to really take the perspectives of others and put themselves in the shoes of those who are being treated unfairly, then maybe sort of fairness would trump in-group bias in even in this situation where they’re divorced from what’s actually happening. But that’s as far as I’m willing to go with that.

Dr. Blake:  [28:50]

I’ll put out another strategy, which I don’t know if I’m looking at Katie to see if she can back this up, but I’ve heard you talk about this. Another strategy could be to a point out the groups that you’re both a member of. So to go back to those people in the line and say, hey, we’re all Red Sox fans were all women always. There’s always some other group you can appeal to, you know, so there’s multiple ways to mark the group. But I don’t know how kids, how that works with kids.

Dr. McAuliffe: [29:22]

Yeah, me neither.

Jen: [29:23]

Yeah. Okay. Well thanks for going out on a limb on that. Um, so one thing that I did want to probe on a little bit is that so many of your studies or experimental in nature, which in some ways is awesome because you really get to understand a bit more about cause and effect that you do in other types of studies. But I, I’m sure you’re familiar with the late professor Uri Bronfenbrenner’s criticism about developmental psychology and I’m going to quote as being “the science of strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time.” And I’m wondering if you can help us to understand how we can know that these kinds of experiments that you’re doing have what Dr Bronfenbrenner would call ecological validity. You know, do they, do they test what we think they’re testing?

Dr. Blake:  [30:13]

So Bronfenbrenner was very influential for critique of experimental studies, but he knew he wasn’t rejecting the experimental approach. Just to bring it up to a broader context is his bigger picture was that development occurs within a social context and there are multiple levels of those contexts and I think the cross cultural work that we’re doing and that other people have been working on is trying to get at those different levels to see like, well, where is the variation in children’s behavior? Uh, and it in answering one of his other criticisms we’re trying to get beyond testing kids who are just US citizens and then generalizing from there. So I think his main critique was that we’re overgeneralizing a lot from experiments. But to get to the point about ecological validity, one response to that is that our experiments have face validity. Face validity means that if you want to study the behavior, you actually create the context where the behavior occurs.

Dr. Blake: [31:22]

So we give children candy and put them in a situation where they can share. So anything I give to you is costly to me, that is at face value, altruism, that’s by definition. So it is a costly and meaningful action and once we have those experimental paradigms set up, then we can very aspects of the context to figure out precisely… We can try to describe the cognitive processes that are at work there. So that’s one kind of answer, but when, when ecological validity comes up, I also like to point out that this exists on a wide spectrum and it goes all the way from an MRI machine which has zero ecological validity to anthropological observations. And we don’t want to reject any evidence out of hand, even know laying in an MRI machine is about as far away from the real world interactions as you can get.

Jen:[32:20]

And just so we’re clear, what you’re talking about is putting someone in a machine that scans their brain while you ask them to do a certain task. Right?

Dr. Blake: [32:26]

Exactly. And yet we’ve learned a tremendous amount about [unintelligible]. I don’t think you’ll find anyone who says we shouldn’t take neuroscience seriously. So often say, well, this isn’t ecologically valid. You could respond to that by saying, well, do you reject neuroscience?

Jen:  [32:46]

Is that your standard come-back?

Dr. Blake:   [32:48]

It depends who I’m talking to.

Jen:  [32:52]

Okay. Yeah, point taken.

Dr. McAuliffe:  [32:55]

I think that there’s, there’s something else here that we would love to do. I mean, any experimentalists would love to have a sense of how these behaviors translate into real world interactions and in particular, I mean, one thing that would be fascinating is to follow the children that, you know, do our experiment at age four all the way through adolescence and adulthood and if we have any early predictors of social behavior later on and at the moment as this quotation said, these children, we see them for 10 minutes and then never again. That’s certainly true of the park. Now, lab studies are in a slightly better position in this regard because the same families do come to the lab regularly, so there is some hope there. But yeah, I mean I think doing any sort of longitudinal work for these sorts of questions would be really good.

Dr. Blake:  [33:44]

The problem is it’s very expensive. And ideally we would see that happen in multiple cultures. That’s kind of our orientation these days. Can we take this abroad.

Jen:   [33:57]

Yep. Well, there’s your next project.

Dr. Blake:  [33:59]

Just a couple of million dollars.

Jen:  [34:03]

Excellent. I’ll get right on that. So we usually wrap up our episodes by just thinking about what, if anything, parents can and even should do to help their children in the area that we’re talking about. And we’ve sort of, we’ve touched on this several times as we’ve moved through and I’m wondering if, if this is, I mean obviously parents are already influencing the ways their children think about fairness. Should they be doing it differently than maybe the common intuition is for how to teach fairness or should we be trying to instill more of a collectivist model in our children to encourage cooperation with others? What’s your general sense of, of what parents can and should do to instill a sense of fairness and their children.

Dr. McAuliffe: [34:51]

I mean, yeah. This is a really interesting question and I think I agree broadly with something you said earlier, which is they probably don’t have to do a whole lot and still going to come online. In some regards, but I think it’s true certainly with things like advantageous inequity aversion, which we’ve talked about a bit that shows quite a bit of flexibility across cultures and even within cultures across different contexts. I think, you know, like helping children overcome those sorts of costs and understand that they need to be fair to someone else. I think their parents can influence them. And one thing Peter made a note and I’m going to steal this point because I think it’s a good one and I actually have some new data to suggest that this is true perspective taking really encouraging children to perspective take and thinking about what it’s like to be at the receiving end of an unfair deal.

Dr. McAuliffe:  [35:41]

So maybe you’ve got four candies but this means your partner has one candy, you know, how is that going to make them feel that that might be able to help in some respects. Another thing I think I have some data… We have a project on this is I’m really like reputational cues are important to children and so making them aware that they’re being watched now this is not something you want to do and sort of awkward way, but I think we have data from lots of studies, not our own, but other work as well, showing that children tend to sort of cheat less and be more generous and more generous, but at least more fair when they’re behaviors are going to be visible to others. So I think emphasizing the reputational benefits of being a fair person might also help.

Jen:  [36:24]

So not necessarily, Mama’s watching you and you better be fair, but you know, the other kids around you are noticing what you’re doing and they might not want to play with you tomorrow if you take all the toys. And in terms of perspective taking, I’m just curious as to what age you can start to encourage that, do you think?

Dr. Blake: [36:43]

In our particular tasks effective this, we think; we haven’t tested it explicitly but around six years of age. So remember, in the US, we typically find that kids will reject getting more and getting less. By around eight. When we did this new variation of the past where kids had to look at things from the other person’s side. We found that younger kids about age six would also start to reject both forms of inequality. That gave us a kind of hint like, oh, maybe it’s this, you know, actually forcing them to take the perspective of the other person is helping them see what it’s like from their side. So that’s, that’s one possibility. We know that kids can do perspective taking much younger than that. So it’s a question of why it only starts to link up and matter with fairness at a later age. And I’m sure other people will find it younger.

Jen:  [37:42]

I’m thinking about theory of mind research that tends to come up around age four, I think, doesn’t it? Where you can start to understand that other people have a point of view different from you.

Dr. Blake: [37:52]

And even that you can find evidence that children understand other people’s perspectives and beliefs at a younger age depending on the experimental design, so I think we have a long way to go to find out more. But, uh, I wouldn’t say that four is not too young.

Jen:  [38:13]

Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Blake: [38:16]

I could, I could add one more thing in terms of… Based on some other work that not by Katie and myself but by some other people showing them when, when children are putting more of a condition where they are in control of the resources and get to decide how to allocate them, they can be more generous in some cases. We believe that this is activating more of a…this is more about an altruistic motivation as opposed to fairness. But it is a, there’s an interesting pattern of findings across several studies that showed us, uh, so one that’s been done by a woman who’s a postdoc working with me right now. Her name is Nadia Cherniak. She found that when she strongly encouraged kids to give one sticker away to I’m a doll that was sad, then subsequently gave them a chance to give to someone else, they were more generous in the second step of giving more to the other partner in that case then they kept for themselves. So this seems to contradict what we’ve found in our fairness studies. But as I said, my own view is that this is, this is actually a distinct psychological process is more about altruism that about fairness and Nadia probably disagrees, but…

Jen: [39:35]

Graduate students! So I know we’re almost at time here, but because you mentioned it, I wonder if you could just distinguish between altruism and fairness and, and know why, why there are different mechanisms going on there.

Dr. Blake:  [39:49]

Yeah. So this has been an ongoing discussion and people do disagree with us on this, but in this new paper that’s a theory paper that’s coming out, we tried to describe this in more detail, but in the main point is that in our inequity game, if children are rejecting candy where they’re giving up a piece for themselves, uh, in order to prevent the peer from getting more than them, they’re going against their self interest, but they’re also not being nice. They’re denying candy to the other kid. So this seems to capture something that’s very distinct. It’s very much not an altruistic act to reject those offers, but it is fair. So using this particular design and testing it in various ways, we’ve made this argument that there seemed to be different psychological processes that are at work and we can push them around at different ages and in different ways, uh, which provides more evidence that is a different psychology that you’re slipping into.

Dr. McAuliffe:  [40:56]

And just one other piece of evidence that I think lines up with the fact that altruism and fairness are probably dissociable is that we see evidence for… This is going to take us off on a little tangent, but we do see some evidence for altruism and animals were sort of incur a cost to confer a benefit to another individual, but we see very weak evidence for fairness compared to what we see in children.

Jen:   [41:23]

Yeah. You’ve done a lot of animal work as well, haven’t you?

Dr. McAuliffe: [41:26]

Right. Yeah. So I think that’s nice evidence as well.

Jen:[41:29]

So I’m just curious what, what do the people who disagree with you think they think is the same mechanism at work?

Dr. Blake:  [41:36]

Yes, there is a debate about whether there’s two separate mechanisms or whether there’s one overarching mechanism. One position, that’s come out recently is that these really are capturing the same thing and it’s really about minimizing inequality between groups. So when I give some, some of my pile of resources to you, I’m making it less equal and in a similar way when I reject the offers in our inequity game, I’m making things closer to equality. So that’s possible. I think experimentally we can show that they’re distinct, but we’re at the point of these positions are just being formulated now.

Jen: [42:21]

Cutting edge! Awesome. Well thank you so much for giving us a preview of that and thanks for taking the time to join us today.

Dr. McAuliffe:  [42:26]

No problem. It was fun.

Dr. Blake:   [42:26]

Thank you.

Jen:  [42:27]

So as a reminder to listeners, all the references for today’s episode can be found on YourParentingMojo.com/Fairness And I also wanted to let you know that a hot off the press, Peter and Katie have a new article coming out. Can we, can we get a link to that article?

Dr. McAulilffe: [42:42]

I can send it when it comes out.

Jen: [42:45]

Okay, awesome. Thank you. It’s going to be called The Developmental Foundations of Fairness and it’s going to be published in Nature and Human Behavior, which is quite an accomplishment, so congratulations on that and thanks again for joining us.

Dr. Blake:    [42:57]

Thank you.

Transcript

Jen:    [00:21]

Welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I’d like to welcome my guest today, Julie King, who is one half of the writing duo behind the new book, How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen, and if that title sounds familiar, it’s because it’s part of what seems to have become a family of books around the classic How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. Julie has been educating and supporting parents and professionals since 1995 and in addition to her work with individual parents and couples, she also leads How to Talk workshops and gives parent education presentations to schools, nonprofits, and parent groups. Julie received her AB from Princeton University and a JD from Yale Law School. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and is the mother of three. Welcome Julie.

Julie:  [01:13]

Thank you.

Jen:  [01:14]

It actually does feel a little odd to welcome you when we’re in your own home. Julie was kind enough to invite me to her home today to have this conversation. So thanks so much for taking the time.

Julie: [01:23]

Oh my pleasure.

Jen:   [01:24]

So I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about the genesis of this book because it kind of runs in the family a bit, right?

Julie: [01:30]

Okay. So to tell you the whole story, I have to go back in time to when I was six months old.

Jen:    [01:37]

This is going to be a long story!

Julie: [01:38]

I’m not going to go through all the details, I promise, but when my parents moved into the house that they still live in when I was born, right before I was born and my mother didn’t know very many people in the neighborhood. I was six months old. She was looking out the kitchen window and she saw another mom with two little kids the same age as me and my brother and she invited that woman in. That was Adele favor and the two of them became very good friends. Joanna. Joanna was the baby and her brother Carl was the older boy and she and I went to nursery school together. Adele took these, what they call Child Guidance Workshops with Haim Ginott and used to call my mother daily and discuss what she was learning and they would talk about what they were going to try on Joanna and her older brother and her younger brother and me and my older brother and younger sister.

Jen:    [02:27]

So you were a Guinea pig for the original book?

Julie:  [02:30]

That’s right. I was a Guinea pig. Um, so she and I became very good friends. We went to school from nursery school all the way through high school together. And um, I was aware that her mother was writing these books as a teenager. I remember going to her house and seeing her mother and Elaime Mazlish writing on yellow legal pads on the kitchen table by hand, and in the eighties when the one of the books came out or was coming out. I got to copy edit the book and I think I found a coma out of place and I felt very proud of my contribution, but I never actually expected to be doing anything with the work until I had my own child and he was in preschool at the San Francisco JCC and they were looking for a more than one time event for parents. They used to bring people in to speak, but they wanted to do something that would be ongoing and I at the time was studying group facilitation and group development and of course I knew this material very well, having grown up with it. So I volunteered to lead a group which was originally scheduled as an eight week group and halfway through everybody said, well, we need another eight weeks to really learn this. At which point I panicked because I wasn’t quite sure what I would do. Well we turned it into an ongoing support group and that first group met for four and a half years. The other people heard about it and asked me to bring the workshop to private groups into nonprofits and that’s how I got into leading the groups originally and my friend Joanna, who is still a good friend of mine who still lives in New York, and I moved out to California…This will happen in New York originally. She started leading workshops in New York, so we would talk to each other about what we were doing and what we were discovering and quite a few years ago when I was still mostly working with parents of preschool-aged kids. People said to me, we love this book, but we need more examples, and so I said, I know what to do. I called Adele and I said, I have your next book for you. She’s written one for teens and she’s written ones for kids at school. I said, now you have to write one for little kids, and she said, more or less. I quote, Julie, I’m too tired. You have to write it. So I called Joanna and I said, Joanna, we have to write this book. So we’ve been collecting material for many years and working very hard for the past two years to really polish it up and create this book.

Jen:    [04:49]

Yeah. Awesome. I did a little comparison between the new book, which as we’re recording has not been released yet, but once, once you hear this interview, you will be able to get the book on Amazon and other bookstores. So I have an advanced copy and I did a little comparison between that and the classic How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and it seemed to me as though the overall concepts are quite similar. The certainly a big focus on handling emotions and engaging cooperation and praise. There’s a little less than the new book on encouraging autonomy, which surprised me a little bit, and you have a spanking new chapter on working with differently wired kids, which we’re going to talk more about in a little bit. I’m guessing that a fair number of my listeners have already read or maybe even own the original book. And maybe that was, you know, they bought it for their first child and maybe they have a toddler in tow now. And I’m wondering if you can help us understand what they would get out of this book that they wouldn’t necessarily get if they have already bought or read the original.

Julie:    [05:48]

Well, let me, let me address that autonomy question. And then the second question as well. Joanna and I talked quite a lot about whether to include a separate chapter on autonomy and we ultimately decided not to in part because we feel like every chapter is about how to encourage autonomy. You know, when we, when we respect a kid’s feelings, when we offer them choices, when we give them information and they get to decide what to do with that information, all of those give the child an opportunity to say to himself or herself, well, I’m going to put the toys away or I’m going to turn off the bathroom light. And we also see that kids have a natural drive to be autonomous and independent. And so a lot of the tools that we’re offering in our book are a way for parents to sort of use that natural drive. So that’s why we didn’t include a separate chapter also because our editor said it had to be under 400 pages and we just had to stop because I think we really could have included another chapter and maybe someday we will, but…

Jen: [06:48]

Or another book!

Julie:    [06:49]

Another book, right – no, not another chapter for this book; this book is done. So that’s the answer to the autonomy question. And your other question was, what’s different about this book?

Jen:   [07:00]

Yeah, yeah.

Julie:     [07:01]

There are a number of differences. I think the biggest reason for people to get this book is because every example is about little kids. If you get the original book, there are little kid examples are 10 examples. We, we just are offering you lots and lots of ways to use these tools from stories that were given to us by actual real life people, parents and teachers. And in my experience, the tools make sense to people. But when you’re in the heat of the moment, it’s hard to think of what to do. Yeah. And if you have somebody else’s example and when you have, when you can picture it in your mind, when you can sort of rehearse it a little bit ahead of time, that’s when you can pull up the tool more easily and use it in the moment. So I think that’s the biggest advantage of, of. I mean, I, I love the original book, obviously… People should read both probably, but if you have little kids that make sense to read a book, just about little kids.

Jen: [07:56]

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I often find when I read books that the principles are aligned with what I’m thinking, but you know, the, the examples and the language they talk through, I’m thinking what would really happen if I said that to my two and a half year old when she really get that? Would you understand it? And so what you’re saying is that because the examples in your book are geared towards younger children, they’re more easy for parents to apply, is that right?

Julie:      [08:21]

Yeah.

Jen:     [08:21]

Okay.

Julie:    [08:22]

And then there’s are several other differences. One of the, the differences that I think will be very helpful to parents is around the idea of taking action. So in the original book there’s a, there’s a skill called take action without insult and doing the workshops. What I found is a lot of parents get confused. Well, what actions should I take? How do I know what to do? I mean, I’ve tried acknowledging his feelings. You know, you’re in the mood to draw. I’ve given them information. Walls aren’t for drawing on; I’ve given him choices. You can, you can draw on this box, you can draw on this paper. But he still took the, took the Sharpies. One of my parents groups, you know, I don’t know why…and started drawing on the walls so, you know, so I felt like I had to say, no, I’ve told you, I’ve told you you can’t do that, you bad boy. I’m taking this away from you. You may not. Now you’re not going to get a chance to see. I’ve already told you that sort of language. And they’re like, well that’s taking action. Isn’t it? Well, the, and you’re nodding your head. Yes it is, and it’s, it’s also we want to offer an alternative, um, in which we protect ourselves or we protect property without attacking the child. So the action is going to look the same. I’m still going to take those Sharpies away, but, but what I’m going to say is I don’t like my walls drawn on. For now, the sharpies are going away and the child knows that I was drawing on the wall. Now I can’t, but you’re not doing it to me, the child. You’re not doing this to make me suffer. You’re doing to protect yourself and protect the walls. Right. So I think that’s, that’s. I think we explain that in the book in a way that’s a little easier for parents to figure out, okay, what do I do in this next situation?

Jen:  [10:04]

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I’m wondering if I can selfishly talk a little bit about situation that I’m having around acknowledging feelings. Yes, because I think that that’s, it’s a really central theme in the book and Joanna actually wrote that chapter and she described a scenario where she videotaped to show for a five year old and a three year old wants to know why she didn’t a tape a show for him when he had asked her to tape it and she says to her, a missed TV show doesn’t really seem as though it’s qualifies as being worthy of a meltdown. But to her son it really was because it was important to him, or, it had become important to you and so it seems as though the best way to help him get over it was to help him get through it is the advice that’s given in the book.

Julie:    [10:47]

And so, you know, when my daughter’s having that kind of meltdown, let’s just clarify, to get, to help him means to say, Oh, you LOVE that show! You would have liked me to tape that one for you too.

Jen:  [10:57]

Yeah, yeah.

Jen:  [10:58]

Or a different show that wasn’t taped.

Julie:    [11:00]

Yeah. Yeah.

Jen:  [11:01]

Um, and so, you know, if, if my daughter is asking for ice cream at bedtime and I say you really, really want ice cream, she seems as though she gets kind of hopeful and it feels to me as though I’m sort of getting your hopes up and then, you know, sorry, you still can’t have ice cream and I’m, I doing something wrong when I’m doing that or…?

Julie:   [11:18]

No…

Jen:    [11:18]

Or partly no.

Julie: [11:24]

I think the point is what you do after that? So when you, when you acknowledge the feelings that that child has for something that you can’t grant, like I can’t make that TV show rebroadcast. Right? So that’s in a way easier.

Jen:   [11:38]

Yeah, it is. I wish I could have, I wish I had known I would have done it. You really wanted me to record it? Oh that’s so disappointing. Yeah, it’s a natural limit. It’s not one that I have set.

Julie:    [11:47]

Right.

Jen:  [11:48]

Whereas having no ice cream when it’s literally bedtime…

Julie:    [11:51]

But she knows that there’s ice cream in the and you could get it if you wanted to. So that’s a different situation. And so we can’t just stop at, Oh, you really want to ice cream because I think, yes, I do. So could I have it? So that’s one. So that’s when you have to follow up with some of these other tools that we have in the book to have ice cream before bedtime. It’s not good for your body. It’s my job to help keep your body healthy. What’s, let’s make a, let’s make a plan for when you can have ice cream. How about tomorrow afternoon and when you get home from daycare or you know as a snack or whatever it is that would be acceptable to you so that she knows that you get it, that there’s, that she’s, she’s going to get it at some point, maybe you write it down on a piece of paper so she knows that there’s a plan and a commitment to her. And it’s not that any of these upper, you know, if you use any of these tools, she’ll say, oh thanks mom. It’s okay. She might, she may or may not still cry about it. It’s important that she knows that when you feel strongly about something you don’t cave just because she is distressed about it. Yeah. I think sometimes we get upset with our kids when they get upset with a limit and that’s just natural. I’m not getting what I want. I feel frustrated and we can empathize with that, with the frustration, without caving to what they did is they want. So in the ice cream case, you know, someday she will get ice cream and maybe it would help to know when that’s going to be. It is a lot easier to acknowledge feelings when you don’t have to also say sorry.

Jen: [13:19]

Yeah, this is my limit that I’m putting on you. Yeah. So the second chapter of the book is on tools for engaging corporation, which seems to me to sort of be another way of saying how do we get our children to do what we want them to do. Um, and so this conversation I’m having with you follows hot on the heels of an episode that I recently recorded that was named exactly that, that was based on Alfie Kohn’s work, and the premise that the relationship with our children is really core to engaging cooperation and so I’m on board with that and with setting up the conditions that make my daughter want to cooperate with me. And after reading the book I use some of the tools that you described to get my daughter to stop playing and brush her teeth, you know, and she said she didn’t want to do it, she wanted to keep playing. And I said, well, do you want to walk or hop to the bathroom? And she said, I want to hop to the bathroom. I said, great, let’s go. But it just, it strains my brain every time she says no to something to have to think, oh, is it walk or hop now or is it, you know, what other creative thing can I come up with to make her want to do this thing with me that I want her to do? Because brushing your teeth is important, you know, it’s not something that I’m arbitrarily saying we must do this now. Right? Um, so does it get any easier that having done this for a year or two now, does it get easier?

Julie:    [14:32]

So the, the short answer is yes, absolutely. You know, and the more that you engage her in play, which is how I hear, you know, she, she, she didn’t want to stop what she’s doing, do some chore. She wanted to have fun. And so you said, well, let’s have fun doing this. Let’s hop. As she gets older, she’ll understand better why she needs to brush her teeth. She’s just too young to really understand about cavities and teeth.

Jen:  [14:56]

She’s two and a half years old now, so yeah.

Julie:   [14:59]

But for now, instead of getting into a battle about it, you’re connecting with her that you’re, your strengthen your relationship with her and she’s, she’s learning that. It’s fun. It’s nice to make things fun. You know, if you have to, when when I have to clean up or I have to fold laundry, sometimes I’ll put on a podcast. Maybe yours now… Because you know, otherwise sometimes that yours not that exciting. So parents do often ask me this question like how long does this go on?

Julie:  [15:30]

And my answer is usually, well it’s usually goes on a little bit longer than you really feel like you can stand it. At least speaking for myself.

Jen:      [15:37]

Hm…seems transferable to a lot of situations in parenting.

Julie:     [15:41]

So I’m remembering when my son, my oldest Asher was too and we used to require that he washed his hands before you eat dinner and I think for awhile that was exciting because if something fun to do…

Jen:   [15:52]

Because it’s water, and you climb up on the stool and…

Julie:   [15:54]

But then he was like, you know, I’ve done that a few times. Boring I don’t want to do that anymore. And he said no as two year olds are want to do. Yeah. And I have to admit, I think at first I did something like, well you can’t have dinner unless you wash your hands. And of course this was late in the day and he was tired and he was hungry and just didn’t really work very well because then he just dug his heels in deeper and we got into this little conflict.

Julie:   [16:18]

So I switched gears and I sort of in desperation, this is how I always come up with these things. I said, Oh, you know what? I just heard an and for the story you have to know that Asher was really into Sesame Street. I just heard that big bird is missing and they think he’s hiding in children’s bathrooms. Should we go take a look? Hey looked at me like, yeah. So we run off to the bathroom and I can look around. You see him? He’s like, no. Well let’s put the water on and see if he comes out. Put your hand under… Did you catch them now? Of course. Now by this point he’s figured out it’s a game, right? Let’s try this soap. Is he in the south? No. Look at your hands above your head. No, he’s not there. Well, I don’t know.

Julie:  [17:00]

Try the water again. Should we look at… We looked in the towel. Got His hands washed, was so much fun. The next day. Dinner Time. That was going to be my question. We look for big bird again several days in a row. We looked for big birth, then we branched out, Cookie Monster, Bert, Ernie. We ended up at some point I remember thinking, what am I going to do? Yeah, there are a limit to the number of sesame street where we branched out to other books. He was reading Winnie the Pooh. Then we started pretending like, I think you do you want to wash your hand in Spaghetti water. We’re having spaghetti for dinner, so I would just pretend that it was spaghetti water and this went on for not just days, not just weeks, definitely months. I mean, I can’t actually remember how long it went on. I just remember once coming home and thinking, oh, I forgot to think of how I’m going to get his hands washed, and he was with the babysitter. I’m like, can you think of something that we haven’t done it, but if we did it, if we played, he was totally on board and it was. It turned out to be sort of a fun thing as long as we could get ourselves into it, right. So, well, by the time I told this story too, I remember some, some group of parents, he was in middle school. I’m like, well, at least now he’s, he does wash his hands before dinner and we don’t have to play a game, you know, it didn’t go on forever, but it does feel…at the time. You think, are they ever going to just do this? And the answer is yes.

Jen:    [18:23]

We’re having the same problem with toothbrushing at the moment and from the forums I’m on, I, I believe that this is a fairly common problem. And the uh, I’m looking for broccoli in your teeth and looking for chicken and your teeth has worked for us for probably a solid five months and all of a sudden it’s like she flipped a switch and we’re done with. We’re done looking for broccoli, we’re done looking for chicken. She still doesn’t want to brush her teeth. And so we’ve shifted toothbrushing up to before bed, bath time now so that, you know, she’s excited to go in the bathroom. Okay, well let’s brush your teeth first. And they were here in the bath. But sometimes we forget and drive it right. And it seems as though you said you have to shift the switch, the tools out when you got lucky, you latched onto a thing where they were a lot of variations possible in the same theme…

Julie:    [19:05]

Well the toothbrushing thing. Okay. I had to do the same thing. Yeah. And I have three kids so I had to come up with a lot of ideas. One of the things I like about leading the workshops is that parents get together and they share their ideas. Yeah. And I encourage people to steal each other’s ideas. I mean, it’s just exhausting to come up with these things. Right? So one of the things that worked for me for awhile, it was an also, I came up with this one out of desperation and it’s going to sound really bizarre, but it worked well with my kids. I said, do you know that I heard all the zoo animals have escaped and they’re hiding in kid’s should be looking at your mouth. And suddenly the kid who wouldn’t open his mouth is like, ahhhh.

Jen:  [19:47]

I’m doing that tonight.

Julie:    [19:54]

And, you know, and then you can have endless variations with the animals and, do you want to tell me which animals do you think might be hiding in there? So we did that for awhile and um,

Julie: [20:04]

I had another, another um, parent who they would pretend that they were going to the dentist office and they would, they would make a big deal. Like, would you like to sit in my dentist’s chair, my lady. And you know, there’s all kinds of games you can play and you’re right, you run out of ideas like, well, okay, so tell me, tell me, you’re making me feel bad because we, we had to cut seven chapters out of this book.

Jen:   [20:26]

What?

Julie:   [20:26]

Because it was too long and one of them was on toothbrushing,

Jen:    [20:34]

Parents are going to be so disappointed.

Julie:    [20:38]

So I had a whole list of ideas for it…maybe we’ll…

Jen:  [20:43]

I guess the lesson that is to try and apply from, from what is in the book, because that was one I got out of the book was, you know, there’s a big new section on seeing the tools in action. And so there’s this toothbrushing must’ve been part of that when I read it, I felt like I was sitting in a parenting class with you and then there were five other people in the room and they were all talking about what worked and what didn’t work is not everything works for everyone. And so I was wondering was that, was that the intent?

Julie:  [21:07]

Yes. In the workshops, people get a lot out of hearing from each other. Like I say, I had a mom in my very first group who got a lot of traction by using a Donald Duck voice. I can’t imitate it so I’m sorry I can’t do it for you, but she could do it. You know what?

Jen:   [21:24]

We’ll imagine it.

Julie:  [21:25]

In the back of your throat. I can’t do it. Anyway, she, she said if I said it’s time to go get your backpack. They didn’t do it, but if Donald Duck told them they would do it. So I took that idea and I’m like, well I can’t do Donald Duck, but I can pretend. And I again, I was so nervous about doing this in public. I pretended to have a British accent, which I can’t really do.

Jen:    [21:47]

Given that I’m English, I’d love to hear you give it a shot

Julie:   [21:51]

Because the kids don’t, didn’t know. Right. So. All right, let’s hear it. I was home with my two younger ones and they were bickering and bickering. I was trying to get dinner ready and and get them to wash their hands and come to dinner. So I went up to them and I said, excuse me, excuse me. It’s time for dinnah. And they looked at me like, What? It’s time for dinnah. Won’t you wash your hands and come eat like, mom, why are you talking so strange? Strange. Don’t think I’m speaking strangely. I’m just trying to tell you it’s time for dinnah. So they stopped bickering and they start arguing with me, but they get up and they wash their hands and they come to dinner and we did the whole dinner. That going mom, you have to say dinner. Am I getting it? Dinnah…

Julie:    [22:41]

So they don’t care. I used to. I also used this saying to them, okay, I’m telling you what my most embarrassing stories. I used to pretend I was an opera singer and then they would do things that if I just asked them to do in regular, they wouldn’t… [Sings] “It’s time for bath.” I would just shock them so much. So I tell people in my groups, you don’t have to be an opera singer; you don’t have to be good at English accents, you don’t have to be able to do Donald Duck, which I can’t do, but if you can attempt any of these, it changes the mood, the mood, and it makes it more fun and as long as you have to do these things anyway, you might as make it. Might as well make it fun.

Jen:   [23:18]

Yeah. Well if I could offer one correction, it would be. We call it “tea” instead of “dinner.”

Julie:    [23:23]

Oh, but then it wouldn’t have that R problem.

Jen:   [23:26]

Yes. So I know you have three children. I only have one and frankly that’s the way I’m planning on having it stay. But I know that a lot of parents who are listening to the show have more than one child and maybe most interested in the chapter that you have on resolving conflict. And so if, uh, if there was one nugget of wisdom that you could distill out of that chapter for the parents who have more than one child, but would that be?

Julie:   [23:53]

Well, that chapter is not about more than one child. I’m going to answer your question about more than one, which is don’t take sides. It’s really tempting to say, come on, just give it to the baby. She’s just, she’s too little. She doesn’t understand. But that kind of response can really build up resentment between siblings. So, um, some people call it the sportscasting sometimes it could just be helpful to say, Oh, you’re not ready to share that. You’re not finished with it. Oh, the baby saying I want it, I want it. What do we do in a situation like this? So I’m not just saying, okay, kids, good luck. You figure it out. I’m leaving, I’m out of this. But I’m also not going in and saying, no, you’ve had it for 10 minutes now.

Julie:   [24:35]

Give it to the baby or give it to the other one, whichever one. I do a lot of acknowledging feelings. So that’s the theme of the book as you noticed. And I’m going to do that even when there’s two kids who are fighting and sometimes there’s an act of conflict and sometimes I’m just, I’m just thinking about a conflict that my kids had. They were, they were a range of age, like six years between the oldest and the youngest. The youngest was definitely in the two to seven range and I think the middle was in the two to seven range. My oldest was a little bit older when they, we used to have a, used it, we have a hook in the ceiling and we used to have a T bar that they could hang from and when we would get home they would fight over who got to use it.

Julie:   [25:14]

And I remember once saying to them before we got in the door, okay, what should we do? Everybody wants to use the T bar first and there’s only one T bar, what should we do? And they negotiated and talked about it and came up with a system that I thought was pretty clever. The oldest one was probably the instigator because he realized that the youngest didn’t want to wait, so she got to go first for two minutes. And then the middle one who could wait a little longer, you get to do four minutes. And then the, the oldest who would be willing to wait longer, he would get six minutes on it and they all signed onto it.

Jen:   [25:49]

I would never have come up with that.

Julie:   [25:53]

When we help them problem solve a situation like that, they often will come up with solutions that we wouldn’t have even thought of.

Jen:   [26:01]

Yeah. At what age do they start? Do they start being ready to do that, do you think?

Julie:   [26:04]

Not at two.

Jen:  [26:05]

Yeah, because, you know, I my daughter’s two and a half and when I asked her a question, she doesn’t seem to understand. She just says, hmm, that’s, you know, if I try something like that, she’ll just kind of say, hmm. So at what point can you sort of start expecting a response to come back? And you know, the tennis ball to get hit back to you?

Julie:  [26:22]

Well, I, I remember when Asher was three and Rashi was just a baby, so up until about problem solving, which you can do with a single child. The reason I remember this story is because some reporter called up Adele and said, can you use problem solving with really little kids? And she said, I don’t know; call Julie.

Julie:  [26:46]

I think he couldn’t get Joanne on the phone. He called me because I was in California. And I thought, do I use problem solving? I’ll have to think about it. I’m like, well, I guess this morning I did because Rashi was, he was just a month or two old. And um, I really wanted to take a shower, which was challenging, right? And so Rashi had fallen asleep. And I thought this is my chance if I can get Asher on board. So I went to tell Asher, let’s go in the bathroom. And he’s like, no, let’s play with the magic mitts. And I remember thinking if I just try to strong arm him, he will scream. The baby seemed kind of fussy so I wasn’t sure he was gonna stay asleep. And I wasn’t gonna get my shower, so I did a very simplified version. I said, Oh Asher, you want to play with the magic mitts? I want to take a shower. What should we do? And he thought about it and he said, hm, maybe I’ll take my sesame street’s tapes in the bathroom, which we had done in in times past and I, I said, that’s a great idea, let’s do it.

Julie:  [27:48]

And I got my shower. So it was not a high conflict situation. But I try to look for opportunities to use that language with him. Like, we have a problem, you want this, I want that. What should we do? And I would encourage you to use that kind of language with your kids. Even at age two, you can, she can, she can understand, oh, you want that? And I want that one.

Jen:  [28:08]

And so do I start now. You know, when I’m starting to do that now, do I start by proposing a couple of solutions and then picking the one that I think is fairest, like verbally going through that process or how do you build to the point where the child can come up with her own solutions?

Julie:  [28:22]

Well, you’re going to be working with simple problems. It’s like, no, you want the blue cup and I was going to drink from it. What should we do? Right. And she’ll probably say I drink from it and you might say, okay, how about you drink from it and I drink from it next. And if and if she says, okay, you can say, oh well we figured out a solution. So she just gets the idea that this is what we do when we’re in conflict and that’s what chapter three is all about. When you’re in conflict, not necessarily between two kids. It could be parent and child. What do we do? And that’s, that’s one way to teach her about problem solving, which is when one of the ways we can resolve conflicts.

Julie:   [29:00]

Yeah. And so that’s, that’s a tool that I can use as a parent of one child and also the parents of multiple children can use with their children and also the children, we assume we’ll learn to negotiate among themselves when the parent is not around, ideally, I’m remembering another, another time when I used it, Asher was four, he had a friend named Matthew and matthew came over to play after school and then I was driving them to music class and we’re going to meet his mom. His mom was gonna pick him up a music class. And this is in the days when we didn’t know about airbags in the front seat. So kids were allowed to sit there.

Julie: [29:35]

Oh, the things we used to do!

Julie:     [29:37]

Yes, right? The wild and crazy times. So we were going down to the car and Asher and Matthew started arguing about who would get to sit in the front seat. And fortunately the doors were locked so we got to the car and they hadn’t resolved it. And I, I remember being tempted to say, well Asher, he’s the guest. You should really let him sit in front. Um, but I, but I just want to do that really. So I said, oh, this is a problem. You both want to sit in the front seat, but there’s only one front seat. What should we do? I think Asher for said, well, I should be able to sit in the front seat because it’s my car. And Matthew said, well, I should be able to sit in the front seat because I’m the guest. And I said, well, it sounds like there’s something about sitting in the front seat that you both really like. And Matthew said, I like to be able to see out the window. You can see better in the front seat. And Asher said, well, I like to be able to choose the music. You can reach the cassette tape, aging myself, a player in the front seat. And there was a pause and Matthew said, I can sit in the front seat and I’ll put on your music. And Asher said, oh, okay. And you know, it was the perfect solution that I never would have been able to figure out it had I not reflected back to them. Oh, so you want the front seat because you want to see and you went the front seat because you would have decide what music we listened to.

Jen:  [31:02]

It’s not that they both want the front seat is that they want different things about being in the front seat and both of those needs can be satisfied.

Julie:    [31:08]

So I was lucky. I mean in the sense that. And I didn’t know where it was going to go when I said, well two people, one front seat, what do we do? I honestly didn’t know how it was going to be resolved, but I think that by doing it that way, first of all, we, we preserve their relationship. Had they gotten into a big fight about it, when you can just imagine that next, the next day they’re not playing with each other. Who knows what. Right.

Jen:    [31:30]

Or if you had had to arbitrate it and made the decision one way or the other…

Julie:   [31:34]

They would have been mad at me and they would have felt it was unfair and Matthew wouldn’t have wanted to come over again. Like, who knows. Right. So I think that’s one of the benefits of involving them in the problem solving.

Jen:    [31:47]

Yeah. Okay. So the chapter on children who are differently wired is written in your voice. I’m wondering if you can tell us a bit about your experience because I think a lot of times when I read parenting books kind of geared at mainstream parents, there really seems as though that the parent has to do the work themselves of figuring out how to make it applicable to their differently wired child. Can you tell us a bit about your experience in how the techniques described in the book can be applied to children who process information differently?

Julie:    [32:16]

I think one of the messages we want parents to get from this book is that all of these tools can be used with all children. Because underlying all these tools is the idea that all kids want to be understood, all kids want to be respected, all kids have a drive to do things for themselves. And what makes it tricky for kids who are differently wired is understanding as a parent, how they’re experiencing what their feelings are, how, what their experience is and how to acknowledge that. Because it’s because it’s often so different from our own experiences as people. So I’ll give you an example. In one of my early groups, I had a dad who had a little boy who used to put up a big fight if he didn’t get to be used one of his three favorite pairs of socks.

Julie:    [33:15]

And in the morning, they would use those three pairs of socks early in the week and they would run out and she’d have his other socks. And the dad tried all the usual look, they’re the same. It’s, you know, this one’s red. That’s when it’s red. Like, what’s the difference? We have to go get your socks on. We don’t have time for this nonsense. All that kind of thing. Came to the group and I told them about my oldest, who, when he was very little with what they say, hypersensitive in his lower extremities, which is to say he couldn’t stand to be touched on his feet and his legs were very, very sensitive. So, and if you can’t touch your feet to the floor, you can’t learn to walk. So we needed to desensitize them, but he really felt a lot of things that most of us, if we feel them, they, they’re not noxious.

Julie:   [34:00]

So I had told the group about how we had done a brushing technique to help my son so that he could tolerate the sensation of touch on the bottom of his feet. Well, this dad hurdle this and it suddenly dawned on him that maybe his son really could feel the difference between this red pair of socks and the other ones. And he went out and he bought more of the favorite socks and the problem disappeared because the kid has hypersensitive in his feet and could feel everything. So that’s part of the challenge as a parent of a differently wired kid is to try to get into that kids body-head experience and be able to relate to what’s it like for them so that we’re not just trying to change their behavior in my experience as a parent who has had kids with special needs, there’s a lot of emphasis often on changing the child’s behavior

New Speaker:   [34:57]

Because the behavior is the problem, right?

Julie:  [34:58]

Because the behavior’s the problem. Exactly. And you know, one of the big messages of our book is that there’s a connection between how kids feel and how they behave and if we want them to behave well, it benefits us to pay attention to how they feel and how we talk to them influences how they feel. So the, some of the tools in that chapter on kids who are definitely wired, are a way for parents to tune into how their kids are, are different in terms of their experience of sensory issues, social issues, all the ways in which kids are different. So it’s not a book about how to do therapy for kids who are definitely wired, it’s really to how to use the same communication tools for those kids. Yeah. So, so I hope that all parents read that chapter and not just kids who have been identified as being differently wired.

Julie:   [35:50]

The first tool that we introduced in that in that chapter is the idea of joining the child in their world. And I think that’s something that can be really challenging, especially for kids who are on the autism spectrum who don’t appear to want to interact with us as much as our other kids and it can feel like rejection and can feel like there’s no way to connect with that kid and the kid doesn’t want to connect. So in my workshops, I encourage people to figure out what is comfortable and interesting to that child and connect that way, before you try to engage their cooperation and solve problems. And one of the most touching stories I heard, which we include in the book, was from a mom who son spent a lot of time alone in a tiny little tent playing on his iPad, not talking to anybody, not interacting.

Julie:     [36:41]

And when we suggested this idea of joining him in this world, she said, I didn’t really know how this was going to go or whether it was at all possible, but she went home and she tried to do her homework there. He was in his little tent and she said she went up and she knocked on the tent, which was fabric. So it was very, very quiet. And she realized that he was very sensitive to sound. So she very quietly said, can I watch you while you play? And he nodded his head and so she just, she said it was a small tents and she couldn’t go in it, but she just watched. And then she asked him what he was playing and he answered her and he’s playing the bubble game, which she said was surprising because he usually wouldn’t have even answered her. And so she watched him play this little bubble game and then she asked me if she could play and they ended up passing the iPad back and forth, and he showed her how to play. He had never done this before with him. It gives me goosebumps just to think about it, you know.

Jen:   [37:36]

And we assume previously that she had been focused on getting him out of the tent.

Julie:    [37:39]

Exactly: come on, let’s do this. We have a puzzle. I’ve got blocks come, come, come. Yeah. So, not that we don’t have things that we want all our kids to do that we have to do every day, but if we don’t find that time to connect with them, if we don’t have that, those moments where it’s just about being together and enjoying each other and then we’re going to have a lot harder time getting them to do all those others things that we need to do. It reminds me of a phrase that’s coming and respectful parenting circles: your child isn’t giving you a hard time. She’s having a hard time. They don’t do these things just to annoy us. Feel as though they are, that there are real reasons for them doing these things and if we can better understand what those reasons are, then we can be in a better position to make a connection that moves the relationship forward.

Julie:    [38:32]

Yeah. Yeah. So when people come to me and they say, how do I my kid to [fill in the blank].

Jen:   [38:36]

Yes.

Julie: [38:39]

Yeah. I will often…so tell me like, how is the child’s feeling about it? Because if I, if I don’t know that I don’t, I, I don’t know where to go yet. I love what you’re doing. Taking the research and bringing it to parents of young kids and I also want to remind people that you can read that it’s important to acknowledge feelings, to give kids choices, to invite them to problem solve with you and you can know all these things intellectually, but when you’re in the heat of the moment, when you’ve got to get out the door because you have a job to get you and you have to drop them off at school or daycare and they’re crying because they don’t want to put their shoes on and the baby’s crying and, and you’re running late. It’s very hard to figure out what do you do in that moment? What feelings do I acknowledge? Sometimes you feel like I don’t even want to acknowledge feelings. I just need to get out the door. So what we’re trying to do is to give parents lots of examples so that when they’re in the heat of the moment, they can think, oh, you’re not in the mood to go to school. You wanted to play with that. Let’s put that somewhere special so we can find it when we get home and we’re relying less on, I don’t care. We’re going, I’m grabbing you.

Jen:   [39:58]

Which may, as long as the child is small enough to get the job done, but it doesn’t really help to build a relationship or, or engender cooperation for the longer term.

Julie:    [40:07]

And it leaves everybody frazzled in the morning. Right?

Jen:   [40:09]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are definitely seeing that as well. Now we’re in a daycare environment. Getting out the door in the morning is a key.

Julie:  [40:17]

It’s a huge stress on parents getting out the door. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. I really appreciate it. You’re welcome.

Jen:    [40:25]

It’s been so inspiring to learn more about the examples behind the techniques that are in the book and there are so many examples in the book itself as well. So by the time this episode is released, you will be able to buy How to Talk so Little Kid Will Listen by Joanna Faber and Julia King from your local bookstore or from Amazon. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of your parenting Mojo. You can find the references for this episode on YourParentingMojo.com/howtotalk