References:

Baesler, E.J., & Lauricella, S. (2014). Teach peace: Assessing instruction of the nonviolent communication and peace course. Journal of Peace Education 11(1), 46-63.

Juncadella, C.M. (October 2013). What is the impact of the application of the Nonviolent Communication model on the development of empathy? Overview of research and outcomes. Unpublished Master’s Thesis. University of Sheffield. Retrieved from http://www.cnvc.org/sites/default/files/NVC_Research_Files/Carme_Mampel_Juncadella.pdf

Kashtan, I. (2005). Parenting from your heart: Sharing the gifts of compassion, connection, and choice. Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press.

Marlow, E., Nyamathi, A., Grajeda, W.T., Bailey, N., Weber, A., & Younger, J. (2012). Nonviolent communication training and empathy in male parolees. Journal of Correctional health Care 18(1), 8-19.

Rose, M.B. (2003). The heart of parenting: Nonviolent Communication in action. PuddleDancer Press. Retrieved from https://www.nonviolentcommunication.com/pdf_files/parenting_communication_mrose.pdf

Rosenberg, M.B. (2005). Raising children compassionately: Parenting the Nonviolent Communication way. Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press.

Rosenberg, M.B. (2015). Nonviolent Communication (3rd Ed). Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press.

Suarez, A., Lee, D.Y., Rowe, C., Gomez, A.A., Murowchick, E., & Linn, P.L. (2014). Freedom project: Nonviolent communication and mindfulness training in prison. SAGE open January-March 2014, 1-10.

(Introduction added after the episode was recorded and transcribed):
Before we get started with today’s episode on the unique role of fathers in children’s development, as well as why children prefer one parent over another, I wanted to let you know about three super cool things that I’m working on you. The first is about my membership group, which is called Finding Your Parenting Mojo. I don’t mention the group a lot on the show because I don’t like over-selling, but a listener who was in the group the last time I opened it to new members told me she actually didn’t know I had a membership group, so I’m going to tell you a bit more about it this time around! The group is for parents who are on board with the ideas you hear about on the podcast based in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting, but struggle to put them into practice in real life. So if you find yourself nodding along and saying yep; I agree with the whole ‘no rewards and punishments’ thing and I’m on board with working with my child to solve the problems we have, and I really want to relax a bit around my child’s eating, but on the other hand you’re thinking: but rewarding with story time is the only way I can get my child to brush their flipping teeth, and how do I even get started with working with my child to solve problems? And if I ever did relax around my child’s eating then all they would eat is goldfish and gummy bears, then the group is for you. We spend a month digging into each issue that parents face – from tantrums to figuring out your goals as a parent and for your child to getting on the same page as your partner (and knowing when it’s OK to have different approaches!)…raising healthy eaters to navigating screen time and supporting sibling relationships; we cover it all. I’ll open the group to new members in July, and it closes at the end of July and on August 1st we start digging into our first topic, which is reducing the number of tantrums you’re experiencing. The cost for the group is $39/month this time around which is locked in for as long as you’re a member – I increased the price from last time, and I may increase it again next time the group reopens. Or if you sign up before July 18th, you can pay for 10 months and get the last two months of the year free. If you’d like to learn more about joining the membership group you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com/membership – the doors will open on July 1st.

So that’s the deal with the group. The second cool thing I’m working on is something to give you a taste of what it will be like to be in the group. I’ve heard a lot of parents talking about how their children’s behavior really “triggers” them, and I was going to do a podcast episode on this and then I realized that this is especially one of those topics that you can’t just listen to and expect a change to happen; but if you’re willing to do a bit of work, that you can see enormous payoffs. So I thought OK; how can I really make the greatest impact possible with this work? And I decided to put together a nine-day online workshop to walk you through it. So if you go to yourparentingmojo.com/tameyourtriggers and sign up, staring on July 8th you’ll receive an email from me on each of the next nine week days that walks you through an aspect of this issue. In the first week we focus on where these triggers come from and it might surprise you to learn that it’s not our child’s behavior that is actually the origin of this feeling in us, but it’s things we remember, half-remember, and maybe even don’t remember from our childhoods. The more we know about those, the better we can manage these feelings when they arise in us. In the second week we look at new tools we can use to reduce the number of times we do feel triggered, and on the rarer occasions when it does still happen, to manage our reaction so we don’t blow up at our children.

Now, you might have done these kinds of online workshops or challenges before and sometimes they ask you to do really simple things and you’re thinking “but I already do that!”. This workshop will be different. Each day you will get homework that you could do in about 15 minutes, although if you find that you are feeling triggered very often you would probably make a huge amount of progress if you could spare 30 minutes a day for not every day, but some of the nine days of the workshop. And these are not always easy tasks to do – I’ll be asking you to take a hard look at some potentially pretty uncomfortable aspects of your childhood, so you may need to do this gently and carefully. I’ll be doing short live videos in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group every other day or so which you don’t have to watch, but which you may find illuminate the daily emails which I deliberately made as short and concise as possible. By the end of the workshop you should have a great deal of insight into what really causes you to feel triggered, and how you can feel triggered less often and less intensely. And we will probably have a pretty big group of parents who are working through this alongside you, who can offer support and encouragement as you work through this.

Obviously this isn’t exactly how the membership group works – we don’t do nine-day series of emails and Facebook Lives every other day; I actually send out a Guide at the beginning of the month and I answer your questions on two live group calls each month. But that format really works better once you’re already committed, and I wanted to be able to help you make real progress on a real issue you’re struggling with, so I decided the workshop was the best way to show you the kind of support you get in the group, even if the format is a bit different. So if you’d like to join the workshop, just head over to yourparentingmojo.com/tameyourtriggers and sign up – we’ll get started on July 8th.

FINALLY, the last thing before we get to today’s episode is that you might have noticed that this is episode 92 of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, which means we’re only eight episodes away from reaching 100! When I started the show two years ago I really had no idea where it was going to take me, or even how long it could last. I’m always worried that I will run out of topics to discuss but I’m happy to say that two years in I actually have a longer list of topics that I still have to find time to cover than I did when I started. As I started thinking about this, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations…if I figure that on average it takes me about 20 hours to prepare for an episode, by the time I get to 100 episodes that will have been 2,000 hours, which is 250 days, which is very slightly less than a year, which means I’ve spent just a bit less than a third of the last three years preparing podcast episodes for you! If I figure there’s an average of 15 books and peer-reviewed papers on the reference list per episode, that’s 1,500 books and papers that actually made the reference list, and since only about half of the books and papers I read actually make the reference list I’ve probably read somewhere close to 3,000 of them in three years. When I started the show I was really just putting an intention out in the world to see where it might lead, and now I see that this work is what I want to do. It has – without a doubt – made me a better parent, and I want to use tools like the membership group to support you in your parenting as well. I keep producing the podcast episodes because I know that for some of you, a free resource is enough – and I know that by the reviews that you leave me on iTunes and the emails you send me that quite a lot of you get quite a lot out of the show. So I want to do something special for the 100th episode, and I’d love to have your voice be a part of it. If you go to yourparentingmojo.com, you’ll see a button on the homepage that you can use to leave me a voicemail. You could tell me something you learned from the show that has made a difference for your family, or a question you have either about the research on the show or about some aspect of my life that you wish you knew more about. Depending on how many voicemails I receive I’ll put all of you or a selection of you in the 100th episode, in your own voices, and I’ll answer your questions as well. So if you want to do this, just head over to yourparentingmojo.com and hit the icon to record a message. You don’t need any special equipment to do it; you can just speak right into your computer’s microphone, although listeners would probably thank you if you could plug in a headset with a microphone as this will greatly improve the sound quality. It doesn’t have to be a fancy one – just the kind that comes with a smartphone is fine. So head on over to yourparentingmojo.com to record your message and while you’re there, sign up for the Tame Your Triggers workshop and check out the membership group as well. OK, let’s get on with today’s episode!

Jen: 01:20

It’s pretty obvious when you’re reading the scientific literature on parenting and child development that just as most of the research on children’s development is conducted on White children and then the findings are discussed as if they’re relevant to all children everywhere. Most of the research on parenting is conducted on mothers and then its applicability to fathers is either extrapolated or it’s just simply ignored. So, what role do fathers play in children’s development? Our fathers basically like slightly less important mothers or are there unique processes involved in the relationship between fathers and children? Here with us today to sort this out is doctor Diana Coyl-Shepherd Professor at California State University Chico. Her research focuses on mother-child and father-child attachment across the span of childhood and she’s especially interested in social and emotional development and children’s relationships with their fathers. Welcome Dr. Coyl-Shepherd.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 02:15

Thank you, Jen.

Jen: 02:17

All right, so let’s start with, I guess it’s kind of the son of the father of attachment theory. The father of Attachment Theory was John Bowlby and so you interviewed his son, Sir Richard Bowlby a few years ago. That must have been pretty exciting.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 02:32

It was very exciting. Having been a fan both professionally and personally of Attachment Theory for a long time, it was very exciting to meet the son of the author of that theory.

Jen: 02:44

Yeah. And so that interview is available for anyone to read in a journal article in early childhood development and care journal. And so I was really shocked to learn that Richard Bowlby actually didn’t really talk with his father about Attachment Theory at all and only started learning about it after his father’s death. And I was wondering if you could tell us about the different role that Richard Bowlby proposed for fathers and mothers and why mothers had been such a focus of research for so long?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 03:11

Certainly. Well, what Richard proposed was a model of dual attachment and in the case of heterosexual parents, they would serve complimentary roles in their children’s lives. So, mothers would be that safe haven providing care and comfort when children are distressed and fathers, as he observed and other researchers have to, more often were used for secure exploration. So, it was that mothers sensitive responding to their children’s distress that increases children’s opportunity to turn to their fathers for support during exploration and during challenging tasks. So, what Sir Richard Bowlby explained was that, and this is again based on other people’s research as well, that we’re driven to explore and seek new experiences, but we need safety and a trusted companion to show us the way. And in our own research we often had children report that they felt safety from their fathers, but more often sought emotional comfort from their mothers. So, each parent can serve both functions of attachment, safety, security and reassurance as well as exploration. But among Western heterosexual couples, we tended to see that mothers and fathers specialized in these areas.

Jen: 04:24

Ah, that’s fascinating. And so I’m thinking about the ways that we assess this attachment in a lab situation and typically it’s using this procedure called The Strange Situation where the mother is withdrawn for certain periods of time and then we look to see how distressed the child is and whether the distress is relieved when the mother comes back. And so it doesn’t seem to be that if the child doesn’t come to the father to relieve distress, that they’re not attached, right? Or is it possible that the way that we are conceptualizing this and the problem is with our measuring tools and not with the attachment between fathers and children.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 05:03

Exactly right. So, in The Strange Situation that measures in part mother’s sensitivity to their children’s distress, what it doesn’t really measure is what fathers contribute to their children’s attachment. And so it was really the research of the Grossmann’s and their colleagues. They did a 16-year longitudinal study, 44 families, and they compared mother’s and father’s contributions to their children’s attachment at ages 6, 10 and 16 and at when the children were toddlers, they had developed this measure called the sensitive and challenging interactive play scale. And what they found, and it’s an observational measure of the way that mothers and fathers engaged with their children during play, that father’s play sensitivity was very consistent across the four years and it was father’s sensitivity that was predictive of children’s internal working models of attachment at when their children were 10 and only fathers play sensitivity, not mothers was predictive of adolescents attachment representations. So, their conclusion was that mothers and fathers are doing different things to support their children’s attachment security and consequently we need different ways to assess that.

Jen: 06:16

And so I’m just curious as to how this works in sort of real life with real families and whether it doesn’t seem as though it’s sort of a one person is one role and one person is the other role because I’m sort of the parent who’s more likely to stand back and watch as my daughter is climbing up something high and just kinda ask her what’s your plan to get down rather than my husband will probably be the one to shout, be careful and we’ll both pillow fight with her if she asks us to. So, is it confusing to her at all that that we have this sort of dual role thing going on or not?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 06:48

I don’t think so. I think children’s expectations of their parents’ behavior are based on their typical interaction with that parent. So, whatever they usually experience is what they expect to experience. And so if you are engaging in exploration with your child and allowing her to take risks and your husband might be the more cautious of the two that I think she would anticipate that that’s the way it goes. That when I want to explore, mom will be my companion and she’ll support this. But typically, and in lots of research, fathers do this more than mothers. It’s not that mothers aren’t capable of it, it’s just typically fathers do it more often.

Jen: 07:24

Yeah. Okay. In an article that you and your coauthors wrote in an Introduction to a Special Issue on Fatherhood and Attachment, you said “The link between father attachment quality and children’s outcomes are often less direct complicated by individual characteristics like child gender, temperament and father’s working models as well as familial and cultural practices.” And that’s pretty dense. Can you help us to tease that part a bit?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 07:48

Yes. There’s a lot there. Well certainly, we know that there’s research that supports gender differences in the way that parents interact with their children. So for example, that mothers engage with their daughters more frequently and they do more kinds of emotional and social discussion than they do with their sons and fathers more often engage with their sons and the kind of ways that they engage with their sons are activity oriented. So, that sort of supports this model that we’re seeing, this idea of father’s activation relationships with their children but more with sons than daughters typically. So, there’s a piece there that leads to maybe differential outcomes for children in terms of their social and emotional development based on the way and how often they interact with each parent. But also in culture. Culture plays a role as well because it’s really, and this was sort of the argument that Dr. Danielle Paquette made when he developed his measure of the activation relationship of measure he called the Risky Situation is the idea that in cultures where competition is a part of that culture, then what fathers do by the way they engage with their children what he described as rough and tumble kinds of play and security and exploration, that helps children meet the demands in a society where there might be competition.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 09:07

How do they manage that competition? How do they manage relationships with others? So, more research I think is pointing to the contributions of fathers and sometimes it’s sort of an additional contribution beyond what mothers are doing to support their children’s social and emotional development.

Jen: 09:27

So, I had a lot of questions about that rough and tumble play and because it seems to be a really critical component of children’s relationships with their fathers, can you help us understand what’s the purpose of this kind of play?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 09:39

It’s to expose them to new situations in which problem solving is possible, but it’s also a social kind of activity because you’re doing it with others, right? And so one of the key aspects of that is helping children manage their physical aggression and intense emotions so that those don’t become problems, right? So, Dr. Paquette described this kind of activity is a way to help children manage their aggression and that fathers who do this regularly with their children, it’s actually associated with lower levels of aggression and peers. And so a little bit about how does that work? It’s sort of a skilled kind of activity. I mean fathers more often, they rough house with their children, they play with them, tickle games, those kinds of things. But sometimes those things go too far. So, children will get over excited and someone starts to cry or someone gets really angry. So, it’s really important that in those situations, fathers are modeling emotional regulation or they’re recognizing in their children that maybe, okay, this has gone too far. I need to pull it back. We need to stop for a little bit. We need to help you calm before either we start again or we don’t start again. So, it’s really important that when fathers are engaging in this kind of play, they’re also really aware of their own behaviors, what they’re modeling to their children, but also how their children are managing these situations.

Jen: 11:02

Yeah, and I’m just curious about that because I engage in this kind of play too. I’ve seen firsthand how hard it is to kind of walk that line between, everybody’s having a good time and we’re a little bit rough and one step too far where there’s going to be tears. And so I’m just curious, I don’t know if there’s any research on this, but if the child is crying, is that a sign that the parent has gone too far and needs to sort of learn better skills at engaging in this play? Or is the crying itself sort of a valuable tool so that the parent can model, okay, well sometimes crying happens and this is how we recover and so on?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 11:41

Well, I think certainly you can respond to the crying, but the primary emotion that should be associated with this kind of play is enjoyment and some excitement. So sometimes, and fathers do this also a bit more than mothers do, they engage in kind of scary kinds of games like hide and seek and chase games, which actually children seems to really enjoy. Boys seem to enjoy it more than girls enjoy it. But I think the key there is enjoyment. And so when it disintegrates into tears or anger, then I think that’s when a parent would be prompted to say, oh, okay, let’s take a moment here. I think we need a break. And that’s important because what you’re modeling is for children also to recognize in other situations, perhaps with peers when maybe things have gone too far and we need to stop and take a break.

Jen: 12:30

And do they do that successfully? Are they able to transfer these lessons that we’re not teaching them, this is what you do when you’re having this kind of engagement with your peer which is kind of having this kind of relationship with our child and expecting them to transfer that knowledge to another situation. Does that happen?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 12:45

It does to some degree, and that’s why I think that it’s been noted that peers are children who engage in this play with their fathers tend to be less aggressive with their peers. So it does get translated even it’s not directly consciously taught through the experience of doing it. I mean, that’s how often we learn things, right? It’s the regular kinds of routine behaviors and activities then those become guidelines for how do we behave in other circumstances or with others.

Jen: 13:12

Yeah. Okay. So, I want to go back to attachment a little bit because I know it’s important to you and I know that listeners have a lot of questions about this. And so one thing that caught my attention when we talked with Dr. Arietta Slade a few months ago was when she said, “60% to 70% of children living in low risk environments feel secure in their attachment is a very robust biological system.” And so I’m thinking, wait, that means 30% to 40% of children in low risk environments do not develop secure attachment. That’s not a robust system.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 13:43

Yeah. A rather alarming.

Jen: 13:45

I know it is, isn’t it? And so I’ve seen these numbers reflected in other studies as well, and obviously it’s best if children do develop a secure attachment with at least one parent. But what happens if they don’t with either parent?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 13:59

Yeah, that’s very problematic. So, when we see disrupted attachment that’s often associated with complex trauma, abuse, neglect, maybe mental illness in the family, particularly with a parent or separation from that parent. And the prognosis for disrupted or disorganized attachment is quite poor. If they don’t receive treatment or intervention, sometimes children are incapable of forming healthy relationships with others and there’s certainly a greater risk for psychopathology.

Jen: 14:28

Okay. So, I’m curious then about this quality of reflective functioning, which Dr. Slade calls it and I think other researchers call it attunement.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 14:38

Yes.

Jen: 14:39

Can you just remind us what attunement is?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 14:40

Yeah, that’s that awareness in a parent of their own feelings and thoughts while engaged with their child, but also their awareness of the child’s feelings and thoughts. So, it’s really recognizing both that sense of their own and their babies or their child’s feelings and the reasons maybe the intentions behind their behaviors. And that is associated with more sensitive parenting and sensitive parenting is associated with the development of secure attachment in children.

Jen: 15:11

So, it’s interesting. It’s something that sort of inside yourself that is indicative of this relationship that you’re building with your child. And I’m wondering if you have any sense from the literature about whether fathers are good at this kind of thing ‘cause it seems to me to be a very stereotypically female attributes to kind of consider not your own feelings and also the feelings of others.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 15:32

Yes. And you know there may certainly be biological mechanisms that support that capacity, but I think it’s certainly learned, there are certainly cultural and social influences. I mean mothers typically provide the primary care for their young children, so they have many opportunities to observe their young children and their feelings and their behaviors. But I don’t think that fathers are incapable of these things. I think that that sensitivity can be taught or can be educated about so that fathers begin to pay more attention to those more subtle cues that their babies maybe sharing with them, maybe sometimes nonverbal cues.

Jen: 16:13

Yeah. And I think we’re going to go into this a little bit more, but you actually recommended a book to me called “The Dad Factor”, which is a little bit hard to get hold of. My copy actually came from Germany.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 16:24

I’m so surprised. I had no idea that, you know, of course when Dr. Fletcher created that book, he shared copies and we all got to have one. It seems really easy to get it.

Jen: 16:34

Yeah, it was easy for you.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 16:36

I didn’t realize it was so difficult now.

Jen: 16:39

So, copies are out there and I’ll mention it again before the end of the show so you can grab the title of that again. So yeah, so that book really sort of puts into concrete terms for parents who are interested in the literature but don’t necessarily want to read it, just how important this reflective functioning and attunement is and sort of how to do it, how to engage with your baby and see, oh, they’re looking away now. That means they don’t want to engage in this kind of behavior anymore. Whereas, some parents might be, oh, I need to get their attention. I’m going to flick to get their attention again.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 17:13

Dr. Fletcher has this wonderful example in the book of a father and the son where the father was at home providing care, but he also had sort of a home online business. And so whenever the child was quiet, inattentive, wasn’t crying, didn’t need to be fed, then he would slip off to do his work. And what Dr. Fletcher pointed out to him was, no, that’s the prime time to be engaged when the child doesn’t need you for other kinds of physical needs. This is the time where you can develop that attunement with your child because they’re ready to engage with you. They don’t have any other needs that need to be met at that time.

Jen: 17:48

Yeah. And you can use that to sort of understand more about how your baby’s feeling and I actually would argue from a perspective of a philosophy that I use called Resources for Infant Educarers or RIE that even caregiving times can also be these attunement times.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 18:03

Absolutely.

Jen: 18:04

It doesn’t have to be we’re not doing anything, the baby is in a good mood for first to learn about attunement. It can also happen during diaper changes and other routine kinds of care as well.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 18:13

Absolutely. Because what we know is sort of after that first two or three months after birth, infants are already orienting their behaviors toward their specific caregivers, trying to elicit the most positive response from them. So if they’re doing that, they have this sort of innate capacity to do that through regular care routines. Those caregivers, fathers included, have that opportunity to recognize, begin to pick up on their infant’s typical signals and ways of interacting with them so that they can be more attuned.

Jen: 18:47

Yeah. I’m wondering how you think this interacts with the idea of toxic masculinity because we did an episode on that a while back too, and I read a paper that says that intergenerational transmission of types of attachment to fathers is lower than those to mothers, which seems to imply that just because a father had a difficult relationship with his father doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to pass that on to his son. Why is this and what kind of processes are at work here?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 19:15

Well, I think the intergenerational transmission of attachment patterns where mothers are stronger predictors of that transmission, it’s because mothers are the primary caregivers typically. And so they spend more time, they tend to be the child’s primary attachment figure. And that’s why I think there’s that stronger influence. But in terms of men and sort of changing that pattern within a family, it takes a conscious decision to nurture a close responsive relationship with your child and to not repeat a nonsupportive family relational pattern. So it’s really an intentional parenting choice because unfortunately we tend to parent the way we were raised, right? And if we didn’t have a positive relationship with either of our parents, we are more likely to enact that relationship unconsciously with them. So, it really takes sort of an awareness of what happened in my childhood, I don’t want to repeat that. I want to be more responsive. And then as those opportunities arise, which they will daily, you have that opportunity to say, no, I’m not going to ignore this. I am going to respond.

Jen: 20:17

Yeah. And that can be a really powerful process. We did an episode on the transmission of intergenerational trauma as well and yeah, it’s pretty clear that it’s not obviously set in stone that because my mother experienced this, I’m going to experience this with my child, but there is sort of this increased likelihood of if your mother had these kinds of experiences, then you’re going to respond to your child in certain ways. That may not be ways that you would ever even consciously imagine that you would do. It’s so strange isn’t it? The way our brains work?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 20:47

Fascinating. There was a really interesting study done a few years ago. Bennett was the researcher and this was in Canada, but she interviewed mothers just prior to the birth of their first child and based on that, it was an attachment based interview. She could predict between 60% to 70% the attachment style that infant would form with their mother. Based on just what the mother said about her own childhood and her experiences with her mother.

Jen: 21:12

So, it really is a conscious decision then if you want to parent differently, you really need to see that and pay attention to it and sort of take that on and make a decision that this is not how I want to parent my own child.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 21:27

I think that’s the value of understanding Attachment Theory that I think most of us understand that we’re influenced by the way we were raised, but sometimes we don’t recognize that how we will then transmit that those patterns of care in our own relationships with children and we see it happening and sometimes we’re sort of divorced from the recognition that, oh, that’s because this is what my mother did to me. And it really does take the sort of conscious effort to say I don’t want to repeat that pattern or I’d like a different pattern with my child.

Jen: 21:57

Yeah. Okay. And so I’m thinking about the potential outcomes when a child’s mother, and it’s typically the mother but not always is sort of deeply invested in the child’s mental wellbeing and is able to engage in this reflective function on a regular basis. But the father really doesn’t. And so in one of your studies, I think you interviewed fathers and mothers and the fathers were saying that they were more harsh, more angry, less patient and less likely to listen to the child’s perspective, more likely to use physical discipline. Some of them mentioned spanking and one father said he did not provide comfort when his daughter was upset. He said, “I tell her to toughen up, I’m serious. I don’t put up with the drama.” Several fathers said they provided explanations and solutions to their children’s problems. And I’m thinking, well, I know this irritates mothers so I’m guessing it irritates to children too. And maybe they used humor or tickling to cheer the child up ‘cause I think fathers particularly see, oh, if I can make the child laugh then the child must be happy. And they sort of use it as the shortcut, whereas it’s really not because it doesn’t address the underlying problems. And so I’m wondering, do you foretell good outcomes for these children? Are they going to be okay as long as they have one parent who’s able to engage in this reflective functioning?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 23:10

Absolutely. I think what’s the key to that and other researchers have approached it from a slightly different perspective, is that when children are distressed, well, when any of us are stressed, the first thing we want is an emotional connection. We want someone to be responsive to that, not to solve our problem or to fix or even distract us with humor. They want us to recognize what they’re feeling, acknowledge those feelings and after that happens that actually helps our brains calmed down a bit so that then we might be able to move on to, well what could we do differently or perhaps some problem solving. So, to the extent that either can do that, that’s going to be beneficial. It’s going to be certainly helpful for their children.

Jen: 23:52

Okay. It’s probably not ideal that the father is sort of engaging this behavior, but you’re saying as long as the mother is engaging in this reflective functioning attunement behavior, then the child is probably going to come out okay. Does it work?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 24:07

Yes, because someone is acknowledging their feelings, which is sort of that first step.

Jen: 24:12

Okay. All right. And so that sort of leads us into talking about attachment hierarchies, which my listeners may not be familiar with, but I know they’re familiar with the concept and that is why children prefer one parent over the other. And so I have sort of an extended question about this.

Jen: 24:31

And Dr. Inge Bretherton, she’s another very famous attachment researcher and her colleagues they did a study where they interviewed 40 upper middle class White couples about their relationships with their children and in about half of the sample, both parents describe the mother as the preferred attachment figure. In many others, one parent detected a preference most often for the mother, while the other side of the relationships is similar or they didn’t mention the topic. Three of the couples agreed that the child’s primary attachment figure was the father, but in six additional families, only one parent believed this to be the case. And the author has quoted “Several parents who said their child really preferred Mommy. They often said that the child likes spending time with Daddy, but as soon as Mommy became available, the child was going to go to her.” And unfortunately this section concluded “To our knowledge, there are no systematic studies about how families with highly involved fathers handle attachment hierarchies in the long run and how the very exclusive preferences for one figure might adversely affect both parent, child and marital relations.”

Jen: 25:28

And so I think this issue is incredibly common. I see posts about it in parenting groups on almost a daily basis. And every time someone posts “My kid won’t come to my husband, they want me.” It’s followed by tons of comments saying, “Yup, same thing here.” And so my daughter has learned after a number of firm conversations, she used to say, “I don’t want Daddy to be in our family anymore.” And now she’ll say, “I still love Daddy, but I love you more than Daddy.” And some of Bretherton’s families reported this as well. So, is there any indication in the research about what parents should do about this?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 26:06

Well, you can’t change your children’s attachment preferences or that hierarchy, but the hierarchy is based on the sort of routine or typical responses to children’s attachment needs. And what moves you to the top of the hierarchy is sensitive prompt responses that are in line with what the child wants. And because mothers often have taken on that role of being the comforter, that’s one of the primary reasons why they ended up at the top of the hierarchy were fathers, maybe the playmate or the distractor that’s not meeting that need for felt security, that feelings of security that’s sort of the goal of attachment. And so you can’t change that. But I think if you made parents more aware of what support secure attachment with your child, it’s those prompt sensitive responses in a way that the child wants you to respond, then you might see less of this. I don’t know that you wouldn’t have a hierarchy still. But you might see less of this difference between children’s preference for their mothers over their fathers.

Jen: 27:09

Okay. And so I just want to think about how this actually plays out in practice with an example, like it’s time for a bath, I’m washing the dishes and I say, okay, Daddy’s going to give you a bath and meltdown ensues. Whereas if I would say, okay, I’m going to give you a bath now, she’d go happily down to the bathroom. And so I spent a lot of time wallowing around in the literature in what little literature there is on it. So, I found a paper by [Inaudible] [27:38], and I think it was part of his doctoral research and most studies on attachment are done in the lab because you can more easily control the process of withdrawing the mother and then bringing her back to watch the child’s reaction. But he actually assessed attachment in the lab between ages 12 to 15 months.

Jen: 27:54

And then he sent research assistants to visit the mother, the father and the child at their home between 24 and 29 months of age. And he videotaped the parents taking a short test to see how they would complete an adult task while still caring for the toddler. So, they’ve got that kind of I need to get this done, but I need to keep you entertained, dynamic going on. And then they prepared a snack and they ate with a child and then they changed the child’s clothes. And both of those tasks were chosen because parents do them often and occasionally they cause distress for the child. And so the research has found that when they were distressed, the toddlers preferred to interact with the caregiver who spent the most time with them and was most involved in their caregiving regardless of their attachment to that caregiver.

Jen: 28:35

And although the attachment history didn’t predict which parent the child would go to, the children who are securely attached to the caregiver they approached were more effective in using that caregiver to recover from distress. And so I’m hypothesizing here and I’d like you to sort of check me is the piece of information I’ve been missing in this whole thing is that the child perceives that being asked to take a bath with the non-preferred parent is a distressing event and that’s what causes my daughter to ask for me. It’s not really about the bath, it’s about resolving that newly felt distressed even if she wasn’t distressed until that moment, am I right on there?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 29:14

Yes, because perhaps if it happens less frequently, there’s some level of unpredictability about how that’s going to go with Daddy giving me the bath. Whereas I know how it goes with you. You do it most of the time. So, I’m quite comfortable and it doesn’t distress me. So whatever activates the attachment system and that’s usually some perceived threat and a bath could be threatening and they’re going to want their primary attachment figure. It’s like, no, no, no, I need Mommy here. I need Mommy here. And so one of the strategies, which of course, you know, I mean this takes a concerted effort and maybe some practice over time is that both parents engaged, letting maybe the father be the like, okay, we’ll go together, and so that the child can see, oh no, this is safe. There’s nothing going to happen here that is going to distress me and Mommy’s right there if I need her. And then sort of reassuring the child as this becomes a routine. Like see, you’re fine. Daddy’s right here and I’m not far away if you need me that that might sort of alleviate that mothers always have to be there in any potentially stressful moment for their child.

Jen: 30:18

Okay. And so is it possible that we can sort of build up this routine ‘cause I think sometimes it occurs even when there is a routine that Daddy gives a bath every other night or something that the child would still say, oh, I want Mommy to do it.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 30:33

Well, I think there’s always a preference for that primary attachment figure in all situations it’s just comforting. It’s nice to have you right there beside me, right? And I don’t know if you can eventually train your children out of not wanting their primary attachment figure because even in adulthood we are like that. I mean things become highly stressful in our life, we might have two or three attachment figures, but there’s always someone who we most want to connect with.

Jen: 30:59

Yeah. Okay. So, we’re saying it’s even not necessarily desirable to have the child not prefer one parent even if we could do it?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 31:08

I think you would have a hard time making that actually happen in real life. It doesn’t seem to play out that way. So that does mean of course for the primary that they’re on duty much more because they’re expected to be responsive. And of course that sort of is the nature of parenting anyway, isn’t it? The 24/7 I need to be available to my child. But I think mothers feel that much more often because they are the primary attachment figure.

Jen: 31:32

And so the best thing to do then to sort of ease that process along, I guess is to make the child feel comfortable in the secondary parents’ presence through reassurance from the primary attachment figure and potentially sort of withdrawing that over time and letting them have that relationship by themselves.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 31:52

Absolutely. And I think as children get older, cognitively they’re able to understand that so at that point you can sort of remind like you see that was gray, right? You had a fun time with Daddy and so just sort of reminding them that in this situation that could have been potentially stressful for you, you were there with Daddy and everything was fine.

Jen: 32:12

Yeah. I think a lot of parents struggle with is that their relationship with Daddy, the secondary caregiver is fine when the primary caregiver is not around.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 32:22

Yeah. Right. Like I’ll take you because this person’s not here.

Jen: 32:25

Yes. Yes. And I think that the thing that the secondary caregivers find frustrating is I’m fine when nobody else is around, but as soon as you come back it gets difficult again. Is there anything you would say to these secondary caregivers who are sort of having this experience to reassure them that this is normal or this is how it’s supposed to work?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 32:50

This is typical and that it doesn’t in any way negate the value or importance of your relationship with that child. The fact that they have a preference, I think you can point them to their own lives and say, don’t you as well have a preference for someone you’d like to have respond to you in certain situations. But it doesn’t mean that other people that are important to you lose their importance. I think it feels a little like secondary for fathers sometimes a little excluded from that. Spend the time with the child to engage and to try to reassure and establish this sort of sensitive relationship where the child feels more comfortable turning to that second parent or the other parents when they have attachment needs. And that kind of speaks to two issues. So, part of attachment needs are having that reassurance when you are distressed. But another part is having this sort of secure base from which you can engage and explore in the larger world. And that’s where we see this differentiation where fathers often serve as these sort of ready companions or willing playmates to help their children engage in this way. It’s also very important. It’s another very important part of that attachment security.

Jen: 33:57

Yeah. And so just because you’re not the preferred parent at bath time doesn’t mean that your role in this family is not important.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 34:03

Right. Or that you don’t have important things to contribute to your children’s attachment security. So one of the things we noticed in our research, and in often more recent studies, we had older children so we could interview them and ask them, is that what they would say? Is that when they were emotionally distressed, they generally preferred their mothers. I want mom to comfort me, but if they were frightened in any way they wanted their fathers.

Jen: 34:27

Oh, interesting.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 34:28

Yeah. So it was like this more of a protective role that I know I can rely on my father if something seems literally dangerous to me instead of just emotionally distressing.

Jen: 34:39

Yeah. And I just wanted to briefly revisit something you said about, you know, imagine you as an adult have a primary figure that you go to for security, but if that person is unavailable, you can still get the security and the attachment that you need from another person. And I think that’s so profound for parents to understand, oh yeah, I do this too. Because then they can see it in their children, oh yeah, that’s totally normal.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 35:03

I think that Bowlby release sort of rock the scientific world when he made that point, that attachment is lifelong. It isn’t something that we just need as children and then we grow up and we don’t need that. There’s never a time in our lives where we don’t want or need someone to respond to our distress to comfort us and to reassure us. And so in adulthood it’s the same. It’s just that we are more sophisticated, I mean we have potentially more individuals we can reach out to for maybe very specific context. You know, if I’m stressed at work, maybe it’s my coworker. If it’s a bigger kind of stress then it’s my romantic partner, or maybe it’s one of my parents who’s still my attachment figure. Children have more limited access to potential attachment figures or people who could function in those ways. They really only have that sort of small circle within their family.

Jen: 35:54

Yeah. And so I don’t know if there’s any research on this, but I’m wondering about if there is any research on why children switch their primary figure, because I think that that is somewhat common as well. The parent will say, oh yeah, my kid used to prefer me, but now Daddy’s all that they want.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 36:12

Yeah, I think it depends on the nature of what they’re utilizing that attachment figure for. That sometimes we see that switch as children move into preschool because they have fewer physical needs that need to be met so they can start to feed themselves and clothed themselves, bathe. And now it’s more about exploring and seeking opportunities outside the immediate family in which again, fathers tend to take more of a role there. And that might be part of the preference. But the preference is always based on who’s best meeting my needs. And so the other, this is an interesting phenomenon too, longitudinal research has shown that some individuals as adolescents and young adults can have something called earned security, which is that they may have been assessed as infants or young children as having an insecure attachment to one of their parents or their primary.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 37:06

But then now and young adulthood, they appear to be secure. Their internal working models are much more positive of themselves and others. And how did that happen? Well, somewhere along the way, and it’s typically in a close relationship either it could be a very close friend, but more often it’s a close romantic relationship. They have a different pattern of that relationship looks different, that partner is more responsive, more sensitive. And over time it begins to change the way they see themselves and the way they see others. And they can get to this place of earned security, but this happens in significant long-term relationships that that attachment maybe preference would change.

Jen: 37:47

Yeah. Okay. And so I’m guessing that this process is also impacted by the father’s relationship with the child’s mother as well. And so I think you’ve looked at the association between father’s efficacy with their effectiveness and their involvement in parenting. Can you tell us about that?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 38:04

Yeah, well, so we looked at a couple of things and some of our studies where we looked at mothers and fathers attachment styles with their partners, right? And so we found that when fathers were secure with their wives or their partners, then their children also tended to be more securely attached to them. And the other factor that we looked at was, again, predictive of children’s attachment security was co-parenting. And that was the father’s perception that we’re doing this together. We’re on the same page. Supportive of the way that I parent. And that was predictive of children’s attachment security for fathers, but not for mothers.

Jen: 38:42

Okay. So you’re saying that if the mother is supportive of the way the father’s interacting with the child, then the child is more likely to have a strong attachment to the father?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 38:51

Maybe because, and sort of as a mediator, it could be that because the couple has a good relationship. The father’s parenting skills are more optimal or more sensitive. And that’s what supports the attachment security with the child. Whereas when couples are fighting or they’re having disagreements that tends to distract from parenting, seems to distract fathers more than mothers. So, when marital quality is poor, fathers report and their children experience poorer parent-child relationships with their fathers, not necessarily with their mothers.

Jen: 39:24

Okay. And so there’s this idea of the mother being a gatekeeper that I think is somewhat coming in some families where the mother will say, oh no, you’re not doing it right. Just I’ll do the diaper ‘cause that’s not how you do diapers or something like that. Maybe as direct as that, but maybe slightly more indirect as well. And it seems as that pretty much undermines the father’s efficacy beliefs. Does that impact to the father’s involvement in the family?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 39:48

Typically, yes. So, if there is that sort of gatekeeping going on that every time I try to do these tasks, my wife says stop, I got it, don’t bother, I can handle this. Then fathers stopped bothering and it’s like, well, if you’re going to criticize me when I do this, fine, maybe I can’t do this well, maybe it is you and I’ll just step back. And so it’s something to be aware of I think to recognize that you can certainly enjoy as a mother your parenting role, but if you have a partner there, your child is only going to benefit if you give that partner opportunities to also engage in those regular care routines and build a secure attachment with the child as well.

Jen: 40:28

Yup. Okay. And so before we start to wrap up by talking about this relationship as the children get a little bit older, obviously we’re talking about fathers, we’ve talked a lot about fathers, but there are some families where there are two mothers in the family and also where there are two fathers in the family. And so I did see one study of two mother households were only 10 of 60 lesbian women who were interviewed stated that their firstborns had a clear, exclusive and stable preference for the birth mother, which I was surprised by I mean that’s much lower than I think I would expect in a heterosexual relationship. So how does this research intersect families that don’t have a traditional sort of heterosexual relationship?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 41:06

I think the keyword there is traditional and I think it has to do with caregiving role. So, more lesbian couples I have nontraditional or not gender based roles for care. So, both parents might be providing equal amounts of caregiving for their child. And then there’s not a clear preference because I’m having both respond to me. And if they’re both sensitive in those responses, then there may not be a preference of the child demonstrates. I think the preference is always evident when one caregiver is more sensitive, more consistently responsive, meeting the child’s needs, calming that distress on a regular basis. That’s where we start to see the preferences. And that’s true whether we’re talking about same sex couples or we’re talking about heterosexual couples.

Jen: 41:50

Okay. So, it seems that the best thing that any parent can do, no matter what kind of relationship you’re in, is that both parents respond sensitively to the child’s needs. That’s the crux of it, right?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 42:01

I think so. And I think it is understanding what those needs are. I think as sometimes we move into adulthood and we forget how uncertain or frightening things could be. Even everyday events like bath time for example, and we think, oh, the child’s being ridiculous. This is silly. And yet that’s really where they are and you need to meet them where they are as opposed to expecting them to understand things from your perspective.

Jen: 42:25

Yeah, that a bath is not scary.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 42:27

That’s right. That sort of logic. Any parent who’s tried that in their child, no, it fails miserably. You try to explain to the child best is just silly. And that is not very convincing.

Jen: 42:37

No, it’s not. And I think that’s a real challenge of parenting is to sort of bring it back down to the child’s level and instead of expecting them to rationally understand, you know, we did bath yesterday, you weren’t scared then, why are you scared now? But to try and understand, the child isn’t doing this just to drive you up the wall. They’re doing this for a reason that to them seems very real. And the more that we can understand that reason, the more we can address it in a way that meets everybody’s needs.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 43:07

And I think that goes back to that reflective functioning or that attunement. When you recognize your child’s feelings and thoughts about situations, you’re better able to respond.

Jen: 43:18

Okay. And so as we conclude here, I’m thinking about how the father’s role shifts as the child gets older. And I saw one study that said that “Mother is usually retain the primary attachment status through the high school years, followed by romantic partners and then best friends. And then lastly fathers.” And so some of the young women who are quoted in that study talked about how their fathers would completely overreact, will be over protective if they ever shared any real information and they essentially seem to be just using their fathers as a source of transportation from one point to another, which seemed incredibly sad to me. And so I’m wondering if this is linked to the father’s inability or possibly unwillingness to provide secure base or a reflective functioning attunement behavior earlier in life and would we potentially kind of avoid this outcome where the fathers are at the bottom of the attachment hierarchy heat in adolescence and later in life if these skills were better developed earlier in life?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 44:19

I think that really is key because that pattern follows a child that as, you know, the research really shows that what is the quality of those early interactions between each parent and if fathers can be more sensitive and emotionally available and responsive to their children earlier on then their children can continue to rely on that parent rather than just for sort of instrumental types of support like, well, my Dad will give me a ride here or my Dad will give me the money, but I never talked to him about my personal problems because he overreacts or he doesn’t understand or he doesn’t want to talk about these things that makes him uncomfortable.

Jen: 44:57

Yeah. Wow. That’s really profound, so yeah, it’s the fact that the mother is more likely to, I mean she may feel this discomfort as well or maybe she doesn’t feel it as much, but she’s more able to sort of relate to the child with what the child needs in that moment. Whereas the father’s more likely to say, well, I don’t want you dating that guy or I don’t want you doing that thing and so it causes the child to withdraw from the father. I’m hypothesizing is, am I on the right track, do you think?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 45:26

Oh yes, absolutely. I was thinking about it in our study with school age families that when we asked children like what do you do with each of your parents? So much of what they did with their fathers was activity oriented. So, it was sports or some sort of organized activity and that’s what they did with their fathers. But when we asked, well what do you do with your mothers? They said pretty much everything, we just hang out, we do shopping or whatever. But in the course of that spending time together is this context in which children feel like if I want to bring something up, I can talk to my mother about these things. Whereas when you’re doing activities with your father, it’s maybe not the time to bring up a personal problem that you’re having, right? ‘Cause we’re engaged in a sport at the moment. And so it’s really about how are they accessing their parents, how are they using their parents and how do they feel that their parents are available to them in what areas or what capacities.

Jen: 46:17

Yeah. And I think even though if you’re sort of playing sports, then yeah, that’s not the time to bring up a decent problem that you’re having, but maybe you walk to get there or you drove to get there and you had time. And so either there’s this silence as you’re walking or driving or you’re talking about any consequential things or you can use it as this chance to understand what’s going on in your child’s mind and support that relationship, the ongoing development of the relationship. And I think, again, hypothesizing that a lot of parents, fathers particularly miss out on that and sort of just don’t take advantage of it. And so they get sort of ever deeper into these trenches of we don’t talk about these things. We just walk or drive in silence.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 46:55

Yeah. And I hope that that’s changing. I hope that even within our society, we’re sort of proposing a model where fathers can be more emotionally engaged in all of their relationships so that emotions are not uncomfortable for them the way maybe if you look sort of back fathers in the 50s and the 60s it’s like I don’t deal with those kinds of things. And it’s like, but I think more and more as a culture we’re saying no, that’s just human to deal with, express and understand your emotions, other people’s, that’s emotional intelligence. And to the extent that father’s opened themselves up to that, then they’re going to be more available and capable of being responsive to their children.

Jen: 47:33

And have better relationships with their children potentially for years to come.
Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 47:37 Absolutely. Because I’ve certainly interviewed fathers that have those kinds of relationships. They say, my child can talk to me about anything and I don’t push them away when they’re talking about emotional stuff or I don’t tell them how to solve the problem. So, I see some progress in this area.

Jen: 47:55

Well, on that positive note, thank you so much for helping us to really give us some practical research based tools to support the development of these relationships with our families. I’m really grateful to you for doing that.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 48:07

Oh, I enjoyed it. I was glad to share.

Jen: 48:10

So, references for today’s episode can be found at YourParentingMojo.com/Fathers and also there’s a link there to the book that we mentioned earlier called “The Dad Factor” by Richard Fletcher. And your copy may come from Germany or maybe there’ll be some others coming up on the market soon. So again, you can find all of that information at YourParentingMojo.com/Fathers.

References

Benbassat, N., & Priel, B. (2015). Why is father’s reflective function important? Psyhoanalytic Psychology 32(1) 1-22. Benoit, D. & Parker, K.C

.H. (1994). Stability and Transmission of Attachment across Three Generations. Child Development, 65 (5), 1444-1456.

Bretherton, I., Lambert, J.D., & Golby, B. (2005). Involved fathers of preschool children as seen by themselves and their wives: Accounts of attachment, socialization, and companionship. Attachment & Human Development 7(3), 229-251.

Coyl-Shepherd, D.D., & Hanlon, C. (2013). Family play and leisure activities: Correlates of parents’ and children’s socio-emotional well-being. International Journal of Play 2(3), 254-272.

Coyl-Shepherd, D.D., & Newland, L.A. (2013). Mothers’ and fathers’ couple and family contextual influences, parent involvement, and school-age child attachment. Early Childhood Development and Care 183(3-4), 553-569.

Dumont, C., & Paquette, D. (2013). What about the child’s tie to the father? A new insight into fathering, father-child attachment, children’s socio-emotional development and the activation relationship theory. Early Child Development and Care 183(3-4), 430-446.

Fletcher, R. (2011). The Dad factor: How father-baby bonding helps a child for life. Mona Vale, New South Wales: Finch.

Freeman, H., Coyl-Shepherd, D.D., & Newland, L.A. (2008). Father beliefs as a mediator between contextual barriers and father involvement. Early Child Development and Care 178(7), 803-819.

Freeman, H. (2010). Mapping young adults’ use of fathers for attachment support: implications on romantic relationship experiences. Early Child Development and Care 180(1), 227-248.

Freeman, H., Newland, L.A., & Coyl, D.D. (2010). New directions in father involvement. Early Child Development and Care 180(1-2), 1-8.

Gaumon, S., & Paquette, D. (2013). The father-child activation relationship and internalizing disorders at preschool age. Early Child Development and Care 183(3-4), 447-463.

George, M.R.W., Cummings, E.M., & Davies, P.T. (2010). Positive aspects of fathering and mothering, and children’s attachment in kindergarten. Early Child Development and Care 180(1-2), 107-119.

Goldberg, A.E., Downing, J.B., & Sauck, C.C. (2008). Perceptions of children’s parental preferences in lesbian two-mother households. Journal of Marriage and Family 70, 419-434.

Grossman, K., Grossman, K.E., Kindler, H., & Zimmerman, P. (2008). A wider view of attachment and exploration: The influences of mothers and fathers on the development of psychological security from infancy to young adulthood. In J. Cassidy & P. R. Shaver (Eds.). Handbooks of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (2nd. ed.) (pp. 552-598)). New York, NY: Guildford Press.

Newland, L.A., & Coyl, D.D. (2010). Fathers’ role as attachment figures: An interview with Sir Richard Bowlby. Early Child Development and Care 180(1-2), 25-32.

Newland, L.A., Chen, H-H., Coyl-Shepherd, D.D., Liang, Y-C., Carr, E.R., Dykstra, E., & Gapp, S.C. (2013). Parent and child perspectives on mothering and fathering: The influence of ecocultural niches. Early Child Development and Care 183(3-4), 534-552.

Pluke, R.H. (2014). Men’s experiences of fathering sons: Encountering difference and disappointment. Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Retrieved from https://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10413/13939/Pluke_Robert_Hay_2014.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Umemura, T., Jacobvitz, D., Messina, S., & Hazen, N. (2013). Do toddlers prefer the primary caregiver or the parent with whom they feel more secure? The role of toddler emotion. Infant Behavior and Development 36(1), 102-114.

Transcript

Jen:   [00:38]

Hello and welcome to today’s episode of your parenting Mojo. We’ve done a number of episodes by now in our series on the importance of play and I think this actually might be the last of them for a while. We started out by asking what is the value of play, and then we looked at the benefits of outdoor play and we talked with Dr Scott Sampson about his book, How to Raise a Wild Child. Then we wrapped up with outdoor play by trying to understand whether we should allow our children to take more risks. As we finish this whole series on play, I wanted to look at a question that comes up a lot in parenting groups that I’m in, which is: “my child loves fantasy play, but I just can’t stand it. What do I do?” So in this episode we’re going to try and get to the bottom of whether fantasy play really is important to a child’s development and what you can do if you just can’t stand it either.

Jen:     [01:24]

So to help us think through these things. I’m here today with Dr Ansley Gilpin, who is an associate professor at the University of Alabama and a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on cognitive development in early childhood, so between about ages three and eight, specifically with a focus on executive functions and imagination as well as development of academic and socioemotional skills. Dr Gilpin is exploring the potential mediation effect of executive functions on school readiness intervention outcomes as well as long term intervention effects on cognitive development. Welcome Dr. Gilpin.

New Speaker:   [01:57]

Thank you for having me.

Jen:   [01:59]

All right, so let’s start all the way at the beginning here. I wonder if you could define for us what is fantasy play.

Dr. Gilpin:   [02:06]

So when we talk about fantasy play in research and when I observed children doing it in their natural day to day lives I’m talking about is a type of pretend play that children tend to do on their own, which involves them pretending something that they don’t experience in everyday life. So differentiated from pretending to be a mommy or pretending to cook or pretending to go to the movies. So with fantasy play they are pretending something that they have not experienced before, like making popcorn on the moon.

Jen:   [02:45]

Oh Wow. Okay. So that, that’s a very important distinction there. So pretend play is one thing and fantasy play is another thing as far as the research is concerned, then?

Dr. Gilpin:   [02:56]

Pretty much. Fantasy play as a type of pretend.

Jen:    [02:59]

Okay. Okay Great. So there has been a fair bit of research done on the benefits of fantasy play on children’s development. And when I read in the popular press about fantasy play, I see these general assumptions that are made that fantasy play is really critical for children’s development. And I know that there was a meta-analysis done, which is a study that looks at a lot of different studies and tries to understand what’s the overall direction of the evidence and you weren’t involved in that study, but I know that you’ve commented on it and your work as well, but that method analysis examined theoretical ways that fantasy play could influence a child’s development and those kind of varied from fantasy play having a critical role to being an index rather than a promoter of development to a fantasy play. Kind of coinciding with other aspects of development but not really being that important. And I was really surprised to find in that paper that the research really doesn’t support the position that fantasy play is critical to the majority of aspects of children’s development, but the far larger problem, but most of the research has such a huge methodological problems that it’s hard to say much more than fantasy play might be linked with some aspects of children’s development. I wonder if you could kind of comment on the general status of the literature and your view of it.

Dr. Gilpin:   [04:14]

Yes. So this is one exciting part of this research, so with Dr Lillard she and her colleagues demonstrated was going through all of the research on pretense, pretend, play, imaginative play, fantasy, play, all those different types of play that are really very similar and looking to see whether or not there was research to show that really it was causal in facilitating development and part of the excitement is that we don’t know the answer to that yet and we don’t have a lot of support to show that it’s actually causing development to occur or that it is absolutely critical for development and it may not be; it may just be to her point related to development or it may enhance development. It may just develop at the same time as other skills. So we really don’t know. And as we improve on methodology and improve on our physiological measurements and biological measurements and our ability to observe naturalistic play and get multiple measures, that’s really going to help us be able to make those decisions. And so really as the research skill technique and equipment evolves, we will evolve with this question.

Jen:    [05:42]

Okay. Yeah. And I did wonder to what extent, the way that we attempt to study pretend play is part of the reason that we’re not finding these significant effects. Because when you actually go into some of the studies that are included in that meta-analysis and you look at the methodology, you see the researchers are often going to put children in a lab and they asked them to do some kind of specific task and then they say, okay, now let’s pretend with this specific toy that I’m giving you and you have to do it in this way. And so firstly, I wonder, is it possible that researchers don’t differentiate between pretend and fantasy play in the way that you just did? And secondly, children engaging in fantasy play at home: it’s the child that says, “Mom, I’m going to make popcorn on the moon.” It’s not me that saying that. So how much of this is an artifact of the researcher telling the child how to play?

Dr. Gilpin:    [06:29]

Right? And so I recently got a grant from the Templeton Foundation to work on that. And so what we did is we really help define the different types of play and that’s going to be important going forward just as you said, so that we’re not combining types of play when we study and confusing them and also then how we’re measuring them. So we created a measurement that parents can report on. So as a parent myself and having interviewed literally thousands of children, they say whatever pops into their head half the time and they’re not good at giving you the last six months, what was it? What did they like to do? They tell you their favorite thing was what they did five minutes ago. That’s just part of their memory development. And so it’s really going to be very interesting as the methodology changes and improves. And that is somewhat technology and somewhat learning. Developmental Science psychology is really early science and so we’re really learning as we go and it’s really exciting.

Jen:    [07:32]

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s very strange for non-scientists like me to understand that this is relatively new landscape. If things that there aren’t better answers to a lot of these questions yet when we’ve been studying them for 20 or 30 years and in fact that’s not long enough to really fully understand them yet. Yeah. So one of the things that I thought was really cool coming out of that paper that you mentioned by Dr Lillard was published in 2013 and then you and your colleagues really took that and said, okay, well yes, we acknowledge the methodology and some of these papers isn’t great, so let’s see how we can do better. And so you’ve published a paper showing there’s a correlation between fantasy orientation and executive function and I wonder if you can tell some more about that please.

Dr. Gilpin:   [08:17]

Sure. So the correlational research, to be honest, doesn’t get us very far, but it’s our first stepping stone. Right? So it just says that when children participate in more fantasy play that either we can measure by directly observing the child or their parent or their teacher tells us that they are higher in fantasy play or pretend play than some of the other kids and then this particular paper that we were talking about fantasy play, so the experiences they haven’t done before. What we found was that correlated with children who had higher what we call executive functions. So those are basic cognitive skills that have something to do with your intelligence and your ability to process, so things like your ability to inhibit and your ability to pay attention and shift your attention when you need to. Your ability to engage your working or short term memory, and I’m using that right now as I try to remember the executive function…

Dr. Gilpin:   [09:16]

Your ability to plan and organize, which is a little bit later than the toddler years, but those are all skills that are related to how much a child participated in fantasy play. And we measured this in two ways. Both in how much they participated according to their teachers and their parents as well as how much they could show us that they could do it. So how imaginative was it really as well as their, what we call propensity towards play. So parents may have noticed, some children just really like to engage in imaginative or fantasy play and some children really don’t seem to do that very much and that seems to be an individual difference that we can measure in personality later in adulthood. And you can think about it in terms of yourself as well; whether or not you liked to go to see movies that are more imaginative, more fantastical, whether you can keep open the possibility that there might be extra-terrestrials possibly trying to be a super weirdo. Some examples here versus people who would much rather see a movie about a scientist or about mathematics.

Jen:   [10:36]

So a number of points came up here. Firstly, if my husband’s listening to this interview, which he does occasionally when they published and he’s going to be laughing as he drives home from work because I have zero tolerance for suspension of disbelief. So yeah, I have no interest whatsoever in watching a movie about something that couldn’t really happen and to some extent I kind of see that in my daughter and that she does engage in a little bit of fantasy play. But it’s more of a brief imagination rather than an extended idea that she plays with for a long time. And so what we’re seeing here in, in the research I think is there’s a correlation and so there may be some link between executive function and fantasy play, but that firstly, not every child who doesn’t engage in fantasyy play has poor executive function skills. And secondly, it’s really hard to understand which direction this correlation goes in. Right? We don’t know which half of it leads the other half

Dr. Gilpin:   [11:33]

right now. We did a follow up study promoted in part by Dr Lillards meta-analysis. What we did is we put the kids into three separate play conditions over a period of five weeks and in their own schools in their own way, we didn’t force them to play with a certain topic in mind; we just simply encouraged one group of kids to play in a more fantastical way by saying things like what would happen if we went and popcorn on the moon? And then gave them that cue and then let them do it. And we followed them and if all of a sudden they were cooking cookies on the moon, that’s okay too, you know. And then the other kids, we gave them a reality-based prompt. Like that was very similar in scope. Right? Let’s go make popcorn. Right. And then other children, we played games that didn’t involve imagination at all.

Dr. Gilpin:  [12:28]

So things like hopscotch. Right. And is that an duck? Duck goose and hot potato. Right. And with other kids they didn’t get any additional play than they already got in their regular preschools. And I should mention that these were both low income preschools where there wasn’t a lot of imaginative play as well as preschools where there were quite a lot of enriched play. And what we found is the kids in the fantasy play condition showed us a change in their executive functions over the course of five weeks. So that at least tells us there is a link, that it’s not just over time this is happening, but there seems to be some sort of link. And we also found that the children who naturally had more propensity to play with fantasy play showed us an even greater increase than their peers, but even the peers that didn’t want to do it but still did it; they wouldn’t have done it on their own; we weren’t forcing them to do it, but they wouldn’t have done it on their own, but they were like, “all right, I’ll play along; whatever” they also showed us that increased but not as strongly as the peers who wanted to do it and we’re more engaged.

Jen: [13:46]

Okay. So then your research is starting to indicate that fantasy play does potentially lead executive function and that you can increase executive function skills by engaging in more fantasy play

Dr. Gilpin: [13:58]

at least temporarily. So we don’t know if this would last hypothesis is that if you did it every day as part of a normal preschool curriculum, which most curriculums do to some degree than you would see that long-term increase. But again, that’s my speculation.

Jen: [14:15]

Yeah. And do you have plans to follow up on those children and find out?

Dr. Gilpin: [14:19]

Yes, it is a longitudinal follow up.

Jen: [14:22]

Awesome. Okay. We’ll stay tuned for that then. So on. Still the topic of the research methodology and Dr Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, whom we have talked about a fair bit on the show. We’ve actually interviewed and Roberta Golinkoff, one of her colleagues and she and her colleagues think that the usual best practice way of studying an idea which is to do an experiment where we randomly assign children to different conditions and then we control for all the possible variables that we can that might be impacting the dependent variable as possible. Isn’t really so useful here because by doing all that isolation, we might end up removing some of the factors that we’re trying to understand and they argue that we should reframe the question. Instead of asking, does pretend play cause child outcomes? We should ask how much of the variance in child outcomes is attributable to play above and beyond other factors? What do you think about that?

Dr. Gilpin: [15:12]

Yeah, I think she’s absolutely right. So that’s the next step from what I described, right, is – and we were very conscientious and doing exactly what she recommends here in that we didn’t force them to do it a specific way and control for a million different variables, but tried to leave it as naturalistic as we possibly could because we wanted to see would we see a difference in play, like they would normally do it, right? For the most part, would we see a difference? So yeah.

Jen: [15:48]

So you’re sort of trying to take the best of the scientific experimental method and bring in more of an ethnographic approach and marry the best of those to come up with something that actually leads us to something that’s useful and applicable to the real world.

Dr. Gilpin:  [16:01]

Right. And that is definitely a tight needle to thread, but she’s absolutely right. You can’t go in and control so much that you then have a completely an inpplicable situation. And also it doesn’t tell us much. What we do know is that the changes that we’re seeing are really pretty small. Right? And these are going to be really small effects, so maybe a third of a standard deviation if that means you know, so means very much so it may be five IQ points as an example. And so just a teeny tiny. I’m not suggesting that it impacts IQ, but just as an example of a third of a standard deviation, so teeny tiny incremental changes might be possible. And so that’s another good point that Dr Hirsh-Pasek says, is that really we want to know not only might it caused child outcomes but how much. Right.

Jen: [16:59]

Yeah. And it really, how relevant is it compared to other factors that influence the child more, you know, if we’re engaging in some kind of intervention to increase the amount of fantasy play they do in the classroom. Is this being massively outweighed by some other factor standardized testing, for example.

Dr. Gilpin:  [17:16]

Like totally random example. Not that that’s relevant to classrooms at all.

Jen: [17:22]

Yeah. So what, what do you think about that?

Dr. Gilpin: [17:24]

Yeah, I agree with you. I think it’s really important that we consider what the actual impact is with the effect sizes of whether this is making a really small impact but positive and we weigh that specifically with the expense and the training required of the teachers and the toll that it takes on teachers and parents. So I think you mentioned in your opening that there some parents that just hate it, don’t want to do fantasy play and I would say your child can pick up on that. They can tell what they would much rather you do is engage with them and whatever you find interesting and they find interesting, right, to get there and we know that engaging one on one between a child and a parent is super enriching for children. And so my answer to that would be we’ll do what you both enjoy, right?

Jen: [18:21]

Yeah. Okay. So I want to get into something in terms of how the research is conducted. Because when you’re reading through our research paper, it’s not often that you actually get the script that they use. So they just say, we told the children x and then we asked them to do y and then this happened and so there was one study that I found that did include the script and so it read in part where the researcher told the children, “we’re going to make up different stories using the toys on the table. We will make up a story and play it out with the toys. Good stories have a beginning, a middle and end and use lots of imagination and pretend,” and clearly you can see where the researcher is pushing them in this direction. And I couldn’t help but think back to the episodes that we’ve done on the show on storytelling recently where we learned that children from backgrounds that aren’t White and middle class and they tell stories in a very different way from middle class White children and their stories might not have a beginning, a middle and an end or the children might actually have been verbally or physically reprimanded for telling a story that wasn’t true.

Jen: [19:25]

So in this single instance that we can pick up on because the script was provided. We see this issue, I wonder how we can argue that the results of these studies are relevant to all children when really we have no idea how many of them are being set up in a way that doesn’t even consider the possibility there’s any other way to see the world than the White middle-class way.

Dr. Gilpin: [19:45]

Right? I 100% agree with that statement that it’s really hard to design any study that would be relevant to all children everywhere, right? Much less all children in a city. Right? And so we absolutely have to consider children’s backgrounds and their culture and their previous experiences when we design these studies. So one thing that we thought about when we were talking about, well how do we come up…we were coming up with examples with those prompts, right? So let’s go make popcorn on the moon. That, well, probably most children in this city that we live in know how to make sure they understand making popcorn. So that’s good. Right?

Jen:  [20:30]

Let me tell you, my daughter doesn’t know that, so she doesn’t know how to make popcorn.

Dr. Gilpin: [20:35]

We were hopeful that that most of them, most of them would. Okay, and one of the examples that we came up with was something like that. We thought most of the children and one of the schools would have experienced. One of the ideas that came up was what about we say, well, let’s fly on a plane, and then we realized, no, this is not..this is not a universal experience for all of the children, especially the children in our lower income schools. So it was really important that we picked prompts that we felt like most children had experienced or had not experienced for the fantasy.

Jen:  [21:16]

Okay. Condition. So you are actively thinking about this in your research, but clearly not everybody is.

Dr. Gilpin:  [21:21]

Right. But it’s really hard to do. But it is. It’s very important. And another thing that we pick up on, it might be interesting and I won’t go into too many details, but in the southeastern United States, we have a group of highly religious, like fundamentally religious background. Families and children are highly discouraged from pretending and also from beliefs that are not about God and so they are not allowed to believe in Santa Claus is a good example of that and so in this case it was really important to consider that when we consider what their experience is with pretend play, whether or not we’re going to be able to ethically ask them to pretend play and so there are a lot of very important…

Jen: [22:12]

Wow! You’re in a tricky spot as a researcher.

Dr. Gilpin: [22:13]

But fascinating.

Jen:  [22:16]

So how do you get around that? Did you have to ask about the religious orientation of your families before you start?

Dr. Gilpin:  [22:23]

We did.

Jen:  [22:23]

Okay.

Dr. Gilpin: [22:24]

We did in because that tends to be related. I’ll go into that later if you want me to, but that tends to be related, but in general, we really made sure that we weren’t asking them to pretend about anything that would be against their cultural or religious beliefs, so there weren’t pretending about witches, for example. That would have definitely not been appreciated from some of the families. Or pretending about vampires.

Jen:  [22:52]

Right. Okay. But you. You did have these children in your sample, so you are asking children who have basically no experience with pretending in their daily lives and asking them to engage in this play. I wonder how that impacted your results.

Dr. Gilpin: [23:05]

So it’s interesting and that they’re not allowed to pretend and there’s quite a lot of research, especially with ethnographic research and as well as anthropological research and particular Marjorie Taylor has done some great work looking at children from Mennonite backgrounds and other fundamentalists backgrounds to show that they still do it anyway. So it is a universal experience. It’s just taboo in some situations.

Jen: [23:34]

Okay. Alright. So you, you provided a beautiful segue into my next question, which is that in the show in general, we like to look to the anthropological literature to see how people, other cultures deal with a particular issue that we’re facing. And so we’re pretty lucky on this issue because Dr David Lancey, who has a fabulous book that we reference all the time, The Anthropology of Childhood and he covers it quite extensively and he gives a ton of examples of children in different cultures playing. But I want to quote from the conclusion because it kind of covers it most concisely and he says, “make-believe play is valued as a learning medium in nearly all cultures, in hours, parents become actively engaged with children’s make believe in purchasing or making appropriate prompts in guiding the child’s development and make believe and fantasy in linking. Make believe to reading books and stories and then using the medium pedantically to teach moral and other lessons.

Jen: [24:25]

When we don’t intervene to guide play, our children have a tendency to become bored. Village parents get involved and make belief only to the extent of donating materials, including miniature or cast-off tools. Otherwise they keep their distance. Boredom seems unknown.” So a lot of parents, as we’ve alluded to a couple times, don’t want to engage in fantasy play with their children because the parents just find it boring. And it seems to me that the only reason western parents need to engage in fantasy play is because the children don’t get told, go and play with the other children anymore. So if I have an only child and she gets a reasonable amount of unstructured playtime with other children, but she still wants to engage in fantasy, play with me. Can I say no? And should I say no?

Dr. Gilpin: [25:10]

Uh, it’s a great question. Right? So it really, I hate to do this, but it really depends on the time.

Jen:  [25:17]

Of course. Yes, of course.

Dr. Gilpin:  [25:19]

There some kids that would be very…would feel like they were being cast off.

Jen:  [25:24]

Yes.

Dr. Gilpin: [25:25]

So in that case I would say don’t break your child’s heart, do it for five minutes. And the other hand there are some children that just need to be redirected. And I do this all the time with my children and go play with your sister, go play with your friend. I think so and so is available next door. I have to do the laundry. I do. Right. But yes. So there’s great research to show that in some slightly off topic, but related in some villages and cultures, really, parents don’t talk to their kids.

Jen:  [26:02]

They really don’t.

Dr. Gilpin: [26:02]

They don’t. And in fact, the children and older children in particular, the ones that are providing the language enrichment and language training and playing and teaching and, and we really as human beings, there’s plenty of research from all different areas to show that we really need human interaction. But it doesn’t have to be from your parent.

Jen:  [26:27]

Yup. Yeah. It’s so fascinating. The distinction with our culture where the mother’s age, I guess partly, but also vocabulary and a level of education is seen as of primary importance and we’re not assuming that the child gets any amount of meaningful language development from siblings or friends, or anything like that. So yeah, so there’s not one path to raising an a well adjusted child. There are many different paths and approaches that you can take. So yeah. So the takeaway seems to be if fantasy play is something that is extremely important to your child. Then engaging in a small amount of it might be a good thing to do, but it’s not necessarily something that you feel as though you have to engage in all the time.

Dr. Gilpin: [27:06]

Right. But I enjoy fantasy play, but at the same time there is a point where I have to do the laundry…

Jen:[27:15]

Let’s make the laundry fly to the moon!

Dr. Gilpin: [27:17]

That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, absolutely. So they want to know that you care, that you love them and that you enjoy them. But you can do that in many different ways.

Jen: [27:28]

Yeah. Okay. So you bring up the laundry, which is sort of like work and in a lot of different cultures. I guess I would consider it work, but a lot of cultures, very young children perform very real work from a young age, like moving water from a cistern into the house or providing actual childcare for younger siblings while parents go out and work. And in our Western, Educated, Industrialized Rich, Democratic, or WEIRD societies, we say that it’s just not appropriate for young children to work and we actually make it hard for them to do that. And then of course later we complain when they don’t want to do their chores. And so I was really interested to see one paper that says, researchers have asked why at the very ages when children are developing basic representations of the world, they engage in an activity that misrepresents reality after all, the primary task of early childhood is figuring out how the real world works.

Jen:  [28:22]

And so that was interesting in contrast with an interview of Vivian Paley, who was a preschool teacher and she is an outspoken advocate of play; she’s written a lot of books and papers about it and she was asking in an interview, is there any downside to describing children’s play as work and Paley responded “There is no downside to a serious consideration of play as the central motivating and learning tool of young children,” but I’m wondering is it possible that children could achieve similar cognitive development through participation in self chosen work? So it’s not me standing over them saying you will do this or else, but self chosen work as they do through pretend play or is pretend play really uniquely useful at bringing out the kinds of creativity and collaboration and willingness to take risks that we know are going to be important skills for children in the future.

Dr. Gilpin: [29:11]

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that Maria Montessori really addressed this with her work and her curriculum and that she really felt it was very important that when children were interacting in the classroom and learning are playing, that they used real tools so they had real cups and pitchers, made of glass. There are a lot of parents, including myself that would probably not hand there too, knowing that they for certainly would end up at the hospital in a few minutes, but she really felt that it was really important that they learn to interact with their world in a real way. And I think that children really just like to engage and experience the world and there are a lot of different ways to do this. And again, I think it goes back to these personality individual difference. That there are some children who are very creative and very imaginative and collaborative with other children and they want to do that in their play or in their work if you want to call it that. And there are other children who really want to do something that’s reality-based and that just seems to be an individual difference.

Jen: [30:32]

Okay. And so again, sensitively responding to your child is potentially the best way to move forward in that regard?

Dr. Gilpin: [30:39]

I think so. I like to ideally kind of try both. So at the moment, my two year old likes to crack eggs.

Jen: [30:50]

Yeah, mine went through that.

Dr. Gilpin:  [30:50]

They love it. Yeah, it is really messy, but she really likes to do that so I’m trying to embrace the Salmonella all over the kitchen countertops as she cracks, you know, a dozen eggs but she’s really enjoying that at the moment. But previously she really enjoyed pretending like she was a princess and so we did that. And so you’ll see stability of that over time where a child…some children do both pretty well and some children really like one or the other. A very, not super rare, but pretty rare subset of kids have imaginary friends. That tends to be about a third of kids roughly kind of depending on how you define it, so if you restrict it to truly in their imagination only then it’s less, but if you allow it to be like an animated toy that they have, like Christopher Robin’s Winnie the Pooh, then it’s a little bit more, but they have imaginary friends and, and a very rare subset, about five to 10 percent actually have paracosms where they have their own imaginary world and it has currency and laws and the whole nine yards.

Jen: [32:08]

Wow.

Dr. Gilpin: [32:10]

And that’s how we end up with Harry Potter and please fantastic stories. Right.

Jen: [32:17]

Okay. And so when parents see that their child has an imaginary friend, maybe the tendency is to think, why are they doing this? Should I be encouraging this? W, what would you say to someone whose child has an imaginary friend?

Dr. Gilpin:  [32:32]

So we have looked extensively at imaginary friends and several other researchers have to. And what we find is surprisingly, and you’ll hear as a side note, you’ll hear novelists explain it in the same way that the children really do not have control over what the imaginary friend does. So you’ll hear novelists say things like, I had no idea that the character was going to get in a plane and take off. And you’re like…

Jen: [33:00]

I have heard them say that. And I always think, well, what do you mean? You wrote it!

Dr. Gilpin:  [33:04]

And many of them will say that, right? Or like there was a character that just appeared. And you’re like, “What?!”

Jen:  [33:10]

So this is the reason why I haven’t written a novel!

Dr. Gilpin:  [33:14]

Right, right, right. So we have a lot of children that have, you know, about a third of kids have an imaginary friend and they’ll hang out for awhile with the imaginary friend.

Dr. Gilpin: [33:23]

Parents sometimes don’t know. So we think about maybe about half parents are aware of children have imaginary friends.

Jen:  [33:29]

Really? I would assume the child would say, “hey mom, this is my friend whenever the bunny.”

Dr. Gilpin:  [33:34]

But no, but no. Yeah. So sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. And what we found is that they really are very similar to real friends and terms of their impact. So if the child has a pretend friend that’s innocuous, benign or even positive, and they describe positive associations with this pretend friend, right, then I wouldn’t worry about it and you know, I may ask them a few questions about it just like you would do with any other friend. And if the child is describing very negative experiences, which is pretty rare, I should say; it’s pretty rare. But in the event that it does happen, I would try to steer clear of that imaginary friend as much as possible.

Dr. Gilpin: [34:24]

I would say things like, wow, he really seems to not be a nice friend just like you would with any other friend. So it’s very interesting. We had, I think Marjorie Taylor interviewed a child whose best friend was Jack the Ripper.

Jen:  [34:39]

Whoa.

Dr. Gilpin:  [34:39]

Terrifying. I think that’s, that’s the most extreme example. And we interviewed a child whose best friend kept telling her that her parents were going to get a divorce, which was apparently not the case at all, and was very, extremely upsetting. I can image for the most part they seem to be either a positive influence or benign.

Jen:  [35:02]

Okay. So not something to worry about then?

Dr. Gilpin:  [35:05]

Not something to worry about. Yeah, and it goes away eventually, unless you become a novelist?

Dr. Gilpin:  [35:10]

Right. It either goes underground or goes away and typically we’ll go right around school age. When the child starts having a larger network of peers and they realized this is A, a little bit strange. I shouldn’t tell my friends about it and they don’t really necessarily need that companion. We also found that more firstborn children and more only children tend to have imaginary friends, for obvious reasons.

Jen:  [35:40]

Yep. Okay. Yeah. And so that leads me to the question on how children process issues through play and we’ve talked about family storytelling on the show and how children can process traumatic things that have happened to them through telling stories as a family. And so you’ve mentioned potentially Jack the Ripper not being the best pretend play companion…

Dr. Gilpin: [36:01]

I think that would have to get rid of that one.

Dr. Gilpin: [36:04]

Yeah, possibly. But maybe there are monsters…I mean the child who’s terrified her parents are going to go through a divorce. I don’t know, maybe there is something going on in the house that she’s picking up on it, that she’s, that’s coming through in her fantasy play. So I’m wondering if parents notice this kind of theme in their child’s fantasy play, should they encourage the child to keep working through the issues or should they discourage it or just observe and then try and address it later by saying, you know, we’re not getting a divorce in or something. Perhaps a little less heavy handed than that. But what do you think?

Dr. Gilpin: [36:35]

Right? Well, this is entirely my opinion. But I think that when your child exposes you to their pretend play or their imagination, they’re doing it because they want you to be interested. And so I try to show a little interest and ask them questions about it and just follow their lead for the most part. But like you said, if it’s at all distressing to the child. And I would try to help reframe that in a way that helps the child be less distressed.

Jen: [37:07]

Okay. And when you say reframe it, what do you mean?

Dr. Gilpin: [37:09]

But the same way that you would do with a child who’s distressed about anything else. So for example, if they’ve lost their toy, right? So with a small child you might distract them. With an older child you might say, well, let’s think about where the toy might be. Let’s backtrack and let’s work on it. And if we really can’t find the toy then wow, that’s disappointing. That sometimes does happen. I’m really, really sorry. Let’s see if we can find one of your other toys that would make you feel better. So really did kind of help the child in that way deal with emotional distress if it really is that. Now of course there are plenty of children who like to pretend emotional distress, who have big imaginations and they involve emotions and their imagination. And we have a little bit of research and so this is somewhat based in research and somewhat based in my opinion, but I think that they are practicing; they’re rehearsing their emotion regulation, their ability to control their emotions and to experience a big emotion and then regulate that, and so it’s important to kind of sort of tease apart whether or not they are enjoying pretending the distress

Jen: [38:21]

Or finding it useful in some way?

Dr. Gilpin:  [38:22]

Or finding it useful, right. Versus they truly are very upset about the situation. And one way you can kind of tell a little bit is whether or not the distress is still there after imagination has ended, play has ended so if the child is stressed and the play has ended, then they’re probably distressed for real, if that makes sense.

Jen:  [38:47]

Yeah. That’s very helpful. Awesome. Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit about props because I found a quote in a book on dramatic play that I loved and it says “it is a stimulant, perhaps even a condition of the active character of trueplay that is generated out of what adults usually call ‘nothing.’ If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things. Says Norman Douglas in a fascinating book called London Street Games because of course they only invent games when they have none ready-made for them, like richer folks have.” This book was written quite a while ago I think, so I know that parents want to give their child advantages and so they think about providing things to encourage dramatic play. Perhaps they’ve listened to this episode and they think, okay, I’m onboard with fantasy play and I want to support it and so I’m going to go and buy props and costumes and everything I can to support my child in doing this. But I’m wondering could this actually stifled children’s creativity rather than encouraging it and in fact we should turn them outside and let them go find a stick and have that be the thing that turns into whatever it is that they want to play with that day.

Dr. Gilpin:  [39:52]

Yeah. It’s a fantastic question. I love this question. So what we know is that children pretend play no matter what. Right? And they will do it with dark and a stick and we know that they will do it with the toys that you buy them. We know within reason probably it doesn’t matter. Right? So of course our parents have stories about how they had one doll, a doll and…

Jen:  [40:18]

“…when I was young, it was different…”

Dr. Gilpin:  [40:20]

Right. Right. And so I don’t think that it really matters. And then there may be researched to disagree with me and I would welcome it. But I think to some degree that they’ll do the play regardless. And there’s some research coming out, but it’s kind of a little…his is more my opinion. I think that the TV is stifling their creativity some degree. So I think that when we replace their imagination with somebody else’s, especially if it’s a lot of TV, like hours and hours. I read a study the other day that was looking at young children. These children were one, two, three years old and they were measuring the amount of TV in hours and one of them went up to 16 hours in a day,

Jen:  [41:04]

In a day?

Dr. Gilpin: [41:05]

In a day.

Jen:   [41:07]

And how old are these children?

Dr. Gilpin: [41:07]

Toddlers. So that would really interrupt their ability to pretend play, right? I mean there’s some good research to show even background TV interrupts their language because it also distracts parents from and maybe siblings from talking and language. And so I’m getting a little bit off topic so I apologize. But I don’t think that it really matters how much props they have. I think they’ll use whatever they find, but I think that they are also happy to have a princess costume if that’s what, that makes them happy and that helps them get into the play then that’s great.

Jen: [41:49]

Okay. So if you already have a closet full of costumes, it’s not the end of the world. Don’t go and throw them away. But also by the same token, don’t feel as though you have to go and provide those for your child to successfully engage in pretend play.

Dr. Gilpin:  [42:00]

No. And in fact, one of the ways that we measure pretend play is by seeing how much of it they can do in their own imagination versus using a prop. So props are particularly helpful for very young children. So for example, having a baby doll at 18 months versus pretending to hold a baby doll is different in terms of their cognitive ability and is more sophisticated pretend play when they are pretending to hold the baby. Right. But there’s nothing wrong with helping them get started with a real baby.

Jen: [42:33]

Yeah. Okay. So as we conclude here, we’ve talked about parents engaging in pretend play a couple times, but I want to go back to it just one more time because it’s not often that you come across a study that really looks at the children’s preference for how to engage in pretend play. And so there was one paper that I read that described children’s preference for engaging in real or pretend versions of different activities like baking cookies or cutting vegetables or talking on the phone and we should say that these are pretend things. They’re not fantasy play like some of the other things that we’ve been talking about in the episode. And so the children who were interviewed when they’re asked, “would you prefer to do the real version of this or the pretend version of this?” They choose the real activities. The vast majority of the time and when the researchers followed up and said, “why do you want to do the real activity?”

Jen: [43:22]

They most often mentioned functionality for example, because you could eat real cookies or because they find the real activity more fun and I was amused to know the washing dishes was the actually the only activity where have more children so they would prefer it to pretend then do the real activity, which kind of surprised me because I know that most children love to do anything that relates to water, but it was also, yeah, it was. It’s the only activity on the list that could be perceived as a chore and is usually perceived as a chore by adults and I wonder if there’s been some kind of negative association there. But when the pretend activities were preferred, the most common reasons were to avoid the negative outcomes associated with the real ones. Like cutting yourself with a knife or because the children felt that they couldn’t do an activity.

Jen: [44:04]

And so to me, this represents an absolutely enormous opportunity, especially for parents who can’t stand pretend play because having now done the research for this episode, I’m going to try and better support my daughter’s fantasy play about things that couldn’t really happen by asking her questions about her fantasy environments, but if she wants me to pretend that playing at dinner, I’m going to say, would you like to go and help make real dinner? So is this something that parents can really use particularly the fantasy play-hating parents as a way of engaging their child in something that actually they might prefer to do anyway.

Dr. Gilpin: [44:40]

Yeah. I think that really following your child’s preference is really important because it’s going to facilitate engagement, right? And if you and the child or having a positive, enriching and rewarding experience together, then the language is going to come and the emotions are going to be there. And that’s what we know really makes a difference, right? That children need to feel loved and appreciated and cared for. And we know that that has extremely good positive experiences and positive development for kids. And so I think it’s following your lead and the child’s leads. So if there’s something you just really hate to do, like I’m sorry, I just really don’t enjoy puzzles. I know they’re very enriching for me. I don’t like them. So I do them with my child really wants to. But you know, I’m not going to pick up that one and suggest it.

Jen: [45:34]

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So much of parenting is dance, isn’t it? And so I guess then I would look for my daughter to do as a follow up would be if she says, no, I want to pretend to make dinner, then then we can make pretend dinner for five or 10 minutes and do that. And then I’ll say, okay, I have to go make real dinner now. Do you want to come and help? And if she says yes, I want to make real dinner, then we just go and do that. So I think that that can potentially help parents to do this dance in a way that benefits both the child and themselves and doesn’t make them feel as though they have to engage in pretend play if it drives them nuts, but I always find that if I understand why it’s important for my daughter’s development to do something, I find it easier to do it even if I really don’t enjoy it. So perhaps now coming out of this episode, it may not be so bad for you to engage in five or 10 minutes of pretend play because you know that it has potentially a beneficial outcome. But again, going back to what I think your overall message on the show has been do what creates this warm engaging atmosphere in between the two of you because that’s really ultimately what benefits your child.

Dr. Gilpin:  [46:40]

That’s right. Definitely. And we’ll keep exploring. Pretend play in terms of its ability to possibly facilitate development. Jury’s still out as Dr. Lillard has suggested in his. Absolutely right, but we’ll, we’ll keep plugging along to see what we find out. And one of the big reasons is because it’s really highly cost effective. So the return on investment doesn’t cost much to suggest that a teacher say, let’s make popcorn on the moon, or you know, let’s go to cookie land and run around the room. It doesn’t require a lot of training, it doesn’t require a lot of props, so in that way, even if it has a small outcome, and again, jury’s still out, but if it has a small outcome and it has a small cost and a small training than it might be worth it.

Jen: [47:26]

Yeah. Awesome. Well thanks so much. Helping us to better understand this. I know that it has really made me more comfortable with engaging in just a little bit of pretend play because I better understand that, that it is potentially a factor that can contribute to my daughter’s development even if it’s not going to be the be all and end all factor. So I am grateful for your time and helping us to think through all this.

Dr. Gilpin: [47:49]

Sure. And if I can add one more thing, I really encourage parents to follow the kids lead. Let the kid decide what you’re going to pretend. You may have to give them a little prompt, but then let them do it because you’re really trying to grow their cognition, not yours necessarily.

Jen:  [48:05]

Yeah, so it’s not the parents saying, let’s do this scenario now. You be the doctor or the nurse.

Dr. Gilpin: [48:13]

Right? Yeah. Letting the kid…if the kid decides there that you’re not on the moon anymore and now you’re somewhere else, then that’s okay.

Jen: [48:20]

Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Thanks for that. So all the references that we have talked about in today’s episode can be found at YourParentingMojo.com/fantasy

Transcript

Jen:    [00:39]

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I know we’re going to help a lot of parents out today because we are here with Dr. Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, who wrote the book Raising Your Spirited Child, which I know is an absolute classic read for any parent of a spirited child. I read the book because a listener had requested an episode on it and what surprised me about it was that I don’t think my daughter is particularly spirited, but I definitely saw elements of her behavior described in the book and what I took out of that was that probably pretty much any child can have spirited elements of their personality or even just spirited moments. And so both the book and this episode are really for anyone who raises a child and who has ever had a moment where they think, “why won’t he or she just do what I ask.”

Jen:    [01:26]

So Dr. Mary has a bachelor’s in early childhood education, a Master’s in family social science, and a doctorate in education. She has written four books on various aspects of raising children, which have been translated into 23 languages. Her son and daughter are now fully fledged adults and she lives with her husband in Bozeman, Montana. Welcome Dr. Mary.

Kathryn:     [01:46]

Thank you.

Jen:   [01:48]

And so when I mentioned in my fortnightly newsletter, which you can actually receive by subscribing to the show YourParentingMojo.com, that I was looking for a coat interviewer to help me interview Dr Mary and really dig into the ways to apply the wisdom in the book. I received a number of responses, but one really stuck out. Kathryn is based in London and she has a four year old daughter who we’re going to call Jane in this episode and a son who’s a little over a year old and we’re going to call him George.

Jen:    [02:14]

I asked Kathryn to help us with this interview because she’d actually read and love the book, but had been struggling with the application of some of the strategies. She’s tried hard to support her spirited daughter as she grows and develops, but has found a particularly challenged in some areas since the birth of her son. So we’re here today to really get into the book, but also go beyond the book and get the real lowdown on how to implement the strategies in the book when the first attempt has maybe been a little bit less than successful. Welcome Kathryn.

Kathryn:  [02:41]

Thank you.

Jen:   [02:42]

All right. So Kathryn, let’s start with you. I wonder if you could please describe your daughter and how she fits into your family dynamic and I know you’ve read the book so you know that the words that are used to describe spirited children are very important. So what words do you use to describe her and what words do people around you who might not have read the book use?

Kathryn:   [03:01]

So after reading the book, I would say that in particular it was the intense and persistent elements that really struck a chord, but also she’s sensitive, very perceptive, a very high energy introvert, I would say. And just very articulate about what she wants, funny, enthusiastic, that kind of thing. And in terms of other peoples, there’s never been so much the label’s put on her I would find, but it’s just kind of when people talk, when they’d see something happening, you know, as if, oh, so and so that I know that they’re spoiled and oh well people don’t treat me like King Tut, or you know, just, it’s more in people’s tone. And I, I noticed as well since her brother was born that it’s more she falls into a particular persona kind of in contrast as the main older sibling almost.

Jen:    [03:54]

Is that pretty common? Dr. Kurcinka?

Dr. Mary:    [03:57]

As the mean older sibling? Well, certainly one of the things we know about spirited children is their intent. So every emotion is intense, including jealousy, they’re also slow to adapt. So a shift in the family dynamic is certainly going to affect them, but they’re also incredibly perceptive of the stress levels within our family and so often it’s the spirited child who I refer to them as our stress barometers because they’ll often start acting out because they’re taking in the stress around them. And obviously a new baby brings a great deal of stress to a family dynamic.

Jen:    [04:42]

Yeah. Do you feel as though that’s really impacted your family dynamic, Kathryn?

Kathryn:    [04:46]

Yes, I would say that has made a huge difference because I think, you know, when people talk about age two and age for as being particularly noteworthy in our family, it was really age three. But I think that’s because that was, you know, in the leadup my pregnancy and then the birth of her, her brother, the starting of preschool. So many things kind of happened at that period of time and therefore also our resources were that much less to kind of cope with it. And whereas I had kind of taken everything on with her, largely myself, because I stayed at home, I didn’t go back to work after my maternity leave and had kind of tried to protect her a little bit there because she had very distinct needs as far as I could see it in terms of being a little bit more sensitive to stimulation and to situations and things I had kept her under my wing a little bit in that respect. Whereas I couldn’t obviously do that with a newborn and also just adjusting to letting go a little bit in terms of preschool, you know, and no longer being her whole world anymore. That kind of rattled things a little bit and of course changed the family dynamic quite a bit and then adding an extra person.

Jen:   [05:58]

And these are all fairly natural things to happen, right? Brothers and sisters are born and their children tend to go up to some kind of care or preschool or something. Dr. Mary, how can we help children and prepare them for the kinds of transitions that Jane’s been going through?

Dr. Mary:    [06:15]

Well, there’s several things. One is, as you said, with the starting preschool, there’s also a change in routine in one of the things I talk about and work with families on in my private consultants, there’s two aspects to effective discipline, there’s structure, which is the routine, the rules, the expectations, they’re the things that remain pretty stable and then there’s the emotion coaching and the challenge with a new baby and starting preschool is the structure gets disrupted and so if you think about it’s kind of like all of a sudden moving or changing jobs or changing bosses at work that all of a sudden there are…what you expected in the past is no longer occurring. Things are different, so in preparing them, one is reforming that structure and creating predictability for them, which will then reduce the frequency and intensity of the meltdowns, leaving you the patience and energy to do the emotion coaching when it needs to be done.

Jen:    [07:25]

Yeah, Dr. Mary, you just said something really profound there that helped me to understand the gravity of these kinds of changes in a child’s world. When you talk about being comparable to moving for an adult or changing a boss for an adult, you know, I think if there was a big deal, I need to figure out what a new boss wants for me and how I interact with that person and you know, even as something as simple as changing a child’s teacher at preschool, you might think, well all the other teachers are still there and all the other children is still there, but that’s a very different interaction and it makes me feel as though, oh yeah, I can understand that. I can understand why that would be difficult for a child. Does that help us to bring more compassion to it, do you think?

Dr. Mary:   [08:02]

Well, I think it is important to look at that and look at this situation, yes, very compassionately. And that’s another thing that we can do is actually reduced expectations on that older child, which can be hard because it’s like, okay, now you’re the older one and I need to be taking care of the baby. But one of the stress reactions you’ll see is shut down. And shut down behaviors are, I can’t dress myself, I can’t walk, I can’t feed myself, and the natural reaction to those responses are you could do it yesterday or you could do it an hour ago and we push to have them do what they’re capable of doing, but what they’re actually telling us is I’m so overwhelmed, I’m shutting down. And so one thing that we can do as a parent is proactively say to them before they’re demanding, carry me, dress me, feed me, is, “is today a day that you can dress yourself or do you need help?” And if they say I need help, we help them because we recognize, wow, they’re dealing with a lot of stuff here. And so instead of fighting and struggling, we help them, but we also nudge them by saying, okay, you know, today I’ll help you, but pretty soon maybe even tomorrow you’re going to surprise me and do it yourself again. So we let them know we’re not doing this for ever, but we can see that right now, you need a little extra support.

Kathryn:     [09:46]

Do you see that dynamic in Jane, Kathryn? Yes, and I think some of those kinds of things about the dressing herself and things like that, that was a little bit easier for me or when we had in meal times the returned to kind of wanting to be fed for a little while or when my son was weaning than wanting to be on our laps as well and so some of that we definitely saw and I think I was used to a little bit more doing things at her own pace beforehand, so that part of it was a little bit easier for me, but I struggled a little bit. I think with things that were just suddenly new in those transitions, so transition around having the new sibling created a kind of a new level to my own intensity. I think in terms of a protectiveness over the small person than she had never shown aggression really before then to see some of those behaviors being targeted towards him specifically rather than wanting to be baby. But something that kind of felt like a bit more of an emergency in the moment kind of thing. That was triggering to me in a way that I hadn’t really been triggered as much in the past,

Dr. Mary:   [10:54]

And you’re absolutely right, Kathryn, you know, as a mom who are very protective of our children. It’s kind of the mother bear syndrome and one of the things I think that’s important to recognize, especially with a four year old, four year old and many spirited children, tend to be very bright and have excellent language skills and so we often assume that they have an understanding of things that they don’t because they are so verbal and so when we see behaviors that are potentially dangerous to the baby or a safety issue for the baby, the question becomes what is Jane feeling and needing in this situation? So is it an issue that she actually doesn’t realize, you can’t hug a baby that firmly. And so it’s teaching her how to hold and touch the baby. Is she feeling jealous? So instead of pushing the baby, teaching her to say I want him to go away, and that when she uses the words, we actually at that…because we’re teaching the words at this point, set the baby down and hold her because she used words instead of action. So it’s in those situations stopping to think what is she feeling or needing. Is it a skill issue? Is it a feeling she doesn’t know how to express appropriately. But as a four year old she has no idea that she can harm the baby.

Jen:    [12:39]

Wow. I would never have thought that. Wouldn’t you think that if you hit something it might hurt. But no, that’s a very profound realization I think to understand that a four year old can’t think that.

Kathryn: [12:51]

And I think sometimes if there are kind of two elements to it and like for, it’s the intensity piece around just that kind of out of control, excitement/anxiety, kind of that, you know, in the beginning in particular, if I’m trying to spend time just one on one with her to have a little bit of that, she actually would reject that for quite awhile. And she always wanted to know where he was and oh, if he was asleep she wants to be there waking up. Like she just really didn’t want to take her eyes off him. Like really was affectionate to like overzealously affectionate, but you know, in a way you would expect. But just couldn’t. It was like, yeah, simultaneously just out of control, affection and anxiety around the situation that she just couldn’t quite get to grips with, it felt like.

Dr. Mary:   [13:42]

And, and I think that’s an interesting choice of words when you say kind of anxiety about it. And again with the energy and that frenzied energy, we look at the fuel source because that frenzied energy is saying she’s overstimulated, she’s over aroused. And so one question I would have is actually about sleep because if the meltdowns are happening like after school or late in the afternoon or that frenzied behavior, that actually is an indication that can be an indication of, oh, we’re tired. So what time does she wake in the morning?

Kathryn:   [14:25]

She wakes up about [7:00] usually.

Dr. Mary:    [14:27]

And is she napping?

Kathryn:  [14:29]

No, and she can’t now because she’s in school.

Dr. Mary:   [14:33]

Okay. And what time does she fall asleep at night?

Kathryn:    [14:39]

Uh, she’ll be actually asleep by about [8:30].

Dr. Mary:   [14:43]

Okay. So if we look at the averages and these are only averages, which means some children will have more, some people less. But this time of the year, the winter, when the nights are long, we actually need more sleep than we do in spring and summer. And for a four year old, the average is right around 12 hours. And especially this time of the year, it’s usually a solid 12 hours. So my question to you is what is she like about [6:30], [7:00] at night?

Kathryn:    [15:16]

Yeah. That can be a bit of a difficult time. That’s the window of time as I’m kind of taking her brother up to sleep and yeah, it just depends. That was part of my reason for recently bringing dinnertime forward is because sometimes if we were still eating at that time it would get a bit hectic. So now I’m trying to do it a little bit earlier, but we have had a lot of tweaking with her sleep because that has always been a difficult issue for her. And then when she was napping we couldn’t get her to fall asleep often til like [9:30], [10:00] at night. So we had a really a hard battle when she was dropping the nap because to not have it didn’t seem enough but to have it team too much and we couldn’t quite get it. This has been kind of the most solid in recent times that we’ve had it, that we’re in more of a pattern and she’ll only nap on the weekend, on a rare occasion that we’re in the car or something, but she’s never fallen asleep easily. So it’s the, any routines and things that we have are pretty hard. One, because she, uh, for awhile was falling asleep a little bit earlier, but then it just kinda creeps creeping back and back. So we, we haven’t been able to get it earlier than [8:30].

Dr. Mary:  [16:33]

One of the challenges when you have a child that wakes early in the morning is the odds are very high that she’s genetically wired as a morning lark. So morning larks wake early in the morning no matter what time they go to sleep at night. So my first recommendation to you would actually be to look at her day because a good night’s sleep begins in the morning. So she has a [7:00] AM wake up. It would be, you know, wake up dressed, toilet. And I always have kids do that before they leave the bedroom area so that we’re not surprising them. Some days we dress, some days we don’t dress in it. So then it turns into a struggle in the morning. So we dress and then come for breakfast. And then throughout the day I used to work of Ellyn Satter who recommends six mini meals a day. So every two and a half, three hours. So breakfast is at [7:30], then at [9:30], 10-ish. We have a mini meal in the morning, but again each meal is a little protein, little carbohydrate, little fruit and vegetable, a little fat. So it’s a complete mini-eal. Lunch would be 12, 1230 ish. Another snack about mini meals in the afternoon about [3:00], dinner probably [5:30]. And then for her I would probably go right from dinner into prep for sleep so that her head’s on the pillow and the sleep routine is completely finished by [7:00] PM.

Jen:     [18:18]

How might that fit with your lifestyle, Kathryn?

Kathryn:   [18:22]

That would be a challenge because my husband gets home at [6:30] and my son goes to bed in that window of time and he takes a while these days too.

Jen:     [18:32]

So what would you recommend Dr Mary, for people who have more than one child and it’s difficult to get home from work or whatever. You’re doing a lot of a lot of working parents who are probably listening to this and you have to get dinner on the table that you have to get the baby fed, get the baby to bed, get the older child bathed. How can you get all that done by [7:00]?

Dr. Mary:   [18:51]

So a couple of things. One would be if dad is coming in at [6:30]. Are you breastfeeding the baby?

Kathryn:   [19:00]

I am, yeah. He’s having dinner properly now too. But before bed I do breastfeed him.

Dr. Mary:    [19:05]

Okay. So you know, if dad would come in and actually would he be open to participating in the bedtime routine for either that the baby has been breastfed and then he finishes with the baby and you finish with Jane and then you have a meal together at seven with both kids down. So that would be one way. Otherwise we look at putting a nap back in, but it sounds like Jane goes to preschool in the afternoon.

Kathryn:  [19:37]

She goes to school, they call it “reception” in the UK, it’s like kindergarten but she started school. So she does whole days at school.

Dr. Mary:    [19:44]

And they don’t nap?

Kathryn:   [19:48]

No they don’t, no.

Dr. Mary:    [19:48]

Okay. We have to get naps back into preschool. I think an important thing is recognizing that right now we’re asking Jane to adapt to the needs of others and she can’t do it and so we have to look at…like, the baby naps. Can we potentially…we might look at shifting the baby’s naps a little bit so he can go down 30 minutes later or you do the routine with both of them. Many people with multiple children go through all the steps of the routine with all the children and then stage it who needs to go first for the last good night and who’s second, who’s third, et cetera and is it feasible to move their meal so that it is closer to a [5:30] meal for them and then you and your husband eat later or he eats later?

Kathryn:   [20:51]

That part is fine. That’s. We’ve already started doing actually since my husband has switched jobs and is now getting home later than he used to be. We started eating myself and the kids at [5:30], so that part is fine.

Dr. Mary:    [21:05]

What are the steps of Jane’s sleep routine? Do you bathe her then or what?

Kathryn:  [21:11]

Usually not at nighttime because I think it mentioned in your book that that can be stimulating for some children and for her that was definitely the case. We had real trouble getting in and out and it really dragged things out a lot so she has that in the morning unless it really needed to be at night and so when we go upstairs it will be just mostly brushing her teeth or going to the bathroom and putting her pajamas on and then she does have bedtime stories. Then the two books that she has from school and then sometimes a couple others depending how long they are, but the story time hasn’t been an issue with transition, so we’ve kept that part at the time. That seems to work well.

Dr. Mary:   [21:55]

One of the things, as you talk about the number of books there could be started right after dinner so that say at [6:30] you go up, brush teeth, do the toileting pajamas and we’re down to one book for her and so the baby could be part of that or you could read while you’re nursing?

Kathryn:  [22:20]

Multitasking!

Kathryn:   [22:24]

She does like the idea of reading with her brother there. He’s wandering all over the place, but she does like having him in the room to read so we could do that. I think a part of them was the couple of them being the school books I’d found that was most part where she’d be more willing to practice the reading a little bit, as opposed to afterschool when I would have ideally had liked to do it. She doesn’t seem to be quite in the frame of mind. So when things are calm without the distractions in the, in the dark, just with the little flashlight kind of thing. We’ve just been having some good success with that lately. But we could try again with moving that to right after school perhaps or playing with that window a bit.

Dr. Mary:    [23:03]

Well and after school, as an introvert, she… You were absolutely correct. And recognizing she needs downtime. She’s been socializing all day. She’s been with people and she’s tired and you know, tired physically, but also drained as an introvert. So when she comes home I would again plan that transition home that she gets downtime, gets her… What time do you pick her up?

Kathryn:  [23:34]

About [3:30]. We walk home, which, you know, it’s only [4:00] when we get home, even though we live five minutes from the school then we have a bit of an adventure on the way back.

Dr. Mary:    [23:47]

Okay. And has she had an afternoon snack when you pick her up?

Kathryn:   [23:52]

She does. They have afternoon fruit in the school. You bring your own fruit and they have that at some point in the afternoon, but she is always starving so I do always have something in my pocket for her to eat on the way home.

Dr. Mary:   [24:04]

Right. And one of the things I would think about is, you know, bringing a carriage or a stroller of some type so that she can climb in if she doesn’t want to walk or she’s tired, but then she could actually have her snack and just kind of some downtime in the stroller. Does she like to be in the carriage or does she want to walk?

Kathryn:    [24:29]

Well, her brother’s in the buggy, in the carriage, but we have a buggy board they call it that she can stand on quite. She quite likes to do that. But if some of her friends are like that, live around us are walking at same time, then she likes to run off with them quite often, but it all just depends if it’s just us and absolutely she wants to stand on the board.

Dr. Mary:    [24:49]

Okay. And even with that, is it the kind of thing that she fits in the carriage? If the baby was in a backpack,

Kathryn:  [24:59]

I think she’s over the weight limit for it now.

Dr. Mary:  [25:02]

Okay.

Jen:   [25:04]

What if the baby was in the backpack? I think that’s what Dr Mary was saying.

Kathryn:   [25:09]

Uh, yes. No, I mean I think she’s over the weight limit for a buggy itself.

Jen:   [25:13]

Oh, your daughter is.

Kathryn:    [25:14]

She’s a bit tall for it yet.

Jen:     [25:16]

Got It.

Kathryn:    [25:17]

Yeah, I’d be a bit conscious of messing with that one because she was jealous about it for a little while as well and we’re past that stage now.

Dr. Mary:    [25:24]

So what about when you pick her up at this school, is there a place that you could sit and let her have some protein and something to eat and then begin the walk home?

Kathryn:    [25:38]

Not really because they want to shoo us out of the school gates within a window of time. I think she at first gets quite distracted by the other kids that are there. Like if our neighbor is still there, she’s quite wants to find him and ideally walk with him and then on the way then like when she’s standing on the board, she’ll, she’ll eat her cereal bar, whatever it is or banana or something and then when she’s finished that then she’ll run after him quite often.

Dr. Mary:   [26:05]

Okay. Well, one of the things I would just make sure that, the snack that you bring for her can includes protein because otherwise what happens then is you get home and not only is fatigued from her day, but we’ve got a blood sugar drop because she hasn’t had her protein and she’s hungry and then that sets up the rest of the afternoon for her. So when you come in the door, what happens once you get home?

Kathryn:  [26:35]

So we were having a meltdown, when she got home almost every day for a little while, it’s gotten a little bit better now, but, well, and that’s if it hadn’t happened before we got home and I found actually at first she was really wanting to desperately watch TV and then I found actually that was just kind of keeping the meltdown in check kind of thing. And so after cutting that out, then she’s just, I suppose we’re releasing feelings from the day kind of thing. But is easily set off by lots of thing is really,

Dr. Mary:   [27:10]

Would she come home and go into the bathtub?

Kathryn:    [27:14]

When I’ve suggested it before, she never wants to see, she finds it calming. That was actually a kind of a stand-out question for me is that she likes a lot of the calming things, but she really resists them. So like if I suggest the bath then she really doesn’t want to go into the bath or if I put calming music on then she said this, this is sad music, happy music and she wants something really lively and some of them…even the things that she does really enjoy, like with her sticker book and Play Doh and things like that, that she can get really engrossed in if it’s put to her when she’s feeling kind of revved up, then she doesn’t want to or does only for few seconds kind of thing but won’t let herself be calmed by it kind of thing.

Dr. Mary:    [27:58]

So one of the things I would suggest, because this transition is proving to be a pretty challenging one, is I would create a ritual of pickup and entry that is the same every single day. So it isn’t, do you want a bath today or do you want Play Doh today? But in fact, mommy picks you up. We have the snack, we get on the board, we have this snack. Once we’ve had the snack, then we can play with others if we want to. On the way home. We’d come in the door, she goes into the tub if she’s needs, you know, if that was an incomplete snack, we can have some snacks in the bathtub while she lounges or we just go into the tub, you know, and you sit there. The baby is, they’re not in the tub, but he’s there and obviously we have the bathroom so that it’s okay for him to be wandering there. But we let her have that downtime. If a bath doesn’t work, we might use audio books. The other would be is that we always do Play Doh or water play if we’re not going into the tub. But I would create a ritual that there are decisions to be made that in fact we, if it’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we always have this same snack. Tuesday, Thursdays we always have that snack number two. And when we come in the door, we do the same things because at this point she can’t make decisions.

Jen:    [29:38]

And that’s not to say the routine couldn’t change when needs change, but that it could be helpful right now. Is that right?

Dr. Mary:   [29:44]

Yes.

Jen:     [29:45]

Okay.

Kathryn:    [29:47]

Yes, I think that’s quite true actually, because if it’s a routine to have that bath every day, then I can see that she’d probably become less resistant to it if it’s always at that time.

Dr. Mary:   [29:59]

And when you have a persistent child, the underlying structure and routine is so important because if we surprise them, then we trigger the arousal system and if they’re already drained and we ask them to make decisions, again, that becomes for the introvert who needs to process decisions, again, that’s arousing. And so my tendency is to suggest just very simplistic routines that for the most part stay the same each day. And if you know, if there’s a play date or something, well actually… If she’s been in school all day, I wouldn’t do play dates late afternoon. She’s as an introvert, she’s had enough. But if there’s a doctor’s appointment or something we have to go to, then we prepare her for that, but the rest of the time the days are the same. So she knows what to expect.

Kathryn:   [31:04]

And I think I saw the suggestion of visual charts as well, Dr Mary in your book.

Dr. Mary:   [31:09]

Absolutely. And those visual charts can be very simple. I will take a piece of copy paper draw like a four to six frame on it, like a cartoon frame and then have the kids actually draw because I am completely artistically challenged and you know, you can do photos, you can download drawings from the internet and certainly make it nicer. But the bottom line is you don’t have to. And so I just let the kids draw one step. So it would be mommy comes to school, we have our snack, we get on the board, we walk home, we take off our coats, put away our coat and our shoes, we go into the tub, we play in the tub, you know. Then maybe we have reading time. That might be. Then she might be ready at that point to do her school books because she’s had some downtime. I might experiment with that. And then we have dinner by [5:30] ish and again maybe a little reading, a little low key play and [6:30]. It’s maybe a bedtime snack. So if daddy comes in the door we have just a little bedtime snack and then it’s toileting teeth, pajamas, one story, kiss, hug, head on the pillow at seven.

Kathryn:    [32:37]

All right. And so I want to just kind of bring this back up a level because we’ve been talking about Kathryn’s very specific situation for quite a while and I think what’s important for parents to take out of this is not, well my daughter doesn’t have a meltdown when she gets home from school. How is this relevant to me? But the idea of looking at whatever situation it is that you’re struggling with and brainstorming it and I mean… How many alternatives if we just generate that could potentially shift this routine to get Jane some more sleep. And I, you know, we just thought of this in 10 or 15 minutes. So I think Dr. Mary does actually do consults, so that’s one way of doing it, but maybe resistors could also just call a friend and describe what the situation is and together you could brainstorm different ways that you could adjust the routine to make it better fit your family.

Dr. Mary:  [33:27]

That’s a great summation and you know, we have a struggle that we can predict happens every day. Then let’s plan that for success; let’s plan that transition, that’s look at what’s working, what’s not working, and I know Kathryn, you’ve been playing with different options, trying to find things that work and recognizing that and that’s a really good thing. So part of it’s knowing our child. We have an introvert, which is interesting because she recharges as an introvert, but she’s also very social and so she has that mix of “I want to be with my friends, but oh, this is all very exhausting.” And so she’s got that push and pull going on and so we know who we’re working with and then the need for routine and predictability because that’s very calming to children and then protecting the sleep. Because when we have frequent meltdowns, when we have issues with impulse control, the first thing I’m always going to look at is the sleep and the structure because without enough sleep you can’t manage emotions and you can’t control impulses.

Jen:   [34:43]

Yeah. And so the other thing that was really clear to me as we’re talking through this is the idea that we’re not trying to fix Jane, we’re not trying to fix a spirited child. We’re looking at the whole family dynamic and how the family works together as a unit. And so I’m wondering if we can spend a little bit of time talking about you, Kathryn, and what you bring to this interaction. So could you tell us a little bit about your temperament and how this either helps or hurts or maybe both your interactions with your daughter?

Kathryn:  [35:12]

Sure. So I think I’m quite similar to her actually.

Dr. Mary:  [35:18]

I think, well it can be helpful in terms of empathizing. So looking at the words themselves, I suppose the intense, persistent, negative first reaction, sensitivity to noise and emotion, perceptiveness, slow to adapt.

Jen:   [35:33]

And these are all words from the book, right?

Dr. Mary:   [35:35]

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Those all resonate with me as well and so like intensity not I hadn’t noticed as much, but as a child, yes, but you know, in my interactions with her, I hadn’t noticed so much until, as I mentioned, you know, as she was around three-ish that I could feel that element of my personality more so, which is counterproductive in that case. The persistence I think was quite useful and is quite useful I suppose, in sticking to my guns when I know that she needs something and that kind of goes against what other people might find convenient at that moment, you know, so obviously if we’re going to visit family or going to different functions and then that would potentially be interfering with nap times and things like that. That’s something that I’ve really stuck to and just sticking with what works for us, you know, even if that’s parenting her differently than the next person kind of thing, I think have always been willing to be an advocate for her, which she kind of has needed, I felt.

Kathryn:   [36:38]

Negative first reaction, that kind of thing, that that can be difficult. Of course when they, if they want to get out all the messy things or you have to be conscious that no, okay, no, that probably isn’t as bad as that idea is that feels right now. And I suppose too like with her suggestions, just the, if something might be slightly inconvenient to just keep that in check, I suppose that to make sure that she was getting all the opportunities to explore her own curiosities and things as a toddler than that was, became more relevant and with a sensitivity, with noise and stuff, obviously if, when she’s had intense reactions is the picture of a supreme, for example. It’s something that I haven’t really found hard to keep calm over with that. That’s been a growth point for me, to try to breathe through that.

Jen:     [37:29]

Love it! Dr Mary, I imagine that Kathryn is not alone in feeling that intense feeling when a young child screams?

Dr. Mary:    [37:43]

Absolutely not. And there’s you talk about that you’re very similar to your daughter and as you said, the asset of that, as you can really empathize with her, the challenge is the same things that are triggering her are triggering you. So if you think about the pickup at school and anyone who’s picking up children at school knows it’s chaotic, it’s noisy, there’s people, there’s cars, there’s all of these things happening and things are coming at you from all different directions. And so as you think about that for yourself, it’s a challenging situation for you on a sensory level and also on an adaptability level of kind of knowing what to expect. And so the part of having that kind of ritual of what you do despite what’s going on around you, you may actually find calming for you as well as for Jane and while I’m all for walking and I absolutely love walking and live so I can walk, but I almost wonder in this situation, do you have access to a car?

Kathryn:    [38:57]

We do, but where I would have to park would be just about as far as where we live.

Jen:    [39:04]

Since you’re in in London.

Dr. Mary:     [39:06]

Yeah. Okay. Is that, you know, my thought would be is if you could pick her up, get her in the car, drive away, be home in five minutes and go out later for a walk. Again, that might be an alternative, but it sounds like it’s not in this situation. And Jen as you, as you said, I think the important thing, and I always say this again in the consult is whatever recommendations we come up with, it has to work for your family and your situation. So it is addressing what do we need to make this transition calming for everyone that works in our situation. And the answer to that…there’s 10 different answers to that and the answers may vary between families as well.

Jen:   [39:57]

Yeah, for sure. And so we were talking a bit about the screaming and I’m wondering because I really think this is not unique. I wonder Kathryn, if you can maybe describe a recent example of something that triggered you and maybe it was a screaming, maybe it was something else that is even more triggering to you than that. And can we just kinda talk through that and what are the strategies you could try in the future?

Kathryn: [40:19]

So I suppose the screaming, I mean that’s been something that has started right from infancy that she’s just always had a very strong frustrated reaction since very early but also like then as she got older with disappointments and, and so forth, or to interrupt with a scream that because it’s so triggering, find a don’t respond as well as I would like to. So I do try to reframe the emotion or you know, oh I can see you’re trying to do this and this is frustrating and so forth. As it continues, I hear that you don’t need to scream and scream. You don’t need to scream and scream and you think, oh, I don’t know how much am I sounding like I’m trying to suppress the emotion. Like is at four, is that still like crying? Is that still something that she’s doing right by expressing that or I suppose I’m not sure that I’m talking to her about that in the right way to teach her that to scream because she’s angry or screaming because she’s frustrated isn’t socially appropriate, but versus, oh well she’s four and also an adult doesn’t cry at everything, but it’s fine for a four year old to be crying over things like that in the wider range of contexts. And so yeah, that has been a bit of a struggle for me to kind of figure out in the moment how best to respond to that.

Dr. Mary:   [41:47]

Well, again, we always have to look at what’s behind the scream. So let’s take for example, frustration. So she screams when she gets frustrated and one of the things we know as an adult is there’s times we’d like to scream when we’re frustrated. For the most part, we have learned other strategies we’ve learned to ask for help, to step away, to take a break, to take a deep breath. And for a four year old we can very… What I would do is like if there’s a toy that she plays with that frequently frustrates her or her brother is getting in her space, which we didn’t talk about that earlier, but there are kind of key times where sibling issues increase and one of them is when the baby starts getting into the older child space, it’s very upsetting to them. So the bottom line is when she’s calm is you say to her, you know what you’re feeling, so you do a redo, and a redo helps her understand what she was feeling.

Dr. Mary:  [42:57]

So you were playing with the magnetic blocks and they collapsed or you’re using the crayon and your brother grabbed it. What that’s called is frustration and when we’re frustrated the next time you’re frustrated, I want you to say help and I will come and help you. So we don’t even need to say “you don’t need to scream.” I mean you could say that, but some of the spirit of kids, if you kind of review the mistake, then they just get upset again. So we just say when it’s called frustration, when you get frustrated, you can yell help. And I will come and help you, let’s try that. And you actually role play with them. The situation, like you pretend that she’s coloring and then you take the crayon like the brother would and then you have her practice saying help. And if she says, I don’t want to say it, you can say to her, would you like to listen while I say it so then you say it and then remind her that next time, that’s what you expect her to say. And so we get to a situation, she starts to scream, now we can say, Jane, remember what do we say? Help and I will help you. But the teaching has to be afterward when she’s called. It can’t be in the heat of that moment.

Kathryn:     [44:29]

Yes. I think that’s probably where I’m going wrong. I think when I’m following it up to, I think I’m not waiting long enough.

Dr. Mary:   [44:36]

Which is another thing is teaching kids what it means to be calm. And in Raising Your Spirited Child. I also talk about having calming baskets. So if you know that going out the door, sometimes it’s upsetting for your child and you’re trying to take care of the baby, get the baby ready and she starts to fall apart about her coat is you have right at the door, a calming basket and the basket. She’s helped you select lovies, stuffed animals, books, you know, something that she enjoys and you say to her, you know, go to your soothing, calming basket. I need to take care of the baby. I will come back and help you. And so it’s right there. And so it’s not a punishment, it’s not isolating her. It’s here; take a break, get your stuffed animal, get your lovey and I will come back as soon as I can. And then we teach them that they stay at that calming basket until their voice is quiet. Their limbs are still, their jaw is relaxed. That’s a calm body. And if we’re not calm yet, we stay at our calming basket.

Jen:   [45:54]

And should Kathryn be with Jane there at the calming basket so that it feels more inclusive and like a time in rather than like a time out?

Dr. Mary:  [46:04]

Well the basket’s right there. At the door so you know it’s maybe to the side so that you’ve got room to be doing what you need to do with the baby,

Jen:  [46:14]

But you are right there.

Dr. Mary:  [46:15]

You are right there.

Jen:  [46:16]

Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Dr. Mary:    [46:18]

And you can have one in the kitchen. You can have one in the bathroom, you can have one in the bedroom, you can have 10 of them in your house so that it’s not isolating they’re right there where you need them. Okay.

Kathryn:  [46:32]

I suppose it provides a bit of a visual reminder as well. I think sometimes where if I’ve suggested an activity with the purpose of it being calming, there’s kind of push back against it, but if she stumbles across something on her own then has more of an interest in it, so to have things that she could spot all over the place is possibly a good idea there.

Jen:   [46:57]

Yeah. That could be a powerful one for you,

Dr. Mary:  [47:02]

Kathryn. As you said too, it’s kind of the messy things can sometimes be a trigger for you of like, I can’t deal with this right now. You also can establish in your day at a time for messy toys like you know, mornings are good for us to do that or Saturday, these are good to do for us and otherwise it’s not time for those because it… Like if you’re trying to get dinner and she’s doing something messy and the baby’s trying to get in it, now everybody’s stress level goes up instead of being a positive. This is actually fueling the situation so you can establish again, predictable, messy activity times. So both you and Jane know when to expect them.

Kathryn:   [47:54]

Yes. That’s a good point.

Jen:   [47:56]

Great. Well I know we’re almost out of time here. I think we could probably talk for another three hours about this. Kathryn, is there one more burning question that you just have to ask before we wrap up?

Kathryn: [48:07]

I suppose the one and only thing in terms of limits that has just always been a curiosity for me is that I’ve always in a meltdown situation, I’ve never wanted to leave her with the meltdown and so when that’s happened at bedtime, if it’s I’ll stay with you as long as you’re lying down and quietly kind of thing. If my leaving, if she got up kind of thing, would then trigger a meltdown and I don’t want to leave her in the meltdown. Is there a suggestion around how to handle that kind of a scenario?

Dr. Mary:    [48:42]

Well, two things I would say first is if we’re having regular meltdowns at bedtime, we’re putting her to bed at the wrong time and probably too late, so on a proactive basis I would be tweaking the bedtime routine and probably moving it earlier. If this is an unusual thing. So the routine has been going well and all of a sudden tonight she suddenly is losing it, then that’s the great thing about an effective routine is now you know that something’s up. You know, she’s coming down with something, something stressed her today and she’s needing more soothing, calming, and so we’ll provide it. Now with that, one of the things in, you know, I would say to her, Jane, I will stay. I will help you. You need to lay down. Sometimes our presence is actually too stimulating. And again, I’m not going to scare a child.

Dr. Mary:   [49:47]

I’m not going to isolate them. And so what I’ll do is say, okay, I’m gonna move my chair to the door so you can still see me and I’m still here and if you want me to be closer than you lie on your bed and we just wait for her to kind of calm and then lie on her bed and then we’ll come back. So she learns that her behavior, she can choose to have you closer, but you’re not abandoning her. You’re not going out of sight from her.

Kathryn:   [50:20]

Okay.

Dr. Mary:    [50:21]

Does that make sense?

Kathryn:   [50:23]

Yeah. So that’s a good suggestion. Thank you.

Dr. Mary:  [50:26]

And I’d like to as we close one is to affirm Kathryn, how well you know Jane than just your sensitivity to her, your awareness of her temperament. And how you have worked to meet her needs according to that temperament and it’s taken a lot of energy and it’s taken skill and educating yourself and I just want to recognize and commend you for that.

Kathryn:   [50:57]

Thank you.

Jen:     [50:58]

Go Kathryn! And thanks also for being willing to share your story with us. I know it’s not the easiest to air your laundry, is it on a podcast? But I’m grateful to you.

Kathryn:    [51:10]

Well thank you so much.

Jen:    [51:10]

Yeah, and also to Dr Mary for being willing to talk through these issues with us and really give us some concrete tools. Yes, specifically for the afterschool meltdown if that’s what you’re going through, but also, you know, don’t be afraid to extrapolate these to a higher level and saying, okay, how can I brainstorm things that work for me with the things that I’m struggling with, with my child. So thanks Dr Mary for doing that.

Dr. Mary:    [51:30]

You’re welcome. Thank you for inviting me.

Jen:  [51:33]

So Dr. Mary’s Book Raising Your Spirited Child can be purchased in local bookstores or on Amazon. And as a reminder, all the references for today’s show can be found at YourParentingMojo.com/SpiritedChild

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Before we start today, I just wanted to take a minute and mention what happens around here on the weeks when you don’t hear an episode, because I have a suspicion based on my download patterns that most of you are subscribed to the show through iTunes rather than through my website, which means you’re kind of missing out.  On the weeks when I don’t publish an episode, I send out a newsletter instead – and this is not just any old newsletter.  I keep track of new research and articles related to both child development and education over the previous couple of weeks, and I select the best of them for the newsletter.  Then I don’t just tell you about the new studies and articles, but locate them in the rest of the literature on the topic by helping you to understand how the new work adds to our understanding, and what we’re still lacking.  I also post calls for questions on topics I’ve already decided to do episodes on (and your questions not only get onto the list of questions that I end up asking the interviewee, but also help me to decide which interviewee to ask in the first place), and mention ideas I’m considering for future episodes to see whether you all are interested in them or not.  Finally, I also use the newsletters to do a Q&A on difficult or controversial topics – so after I did the episode on potty training recently, listeners emailed me with their questions and I answered them in a newsletter a few weeks later.  Pretty often I end up in an email conversation with the people who write to me about the topics they’re interested in, which I really enjoy and I hope is useful to them as well.  So if you’re really interested in this research and in having me do all the work in terms of keeping on top of it for you, you really should head over to yourparentingmojo.com and enter your email address in the box at the top of the screen to subscribe there.  As I’ve mentioned before, if you’re only subscribed through iTunes I never get your email address and I actually never even find out that you subscribed, so there’s no way for me to send a newsletter to you.  So head on over to yourparentingmojo.com and subscribe to the show!

Seems like we’re on a roll lately with topics that I’ve resisted doing for a while – we did an episode recently on potty training, or ‘toilet learning,’ as I prefer to call it.  And I’ve been getting quite a lot of questions over the last few months about sleep – mostly around how to get more of it.  I’d resisted doing an episode on this for much the same reason as the potty training episode – there are books out there on this topic as well, and Facebook groups, and plenty of people making a living from doing nothing but advising parents on how to get their children to sleep.  But the questions kept coming!  And so we’re going to talk about them today.  We’ll do what we usually do with these kinds of episodes – take a tour through the anthropological literature and find out just how weird our Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic societies are, and from there we’ll reframe how we look at children and sleep before we discuss ways that we can all get more of it.  And I should say that as is typical with the show, we’ll look at sleep primarily through the lens of caring for toddlers and preschoolers.  We’ll detour perhaps a little more than usual into learning about younger babies just because that’s the population on whom a lot of research has been done, but we’ll focus primarily on the types of problems that parents of toddlers and preschoolers tend to have, and what we can do about them.

Let’s talk just a little first about why children sleep – it’s because they really do need to do it!  Just a couple of the amazing things that happen during sleep is that memories are consolidated, stabilized, and perhaps enhanced (which has obvious implications for a child’s performance in school), and memories may actually be assimilated into the child’s cognitive matrix, which allows a cohesive view of the individual’s world to develop.  Pretty cool stuff.  Sleep problems in childhood are associated with memory and learning impairments, difficulty in regulating mood, attention and behavioral problems, as well as hyperactivity and impulsivity.  Short sleep duration is associated with overweight in childhood, although I should caution that for many of these issues we aren’t sure whether sleep problems cause these effects or whether these effects cause the sleep problems.  So not getting enough sleep is a problem because when you don’t sleep as much you miss out on all the benefits of sleep that we’re really only just starting to understand.

So the first place I looked when I wanted to learn more about how children sleep in other cultures was David Lancy’s book The Anthropology of Childhood, and I was absolutely shocked to find that there’s nothing at all in it about sleep.  Luckily there is some published literature about it and all the studies seem to pretty much give the tour of the same cultures and their approaches to sleep.

For something that is such a biological NEED as sleep, I was surprised to find the extent to which sleep patterns are culturally determined.  I’m sure many of you are aware of the differences in sleep patterns between Japanese and Western societies – in the West, we encourage children to sleep in their own beds in their own rooms from a very young age, while children in Japan share a bed with one or both parents for many years.  Bed-sharing is typically frowned on in Western cultures; I regularly see signs on buses in my town discouraging parents from bed-sharing, which is more common in African American than White communities in the U.S.  In 2011 the Milwaukee Health Department ran an advertising campaign that showed a beautiful sleeping baby with a large knife lying next to her, with the tag line “your baby sleeping with you can be just as dangerous.”  The American Academy of Pediatrics specifically recommends that infants sleep in the parents’ room, close to the parents’ bed but on a separate surface designed for infants, ideally for the first year of life, but at least for the first six months.  The recommendations go on to list a variety of bed-sharing arrangements that increase the risk of SIDS or unintentional injury or death while bed-sharing, including the child’s age being less than four months, bed-sharing with a current smoker, with anyone who is not the infant’s parent, including nonparental caregivers and other children, and with soft bedding accessories like pillows and blankets.  If we follow the AAP’s guidelines, which I have to say are extremely well-referenced, we’d all be terrified of bedsharing and we would think that nobody in the world would ever do it.  Which would be rather strange, because it turns out that a lot of people in the world do do it, probably in part because bed sharing was very much the norm as our species evolved.  Infants have a need for food (which was historically delivered solely from the mother’s breast) at regular intervals as well as the sensory maternal-infant exchange involving touch, smell, movement, sound, and taste – together, this package represents the only physiological and behavioral environment that the infant is adapted to.  This is not to say that infants aren’t resilient and can’t adapt to new circumstances but we should acknowledge that it’s a cultural shift in Western countries that has precipitated a desire to have children sleep through the night in their own rooms.  So when we read studies that discuss giving parents literature to read that discusses “normal sleep patterns at 6-12 months,” we should be very cognizant that the definition of “normal” is culturally-bound, and that in many cultures what we think of as “normal” is actually thought of as “not normal” and even “unkind.”

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find that there’s a link between cultures that value interdependence between people and co-sleeping, and cultures that value independence and individualism and sleeping alone.  In non-western countries, cosleeping is very much more common than in western countries. Ninety-three percent of Indian children aged 3 to 10 years cosleep, as do 80% of Japanese infants, who typically stay in the parental bed until at least school age.  45% of Korean children aged between 1 and 7 bed share, as do 45% of Egyptian families where the bed typically has up to four sleepers.  Cosleeping is common in Brazil: from isolated communities of indigenous people to the urbanites in Sao Paolo, not less than 80% of children under 10 years of age co-sleep with parents.  So in almost all cultures around the world, babies sleep with an adult, while older children sleep with parents or other siblings.

I should also be clear that I’m not for or against co-sleeping; we didn’t do it in our household primarily because I found I couldn’t sleep with my daughter in our bed.  She spent her first four months in a bassinet right next to our bed and most of the time she could be lifted back into it after nursing in the night.  Occasionally in the early mornings she would fuss and seem like she might not settle so I would leave her in bed with us, with her taking up over a third of the bed next to the bed rail, my husband taking up over a third on the other side, and me jammed in the middle unable to move for fear of waking someone up or squashing them.  I could sleep with just her in the bed if my husband was out, but he’s not really the type to relocate himself out of the marital bed so we stuck with the bassinet.

So why the huge disconnect between Western cultures and the rest of the world when it comes to bed sharing?  Well, there are a number of factors at play which are reviewed in an excellent paper by Professor McKenna at the University of Notre Dame, who holds pretty interesting dual appointments in the Department of Anthropology as well as in the Behavioral Sleep Laboratory.  He tells the following story: apparently during the last 500 years in major European cities, a relatively sizeable number of poor women with no access to birth control confessed to Catholic priests that they had deliberately laid on and smothered their infants as a way of controlling their family size.  The priests threatened excommunication, fines, and imprisonment, and infants were at some point in this period “banned” from parental beds.  The legacy of these events have converged with other changing customs and values such as the rise of privacy, self-reliance, and individualism that support the children’s place of rest being in a different room and not just a different bed in the parental bedroom.  The rise of romantic love made a further contribution to prevent the child from intruding on the conjugal bond; Freud was a proponent of the idea that children should not watch their parents’ sexual activities, although more recent research has shown that children are not harmed by seeing these activities early in life.  The role of fathers shifted as well, as the father-figure became authoritarian figures who engaged in limited physical contact with their children.  In the early part of this century, psychologists, pediatricians, and new-found ‘parenting experts’ promoted allegedly science-based sleep patterns that were compatible with the western cultural values of individualism and autonomy.  In the second half of this century we became especially enamoured of technological solutions to problems – we substituted “superior” formula for breast milk, and we put children in swings and rockers as a replacement for the sensory exchanges previously achieved through bodily contact with the mother.  All of these factors combine to create an environment where parents feel highly uncertain about their own instincts with regards to parenting in general and sleep in particular: they look to expert knowledge rather than trusting their own instincts.

As an aside here, I would like to acknowledge the apparent irony of a podcast that is based on exploring research-based approaches denigrating the use of science-backed recommendations in parenting.  I do still value a research-based approach to parenting, but as regular listeners have probably noticed by now, we always make sure to do that within an appropriate cultural context.  This is why we usually take a look at the anthropological literature before we get into the science just to see how other cultures around the world do things and give ourselves a better perspective on whether or not our approaches – and our children’s responses to those approaches – are strange or not.  In some cases, like with tantrums, we find that while tantrums aren’t universal, children in many cultures do have them.  It isn’t our weird parenting that has created the toddler tantrum.  But when we look at sleep problems, what we find is that a number of these problems are a direct result of our approach to sleep.  In other words, if we weren’t trying to get our child to sleep in their own bed in their own room, we would likely experience something closer to the literally zero incidence of sleep problems that is reported by parents in some other cultures.

The proportion of US families who bed share with their infants is on the rise, from 5.5% in 1993 to 12.8% in 2000, with the most likely explanation being the re-emergence of breastfeeding as a cultural feeding norm.  Families who breastfeed are more likely to cosleep than families who don’t, and while some parents fear that co-sleeping will reduce the child’s ability to fall asleep by themselves, people who have a preference for interdependent relationships see cosleeping as a way to enhance these relationships.  Couples’ marital relationship is also related to their perception of bed-sharing – Canadian couples who bed-shared in reaction to their child’s problems in getting to sleep reported lower marital satisfaction than parents who had made a deliberate decision to intentionally bed-share, and a similar finding was replicated among Italian parents.  Mothers who bed-share have also reported increased rates of depression than non-bedsharing mothers, although the direction of effect is unclear – we don’t know if more depressed mothers choose to bedshare, or if mothers are not getting enough sleep because of their child’s sleep problems which contributes to their depression, and choose to bedshare as a way of getting some sleep.

Breastfeeding and cosleeping together have been shown to provide some protection against Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS.  Of course it may not be bed sharing per se that is actually the dangerous thing, it’s bed sharing on the typically plush, soft, western-style pillow-topped mattress surrounded by sheets, duvets, and pillows that’s the dangerous part.  In most cultures where bedsharing is practiced, us pampered westerners might raise an eyebrow were we to see what passes for a ‘bed’ in other cultures – typically it’s a mat on the floor.  While there is some danger that someone will roll onto the child no matter what surface they sleep on, there’s far more danger that the child will become trapped or smothered when they’re surrounded by things that can trap or smother them than when they’re lying on a hard flat surface on the floor.  Cross-cultural data shows dramatically lower rates and even the complete absence of SIDS in cultures where mother-infant cosleeping and breastfeeding are the norms.  It’s possible that the intricate interrelationship of sleep contact and breastfeeding helps the infant to become aroused after periodic pauses in breathing, rather than failing to become aroused and becoming a victim of SIDS.

What we’re getting at here, of course, is that lots of things related to sleep are culturally determined.  If your culture prizes strong relationships between people then sleeping together probably seems pretty attractive – and indeed, for most of human history, strong relationships between people in your primary group were the way that the human species survived.  What us Westerners are left with is the notion that the sleeping patterns that are species-wide in virtually every culture except our own is seen as inherently highly likely to be lethal, while sleeping alone in a crib is assumed to be healthy, beneficial, and safer.  A variety of studies have shown that sleeping away from the mother appears to be a stressful experience for the child, who takes longer to get to quiet sleep and spends less time in quiet sleep when he sleeps in a bassinet in the hospital compared with being in skin-to-skin contact with his mother, which was probably the way that infants and children slept with parents throughout most of human history.

As we think about the elements of sleep that are culturally determined, we should also think about the needs of the child.  Some children have a high degree of ‘fit’ with their culture – perhaps they’re born in Japan and they like bedsharing, or they’re born in the U.S. and they quickly learn to sleep independently.  Where we find what we call “sleep problems,” much of the time what we’re talking about is a mismatch between culturally-appropriate practices and the individual child’s needs.  Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas, two researchers who were instrumental at defining chilldren’s temperaments, described it succinctly:

Goodness of fit results when the organism’s capacities, motivations

and style of behaving and the demands and the

expectations of the environment are in accord. Such consonance

between organism and environment potentiates optimal

positive development. Should there be a dissonance between

capacities and characteristics of the organism on the

one hand and the environmental opportunities and demands

on the other, there is poorness of fit, which leads to maladaptive

functioning and distorted development.

So as we think about goodness of fit, let’s consider bedtime routines.  Doesn’t everyone have a bedtime routine?  It turns out – no they don’t!  It’s pretty common in Italy for families to have long, leisurely dinners – sometimes very late into the evening – and parents expect children to simply fall asleep when they’re tired.  The might be in someone’s arms or in a nearby stroller, but certainly the adults aren’t going to stop what they’re doing to put a child to bed.  If the child has a biological preference for being up late at night and sleeping in in the morning, then there’s a good fit between the child’s biological needs and the culture in which they find themselves.  If the child is more of an early riser than a night owl, though, he finds himself in trouble – and probably his parents are in trouble too.  In Western countries we seem to have a very ambivalent relationship with our children’s individuality – during the day, we surround our children with all kinds of stimulating activities and allow them to choose which is most interesting to them; we expect them to gain a high degree of independence from an early age and it can be common among parents to compare the age at which a child first engages in certain behaviors like sleeping through the night (as well as potty training).  During the day, we aim to create an emotionally secure relationship with our child and we attempt to respond to their needs.  Yet our relationship with our children’s sleep much more closely mirrors our relationship with their food, which is to say we don’t trust them.  (We did a whole episode on how to get a toddler to eat vegetables a while back – it turns out that using vegetables as a ‘gateway food’ to get a desired food just makes them dislike the vegetable more than they already did, and the only predictor of whether a child will eat vegetables is their liking for vegetables).    So just as we set up ‘deals’ where a child has to eat more of one food to get another, and we ask them repeatedly ‘are you sure you had enough to eat’ (which causes them to not trust their body’s own signals that they are full, which can lead to overeating), we tend to set a somewhat arbitrary time for bedtime, take the child from their highly stimulating environment to a non-stimulating environment away from the comfort of parents (which can be very stressful for a child), and tell them to go to sleep whether or not they are tired.  When you put it like that, it sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it?  We attempt to bridge the gap between the high stimulation and independence of the day with the low stimulation of night using elaborate bedtime routines, and it turns out that Western cultures are pretty much the only ones that do this.

In an admittedly small sample of 14 families in a highland Mayan community in Guatemala, sleepy infants and children simply fell asleep, usually in someone’s arms, or when they were taken to bed with a parent.  In contrast with the elaborate bedtime routines that are common in Western cultures that (in our house) consist of bath time, putting on pajamas, reading two books, one last visit to the toilet, brushing teeth and flossing, and kisses and hugs before turning off the lights, no bedtime routines at all were observed or reported in the Mayan community.  Children didn’t have clothes for bed, nobody read them stories, or sang them songs.  The mothers who were interviewed reported that their children didn’t resist sleep and said they had no problems with their children’s sleep.  The mothers believed that sleeping with parents helped the family to develop a feeling of closeness, which could assist children in understanding and learning from others.  The Mayan mothers apparently responded with shock when told that Americans put infants and young children to sleep in rooms by themselves, and disapprovingly regarded this practice as “tantamount to child neglect.”

One of the things I realized when I was reading this research was not just the fit between the child’s needs and cultural expectations, but also the child’s needs and the parent’s needs.  As I read about the highland Maya, I noticed how it’s apparently common for children to participate in whatever is going on around them no matter what time of the day or night it occurs, which is contrasted by the preference of Western parents to have time when children aren’t around.  Among the studies I’ve read, there seems to be an inherent assumption that getting the child to sleep at an arbitrary time is for the child’s benefit, when it may actually be as much for the parents’ benefit as the child’s – and I certainly count myself among this number.  As an introvert, as well as being someone who is perpetually studying and trying to write papers – or podcast episodes – I need those two and a half hours between my daughter’s bedtime and my bedtime for research, writing, and for mental renewal.  Taking her to bed with me when I go is simply not an option, because I don’t live in a culture where there are always ten other people milling around my house chatting until bedtime (and I might go crazy if there were).

We Westerners also use ‘transitional objects’ like a cloth or a blanket or a favorite toy, and there was a pretty cool study done in Italy in 1970 that looked at Italians from a rural town, Italians in Rome, and foreign (mostly Anglo-Saxon) families living in Rome.  6% of the rural infants used some kind of transitional object to get to sleep, 31% of the Roman Italian infants did, and 61% of the Anglo-Saxon babies did.  The use of transitional objects had an inverse correspondence to parental use of activities like rocking to sleep and co-sleeping, which meant that the more families rocked to sleep and co-slept, the less they used transitional objects, and the researcher concluded that the transitional object essentially becomes a substitute for maternal contact and proximity at bedtime.  These results have been replicated within single populations and across populations, including one study which found a very similar result among native Korean mothers in Korea, Korean mothers living in the United States, and Euro-American mothers.  Mothers who are interviewed on this topic report that their bedtime practices align with their child-rearing principles, which is to say that Euro-American mothers say they value independence and autonomy,  and that this is why they don’t co-sleep, while Mayan parents value emotional closeness and interdependence with their children, and that is why they sleep together.  There’s also a correlation between cultures who value the individual distinctiveness of children and sleeping alone, and cultures who don’t celebrate individual distinctiveness and co-sleeping.  But it turns out that there’s actually no association between the age at which children learn to sleep through the night or the difficulty they may have had learning to sleep through the night and their self-reliance in daily living skills or their social independence at preschool age, so our tendency to connect the ability to sleep through the night with independence in other arenas may be somewhat misplaced.

For I think what may be the first time on this show we can raise our hands up in the air and thank the deity of our choice for the fact that while the vast majority of sleep research has been conducted on White children and parents, there IS research available on the sleep habits of non-White children and parents.  Hispanic children get about 30 minutes less of sleep per night than White children do, and Black children get about an hour less per night than White children and tend to go to bed later as well.  Black children are also more likely to have parents who report that the child is tired during the day, and significantly more likely to nap past age two than White children.  Hispanic children are more likely to sleep with a parent than White children, and Black children are more likely to sleep with a sibling.  White parents are more likely to view their child’s sleep as problematic than Black parents, even after adjusting for other sociodemographic variables.  A variety of other factors related to race can impact sleep, including the marital status of parents, the amount of structure in the child’s daily schedule, watching TV, the family’s socioeconomic status, parental smoking, and parental mental health.

As we start looking at what we might call ‘sleep problems,’ we need to be cautious about interpreting results of studies looking at these.  For example, some studies have reported that children who are rocked to sleep or cosleep with parents have more frequent and prolonged bouts of night waking than infants who don’t do these things.  But parents who cosleep in Japan and Singapore report no such problems, so why would this be?  One astute researcher pointed out that cosleeping in Japan and Singapore is common, and parents are usually present at a child’s bedtime.  In North America, parents often choose to cosleep as a last resort, when they realize they’re getting even less sleep when the child is in their own room.  So it’s not that cosleeping causes North American children to wake up, it’s that the children who already have a difficult relationship with sleep, possibly due to parental absence during settling and sleep, that are more likely to cosleep than those who have demonstrated that they can successfully settle themselves to sleep alone.

One reason Western parents want to get their children to sleep relatively early is that a consistent bedtime is one component of what is called ‘sleep hygiene,’ a catch-all term to describe the habits and practices that are conducive to sleeping well on a regular basis, and is usually found to contribute to sleep quality and high functioning during the day which is particularly important where practices like work and school happen at set times over which the individual has little or no control.  For children who live in cultures where their lives are not regulated by the clock, there are few negative consequences to irregular bedtimes because they can just nap during the day when they are tired.

One particularly interesting study found that it wasn’t so much the activities that took place as part of the bedtime routine that were important, but the mother’s emotional availability during the bedtime routine that was linked to children’s sleep disruptions.  The sample size in this study was small, as they often are – only 45 families, and even more sadly fathers were recruited into the study but because only seven of them interacted with their children for at least 2-3 minutes at bedtime, the researchers couldn’t draw any conclusions about the importance of paternal emotional availability.  Emotional availability was assessed using a tool called the Emotional Availability Scales, which determined parental sensitivity (a parent’s capacity ability to accurately read and respond to the child’s signals with warmth and in an emotionally connected way), structuring (scaffolding of children’s activities and setting appropriate limits), non-intrusiveness (respecting autonomy and personal space) and nonhostility (the ability to interact with the child without signs of either covert or overt irritability or anger).  By now you will likely be as attuned as I am to recognize some of the cultural norms that are buried even within the scale used to assess maternal warmth – scaffolding of children’s activities is very unusual in some cultures, and respecting children’s autonomy implies something very different from a ‘because I said so’ approach to parenting.  Despite the small sample size, the researchers did get results with a moderate statistical power showing that lower maternal emotional availability at bedtime is linked with needing additional interventions after the first attempt to get the child to sleep as well as more night-time wakings, so it seems to matter less that you do a bath and read books and have a drink of water and all the other parts of your routine and more that you are show warmth toward your child as you get ready for bed.  The researchers found that mothers tended to show less warmth toward older toddlers than younger ones, possibly because the older ones were starting to develop their own agendas for bedtime that didn’t always coincide with the parental agenda.  I should note, though, that another study found that infant-mother attachment measures were not related to night awakenings in another study of more than 1,200 children measured from age 6 to 36 months; the statistically significant factors were the child’s difficult temperament at age six months, breastfeeding, infant illness, maternal depression, and greater maternal sensitivity, which apparently leads mothers to respond to their child when the child wakes up rather than allowing the child to self-soothe.

Once we make it through the bedtime routine, we get to the highly-contested topic of self-soothing, both at bedtime and during night-time wake-ups, which has been the topic of so many of the books related to sleep.  One set of researchers observed that 61% of parenting advice books containing information about sleep endorsed a so-called extinction method, in which parents gradually reduce and/or eliminate their responsiveness to a child’s crying, while the predominant counter-argument lies with the proponents of “attachment parenting” – which I put in inverted commas because the term tends to be used differently in the popular press than the proponents of attachment theory originally intended – who believe that consistent, sensitive parental responsiveness is critical to the parent-infant relationship.  The proponents of extinction typically cite one of two methods – either the parent just stops responding to the child’s cries (this method is called “unmodified planned ignoring”) which is apparently usually followed by a “sharp increase in problem behavior” called a “post-extinction burst,” followed by a substantial reduction of problem behavior over the next roughly five days and a typically low incidence of problems thereafter.  An incremental approach uses a ‘graduated checking procedure’ which was popularized in Richard Ferber’s book Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems, where the parent goes in to see the child after 1-3 minutes and gradually lengthens the period of time between checks.  Parents also modify their behavior during the checks – instead of offering a feed, offering to co-sleep, picking the child up for a cuddle or to rock them, parents instead rub the child’s back and tuck them in and limited their time in the child’s bedroom to around 30 seconds.  Studies show that this method takes longer to produce the desired changes in behavior, although it reduces parental and child distress.  Professor Blampied at Canterbury University in New Zealand notes that just ignoring the child’s cries is not stressful to parents either, but perhaps parents in New Zealand are just more stoic than everywhere else because the posts I see in parenting discussion groups talk about how getting their child to bed is driving them crazy but they just can’t stand to let the child cry it out.

One listener who wrote to me requesting an episode on this topic asked me to try to find out whether crying it out is harmful to the child in any way, and on this front I have to say the evidence is not 100% clear but in general it seems to come down on the side of not being harmful to the child.  Elizabeth Pantley developed The No-Cry Sleep Solution after failing to successfully use the cry-it-out approach with her own child, and this basically consists of picking the child up whenever they cry, staying with them until they are sleepy but still awake, and then putting the child down in the crib so they can learn what it’s like to self-soothe.  There is general support for putting the child down while sleepy but still awake, although the rest of Pantely’s methodology is based on precisely zero research-based evidence.  And it would be remiss to conclude this survey of the popular sleep books without mentioning William Sears & co’s book The Baby Sleep Book, in which the cry-it-out approach is “biologically and developmentally wrong that “can sabotage your parent-child-relationship and may make your child “more likely to have ADHD, along with poor school performance and antisocial behavior,” as well as result in a “violent, impulsive, emotionally unattached child.”  With a scathing criticism like that, it’s no wonder that parents feel as though Cry it Out is guaranteed to damage their child for life.  Before we get to the issue of whether any approach is harmful to a child, we should first examine whether the approaches that rely on some crying by the child are effective.  As we’ve already discussed, both the unmodified planned ignoring and the graduated checking approaches have been shown to be successful.  They do reduce the number of times children cry out to parents both when initially getting to sleep and during the night.  In contrast, there are precisely zero empirical studies showing the efficacy of reducing time to get to sleep or number of night wakings using immediate responding strategies.

Back on the topic of whether behavioral approaches are harmful to the child, the authors of the book Great Myths of Child Development, which I discovered in the course of researching this episode and which you’d better believe I’m going to read in greater depth soon, also looks at some of the many studies that William Sears references in The Baby Sleep Book.  They describe one in particular that Sears describes as follows: “researchers at Pennsylvania State and Arizona State universities found that infants with excessive crying during the early months showed more difficulty controlling their emotions and became even fussier when their parents tried to console them at ten months.”  The primary finding of the study that this quote refers to was correlational in nature (so the authors could not show which factor causes which), and showed that babies who cried a lot whether they were in or out of their crib at six weeks old were more likely to have a negative reaction to a frustrating stimulus in a lab situation when the child was 10 months old.  The study had nothing at all to do with sleep in general or even behavioral interventions in particular, and yet it is used to suggest that the cry-it-out approach leads to “difficulty controlling emotions.”  The Myths of Child Development authors say that the goal of the study was to examine the relation between crying and self-regulation, and it basically showed that temperament is fairly consistent in a baby’s first year across settings. The study is not evidence that the cry-it-out approach causes emotional damage. Apparently all of the other research studies cited by Sears et al. are subject to a similar critique.

One very small study of only thirty five children again in New Zealand, and in which the researcher thanks our Professor Blampied for assistance, found that a sleep intervention actually increased children’s emotional attachment with parents over the course of the treatment, although the researchers do note that it’s possible that the parents in the control group rated their children more favorably initially because the parents were less bothered by these children’s sleep disturbances, or the parents were more flexible and accepting of the children.  This study gets cited again and again as an example of how sleep interventions do not harm children while I would caution that it was far too small to draw any kind of generalizable conclusion, and a later study failed to replicate the finding.  I’m also cautious when I find one professor’s name attached to many studies with a particular finding because sometimes scientists develop a pet theory that other scientists don’t find any evidence for.

I found another study that confidently declares that there are no harms associated with behavioral sleep interventions five years after the intervention took place based on a questionnaire about the child’s sleep patterns and more general quality of life, as well as by collecting saliva from children which contains cortisol, a hormone that exists normally in the body but is also produced in response to stress.  The researchers found that the proportions of children with mental health problems, quality of life problems, and chronic stress as measured by cortisol levels were essentially the same in children who received a behavioral sleep intervention as those who did not.  But if you dig a little deeper into both the methodology and results, you find things that raise an eyebrow or two.  Firstly, regarding cortisol levels, the researchers asked parents to obtain saliva samples from children 30 minutes after waking up, and before lunch.  Baseline cortisol levels are highest in the body in the morning and tend to decline over the course of the day, so the researchers hoped to avoid the morning peak by waiting 30 minutes after wake-up time.  But cortisol produced in response to stress has a half-life of about 1-2 hours, meaning that when a child experiences stress their body produces a lot of cortisol, about half of which is gone 1-2 hours later.  So we wouldn’t really expect there to be any residual cortisol left over from a spike caused by stress at bedtime by the following morning or lunch.  It would have been far more interesting to understand whether the child was stressed during or immediately after the intervention, but I suppose sampling problems would make that difficult – you might find yourself with a child who won’t go to sleep unless you make him spit into a plastic tube first.

Secondly, the researchers kind of buried the lede of the whole follow-up study: the control group of parents whose children did not receive the intervention reported  that 6.9% of their now six-year-olds had what the parents deemed to be some kind of sleep problem.  Among the intervention group, that number was 9%.  Now, firstly, we should acknowledge that while the intervention group was specifically taught how to use behavior modification techniques to adjust their child’s sleep patterns and the control group was not, we can’t be sure that the control group didn’t consist of a crack set of researchers who were perfectly capable of researching and implementing these kinds of methods themselves without a nurse telling them how to do it at the child’s well-baby check-up.  So that’s a pretty important confounding variable that doesn’t seem to have been taken into account.  And secondly, it seems as though sleep problems either largely become resolved on their own, or parents simply adjust their mindsets and stop thinking of them as problems because the parents of six year olds who didn’t get the training reported a LOWER incidence of “sleep problems” than those who did.  So all this is to say that we can’t be sure that crying it out isn’t harmful for children; the best evidence we have says that it probably isn’t harmful, but that evidence isn’t of great quality.

There’s also the issue of parental sleep to consider – parental sleep and mood do tend to improve dramatically after a behavioral-based intervention, and it’s possible that long-term sleep-deprived, stressed, and possibly depressed parents may represent a greater threat to attachment security than a week or two of not responding to the child’s cries.  One study found that having nurses deliver hand-outs on the ‘graduated extinction’ and ‘camping out’ methods of sleep training (this last one involves staying in the room with the child but withdrawing further and further over a period of a couple of weeks) and writing a personalized sleep training plan resulted in improved mental health of mothers after 12 months, compared to a control group who didn’t receive this information from the nurse.  Further, it may be impossible to tease out the chicken and the egg of attachment and sleep – while research has indicated that infants with an insecure-ambivalent attachment relationship with their mothers do cry more at night, we don’t know whether the night crying is a cause or an effect of the attachment relationship.

A review of the literature from a behaviorist perspective shows us that bedtime routines are behaviorist in nature – each step in the routine becomes linked to the next, with the idea being that if you do the right things in the right order, the result (sleep) will follow as the last link in the chain.  Professor Blampied (again) notes that ‘parent-provided stimuli, arising from their actions or just their presence, if they overshadow the natural stimuli of the bed environment and become controlling stimuli for falling asleep, will then have to be provided every time if the child is to go to sleep.  This may be acceptable during infancy, but parents may find this burdensome as their child grows older. To avoid this, “parent-associated stimuli should be withdrawn from the last phase of the bedtime routine as the child grows, leaving naturally occurring bed cues to control the final discriminated operants in the chain.”  In other words, falling asleep with your infant is lovely and snuggly, but over time your infant will come to depend on your presence to fall asleep.  If you are a proponent of cosleeping then this remains a lovely thing but if you didn’t really like it much in the first place and you just did it to get your infant to sleep, or if your preferences shift and you decide it’s time your child developed the ability to self-soothe, then you have something of a problem.  This tends to be where elaborate bedtime routines have their origins, particularly as the child adds ‘just one more thing’ to the routine in an attempt to delay sleep ever further.  The behaviorists point to the importance of good sleep hygiene (by which they mean routines that don’t involve the parent being present as an aid to sleep) “and supporting parents through the distress and disruption that accompanies implementing them is one intervention.”  If you read between the lines you hear a lot of screaming children who don’t like the new routine and who protest the new absence of their parent as they try to go to sleep.  An alternate suggested approach is to have the parent stay in the room but refuse to interact with the child, which is apparently also very effective but reminds me a lot of the Blank Face experiment that Dr. Laura Froyen told us about, in which babies became very distressed when their mothers refused to interact with them.  It’s not at all clear to me what makes this method successful when we know that children find non-interaction from parents to be a very stressful thing.  Perhaps the children are doing what children and even adults in Bali can apparently do, which is to fall asleep at the drop of a hat during a stressful event like being a servant accused of stealing or being a toddler present at the birth of a younger sibling.  Sounds strange to Western ears, but it’s apparently true.

I have to say that one thing that struck me from all the research I read on sleep training is that all the researchers are essentially giving variations on the same advice.  I mean, maybe this isn’t rocket science, but one study will compare nurses giving information to parents at a well-baby visit, while another one gives the information automatically online after the parent completes a questionnaire about their child’s sleep.  The actual suggestions given are all the same – if you want your child to sleep on their own in their own bed, you basically have to decide how much crying you can put up with.  If you can’t stand to hear your child cry then the gradual extinction method will take longer but will get you there in the end.  If you don’t mind hearing it intensely for a long time on a few nights, your child will get the idea faster.  That’s really all there is to it, unless you count the study that was funded by Johnson & Johnson that includes the importance of a bath (using a provided wash product) and a massage (using a provided moisturizing product).  Debra Bass, the president of J&J’s global baby franchise, says this kind of research “separates Johnson’s from other baby skincare brands by going beyond products to “deliver a bigger experience backed by science.”  Of course, the study tested the bath/massage/bed routine compared to families’ normal pre-bed activities among families in which the parent had identified their child as having a sleep problem, so it would be sort of surprising if instituting a relaxing bedtime routine didn’t have much of an effect for these children.  It would have been much more interesting to compare families who used the bath/massage/bed routine not using Johnson’s products with those who did – I’d be willing to put money on the fact that there would be no differences between the two conditions, but I suppose that wouldn’t make such a good marketing story.  FYI, Johnson’s uses the data that parents put into its Bedtime app for more research on sleep that they can use to make marketing claims, and I assume the app subtly reminds you about the importance of Johnson’s products to your baby’s sleep and therefore wellbeing, which helps Johnson’s to “own every conversation about sleep” and encourages parents to keep buying their products.  Do what that information what you will.

So for those of us parents whose children do sleep in their own rooms, in a way we make our own beds and now we have to lie in them, as it were: we place a high value on something a child may well find it difficult to do, and then we get super stressed out when they can’t do it, which causes us to go crazy trying to find a solution to the ‘problem’ that is only a problem in the first place because of our expectations.  We do, of course, have to look beyond the macro view of cultural expectations to a micro view of what works for individual parents – if I get up for my daughter in the night, it takes me at least an hour to get back to sleep, whereas it takes my husband approximately five minutes.  We have been lucky that our daughter does sleep through the night the vast majority of the time, but on the rare occasion when she does wake up I usually don’t hear it because I’m wearing earplugs, and he’s the one to go and see what she needs.  If she was in our bed, I’d have lost that hour of sleep, but because she’s not, I get to sleep through – and you’d better believe I’m a happier and more productive person – and a better parent – because I got that extra hour.

I was surprised to learn that when researchers looked for a correlation between executive functioning of 12 and 18 month-old children and the number of night awakenings that their parents reported, they essentially found few differences between children who woke up often during the night and children who didn’t.  This research is in its early stages, but to me it lends support for the idea that self-soothing is something that may be more important to the parents than to the child.  One or both parents may have to work during the day, particularly here in the U.S. where paid maternity leave may be close-to-nonexistent for the majority of the population.  As an example of the idea that something is only a problem if parents perceive it as a problem: children in Sweden typically have their own bedrooms but increasingly over the first three years of their lives, Swedish children tend to come into the parents’ bed in the early morning.  I would not be at all happy with this arrangement because I tend to get my most productive sleep in the early morning hours, but Swedish parents tolerate and even encourage this behavior because they feel as though parents should be available to children whenever the child feels a need for contact, and also in part because working parents see so little of their children during the day that they want to “fill our tanks with love at night sleeping together.”  This practice has even been observed as somewhat common among older parents in Boston, Massachusetts.  What might be the kind of problem that would drive me to distraction if I experienced it is nothing more than a normal part of parenting in Sweden and, apparently, some places in the U.S..

So, as we wrap up, the evidence shows that sleep training methods involving some variation of not responding to a child’s cries or gradually withdrawing responses over a period of time is an effective way to get children to self-soothe.  Further, the evidence suggests (but is not conclusive on this front) that while children do experience some distress during behavioral modification approaches to sleep, that they are not harmful to children in the long-term because children are not fragile beings who will wilt if they experience any stress, and in fact the experience of stress and even of occasional parental unavailability can set the stage for positive mental and emotional development later in life.  We should note, though, that behavioral modification of sleep isn’t appropriate for children less than about six months of age, and shouldn’t be used if the parent can identify a clear need other than that of parental presence that the parent can satisfy – so if the child has a wet diaper, change it.  If they’re too hot, too cold, too thirsty, or whatever – help the child to fix those things once only, and then consider not responding after that.  And, of course, if they have a diagnosed medical problem or you think medical factors could be impacting their sleep, you might want to consult your doctor.  And don’t feel as though sleep training is the only tool available to you – what pretty much all of the behavioral modification researchers fail to mention is that having a child sleep through the night in their own bed is a cultural choice, and the child’s failure to do this is evidence of a ‘disorder’ only inasmuch as the parents perceive it to be a problem.  So if your child doesn’t sleep through the night in their own bed but you don’t mind getting up, then it’s not a problem.  And if the only way your child will sleep is with you in your bed and you’re fine with that and can envision being fine with that for the foreseeable future, then that’s also not a problem.  But do consider that the longer you ‘live with’ a situation that you consider to be a problem without fixing it, the more entrenched the ‘problem’ behaviors will become until they are very difficult to change, so if you feel a change is warranted, you might want to make it sooner rather than later.

You can find references for the 29 books and articles that I read in preparation for this episode at yourparentingmojo.com/sleep

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  I actually hadn’t realized what a can of worms I was opening when I started the research for today’s episode, which is on the topic of manners and politeness.  It began innocently enough – as an English person (honestly, despite the strange accent) for whom manners are pretty important, I started to wonder why my almost three-year-old doesn’t have better manners yet.  It turns out that it was a much more difficult subject to research than I’d anticipated, in part because it draws on a variety of disciplines, from child development to linguistics.

And at the heart of it, I found myself torn between two different perspectives.  The parenting philosophy that underlies the respectful relationship I have with my daughter, which is called Resources for Infant Educarers, or RIE, advocates for the use of modeling to transmit cultural information like manners – if you, the parent, are a polite person, then your child will learn about manners.  On the flip side of that is the practice of saying “what do you say?” or something similar when you want your child to say “please” or “thank you,” something that I know a lot of parents do.  My general approach has been to model good manners consistently but I do find it drives me bananas when my daughter says “I want a [whatever it is]” without saying “please,” and RIE also says parents should set a limit on behavior when they find it annoying.  So I have been trying to walk a fine line between always modeling good manners and requiring a “please” before I acquiesce to a demand, and I wondered whether research could help me to come down on one side or the other of this line and just be sure about what I’m doing.  So this episode is going to be about my explorations through the literature on this topic, which are winding and convoluted – actually both the literature and my explorations are winding and convoluted, and by the time we get to the end I hope to sort out how I’m going to instill a sense of politeness in my daughter, and how you might be able to do it for your child as well.

So the first thing we should acknowledge as we set out on our journey, that both politeness and impoliteness are awfully difficult to define, they are contextually appropriate, and they are culturally appropriate as well.  In fact, politeness and impoliteness seem to be difficult to define *because* they are contextually appropriate and culturally appropriate.  So we might agree that it is rude to interrupt people when they are speaking, and yet I’m sure we can all imagine a time when we were excited to tell someone something and we interrupted them – perhaps repeatedly – so we could do it.  We might even be able to find a culture where interrupting people isn’t that rude at all.

We might all agree that saying “please” and “thank you” form the basis of good manners and yet how many of us ALWAYS say these things at the appropriate times?  I pride myself on my manners and yet I know I don’t ALWAYS use them (although I do make an extra special effort to use them when my daughter is around).  And manners are, of course, highly culturally appropriate – you only need to think of how strange it seems to Americans to bow to someone else to show deference and respect, which is, of course, commonplace in Japan – there’s a helpful guide linked in the references to the exact number of degrees your bow should be in each of a variety of circumstances that require different levels of deference and respect in Japan.  But there are some countries in southern Europe where the translation of “please” into the local language is apparently a term that connotes begging and is seen to be rude, so even something as simple as that is not universal by any stretch.

If we start to think about the purpose of manners, I like to look first to the ethnographic literature to see how things are done in other cultures, because I think this helps to ground our explorations with a view on whether us Westerners are doing things in a way that the rest of the world thinks is crazy or not.  For this I turned to our old friend David Lancy, whose book The Anthropology of Childhood I’ve referenced many times on the show.  I was surprised to find that manners are actually quite universal in nature – what precisely are the social graces that one needs to master varies by location, of course, but the concept of manners does seem to exist in an awful lot of cultures  – and so does teaching children about those manners.  In a majority of cases it seems as though the mother teaches the child manners so it appears more attractive to other potential caregivers, which reduces the burden of parenting on the mother.  Kwara’ae mothers in the Solomon Island drill their children on terms to use for their relatives and polite ways of conversing with them, and these sessions contain not only information about family structure but also about values of delicacy and peacefulness.  Four-year-old Fijian children are expected to bend over in an exaggerated bow to show respect to passing adults, and will be scolded or hit if they don’t show sufficient respect.  Javanese mothers repeat terms of politeness over and over and correct their children’s mistakes, so one-year-olds can do a polite bow and say a polite form of “goodbye,” while an aristocratic five-year-old will have an extensive repertoire of graceful phrases and actions.

David Lancy notes that there is actually considerable evidence that children will learn appropriate prosocial behaviors in time – despite the importance of social instruction in many areas of the south pacific, Samoan children begin to pick up the distinctive features characterizing people of rank and authority without being explicitly instructed.  Apparently there are many societies that value “proper” behavior a great deal and that don’t engage in any kind of enforced compliance or training since, after all, the success of the human species actually rests on our VOLUNTARY compliance with social norms.  The English well-known ethologist Desmond Morris claimed in his 1967 book The Naked Ape that there may be an instinctive basis for greetings and other similar rituals, but it seems to me that children would pick them up a lot more quickly than they do if this were the case.  Six years seems like an awfully long time to wait for a behavior to emerge that is so important in navigating social situations that the child encounters from much younger ages.

French children are well-regarded for their table manners with wrists being held on the edge of the table when the hands are not being used for eating, for example. The gulf between French and American children’s manners prompted the bestseller Bringing up Bebe, which teased us with descriptions of French parenting that alternated between these strict mealtime rules and a great deal of laissez-faire parenting that permits a great deal more parental relaxation than under the typical American model.  David Lancy points out the supreme irony that Americans spend such a huge amount of time teaching their young children things – all kinds of things, in an effort to help them get ahead, much more time than we spend teaching them about things related to kin terminology, politeness, and etiquette (even though it might feel to you as if you spend quite a lot of time saying “what’s the magic word?”).  He attributes this discrepancy to the importance of kin terminology, politeness, and etiquette in interdependent societies where the whole is valued more than the individuals within it.  Western society, and particularly American society, values individuality to such a great extent that being able to recognize one’s feelings and expressing those feelings are far more important than what anyone else might think or feel.

I’ve been trying to think about what it is about these words “please” and “thank you” that are so meaningful for us as parents and that leave me, at least, so ticked off when they aren’t used.  Particularly “please” which I find much more triggering when it’s omitted than “thank you.”  Certainly it’s possible to be polite without using them – something like “would you kindly pass the salt?” is polite doesn’t use “please,” although perhaps the average three-year-old is less likely to come out with this variation that they probably don’t hear very often.  Maybe it’s because we feel taken for granted much of the time and once we’ve asked our preschooler to say “please” a number of times we feel as though they ought to remember the routine, and that if they can remember how to say “I want some banana,” surely they can remember to say “I want some banana please” – although one study did find that a polite request by a child was less likely to be granted than a neutral “I want some banana” kind of request, perhaps because mothers in particular are conditioned to comply with distressed or angry requests.  If the child is already distressed then we don’t want to escalate the situation by denying the request, but if the child says “please” and they’re asking for something we don’t want them to have they’re probably in a mood in which we can negotiate with them.  It does seem as though we’re shooting ourselves in the foot a bit, though, by denying more requests when they are accompanied by a “please” than when the child stamps their foot and says they want the thing.

On the flip-side, though, I can imagine how frustrating it must be to be a child and not be able to reach the bananas, or the milk, or the scissors and glue, and to always have to ask for everything an adult thinks must be kept out of your reach.  So we use these phrases to get people to do things for us, and to show our appreciation for doing things for us, because in our society these things have become routinized.  As one researcher noted, routines are a way of guiding a person’s normal interaction in social situations, and if everyone shares the same “rules” about what those routines should be then the interaction goes more smoothly.  For this reason, researchers have found that young children who have improved social and emotional skills do better in school, although I would argue that so much of “doing well in school” in the early years pretty much does consist of being able to sit still and keep quiet when the teacher says “be quiet” and not get into disagreements with other children so in a way it’s kind of a “well, duh” that children with better manners do better in school.

So what I really want to get to the root of is: how much do our toddlers and preschoolers understand about all this?  Should we teach them the routines of politeness before they understand what the routines mean, or should we wait for the child to understand what it means to be polite and to feel grateful before we expect them to start saying “please” and “thank you”?

Professor Jean Berko Gleason did a fair bit of important work on manners, and we’re going to talk about several of her studies, although most of it was in the 1980s and I think we can assume social conditions have changed a bit since then.  In one study she and her co-authors wanted to understand HOW children learn politeness rules which, she says, are even more difficult to understand than rules of grammar, which children obviously struggle as well because, like with manners, grammar has lots of rules but also lots of exceptions to those rules.  The researchers use a definition of politeness which says that the amount of “work” that needs to be done when making a request is determined by three parameters – firstly, the degree of imposition of the request (so, “could you pass the salt?” and “could I borrow $1,000 from you?” require different levels of politeness, even if you’re asking both questions of the same person), secondly the social difference between the requester and the grantee, and thirdly the power differential between the requestor and the grantee.  The researchers wondered how children learn the rules of politeness in all of its many and varied forms when no parent ever says to them “you can be rude to me but you’d better be polite to your teacher because there’s more social distance between you and her than between you and me.”  But children do receive lots of information from two other sources – firstly parents teach by modeling, for example, by trying to minimize threats to their children’s social standing, or “face,” by making polite requests that help their children “save face” or using more polite forms of requests when asking for special favors from their children.  Secondly, parents do directly teach children about what forms of politeness to use in certain situations, usually taking the form of “say please” or something similar.  Unfortunately, the researchers didn’t make any attempt to analyze how effective were the different methods of teaching.

In another study, Professor Berko recruited eight families, four with girls and four with boys all aged between three and five.  With the families’ permission, she left a tape recorder in an inconspicuous spot in the dining room and recorded the conversation that occurred during the evening meal.  She points out that “it should be noted that the fathers had more occasion to say please or thanks since they were being served.”  One might hope that in modern families at least some men are participating in some cooking, or at least helping to get their own food, although I have to say that that’s not the case in our house.  Professor Gleason found no evidence of differential treatment of girls and boys, but each of the eight families did engage in some attempt to get the child to produce what she called “politeness forms” like “please” and “thank you.”  She believes that by insisting on the use of the word “please,” that parents are indicating to the child that the class of utterances known as requests requires some kind of special treatment; that you can’t just make the request for the thing you want without adding this word, and in this way the parents help the child to “gain pragmatic awareness before syntactic competence,” by which she means that the child becomes able to use the appropriate convention to get what she wants before she really understands what the word means.

Other researchers have noticed that the majority of requests for politeness from children are not direct (as in “say please”) but are rather indirect (as in, “what do you say?”), and while indirect requests are actually a pretty effective method of getting children to say the required word, researchers haven’t fully understood why we parents don’t just say “say please” all the time.  They hypothesize four reasons – that because people believe that children who lack manners have been raised poorly that the indirect request allows the parents to save face because they draw less attention to the child’s error (which I don’t think is really the case), that parents use indirectness as a way of venting frustration when their child is impolite (which I can say probably is the case for me a lot of the time); that parents are teaching their child how to be indirect, or that parents want the child to think of the correct thing to say by themselves, which sounds good until you realize just how routinized these interactions become with the average three-year-old and you see that they know *exactly* what is expected when they hear “what do you say?”.

In another study, Professor Gleason invited 22 children aged between two and five and their parents into a laboratory playroom for a session as part of another ongoing study, greeted the children, at the end of the session an assistant entered the room to give the child a gift for participating in the study, and then said “goodbye.”  The goal was to see whether children would say “hi,” “thanks,” and “goodbye” at appropriate points in the course of the visit, which apparently only one three-year-old boy did on one of his two visits to the lab.  Children responded with “hi” or “goodbye” about 25% of the time, but produced an unprompted “thank you” only about 7% of the time.  When the child didn’t produce the three phrases spontaneously the accompanying parent almost always prompted the child to say it, with the most prompting occurring for the “thank you,” and the child actually saying “thank you” 86% of the time when they were prompted.  The children usually repeated the parent’s words exactly, so if the parent said “say thank you for the gift” the child would say “thank you for the gift.”  The children never added anything like “thank you for giving me the toy” or expressed any other indication that they really knew what the routine meant.  When their child received the gift, 15 parents said “thank you” themselves, 11 of which were mothers and 4 were fathers, a difference that was statistically significant, with a similar result in with the “goodbyes.”  Professor Gleason speculated that the upper middle class parents in her sample might not even try to elicit the appropriate terms as much as members of groups of lower socio-economic status, who may be less permissive with their children.  She also noticed the potentially profound implications of mothers exhibiting more polite behavior than fathers, and wondered whether a two-year-old knows that she is a girl and that she is supposed to talk like her mother rather than her father?  For those of you with boys, you might want to have a conversation with the adult male members of your family about the importance of manners as well, although I should point out that Professor Gleason was involved in another study using a much larger sample size that didn’t find any difference between maternal and paternal use of manners.

So if our children don’t fully understand the words they’re saying, how do they know which words to use?  The phrase “may I be excused” is an example of what Professor Gleason calls an “unanalyzed chunk” – a set of words that the child aged three or four knows go together but isn’t really sure what the individual words mean and can’t use them in other settings for several more years.  Other researchers have suggested that children use these chunks of language as an interim strategy until they fully understand what they mean and can recombine them into new forms.  And they don’t even need to be completely fixed routines, but may have open slots that the speaker can fill in with word that are appropriate to the immediate situation.  Much of a preschooler’s life is highly routinized, and Professor Gleason thinks that the words adults use – and tend to use over and over again, the same each day – are processed by children as chunks rather than as individual words that can be recombined into other sentences.

As an example of this, I have for years now asked my husband over dinner every night “So how was the office, dear?” in the tone that I imagine a 1950’s housewife might ask her weary husband, just after she puts his slippers in front of his feet and his tumbler of whisky on the rocks in his hand.  It’s sort of poking fun at the fact that while I do have a full-time job, I’m lucky enough to work from home and so I have “been at home” all day while my husband has had to drive to his “real” work at the office.  My daughter and I were eating dinner together one night when she turned to me and said “How was the office dear?”  with obviously no understanding of what it meant, but she had heard it used at the dinner table for months and decided to replicate it.  I almost fell out of my chair laughing but after I picked myself up I told her how my day at my “office” was, and since then she has asked the same question on almost a daily basis.  She has been to her Dad’s office, but I know she doesn’t have a concept of what he does there every day or what it means to ask how the office was, but she knows it is a chunk of words that we use and understand and will respond to if she uses it.  She only uses it at the dinner table, because it’s part of our dinner routine, so it’s relatively useless as a chunk of information.  The form “Can I have more [of something]” is easier to understand and so might be one that a child experiments with – you may hear “please can I have more banana” or “please more banana” or “more banana please” as the child figures out what forms are acceptable ways of asking for banana and which will earn a reprimand.

Shifting gears a bit, apologies are also both linguistic and social tools, which Professor Gleason says can restore damaged relationships, mitigate loss of face, and preserve social standing.  Linguists categorize apologies as both performatives, which means the apology is achieved when the words “I’m sorry” or their equivalent are spoken, and as expressives, which is the sincerity of the feelings of remorse being expressed.  Unlike the use of “please” and “thank you,” which are highly routinized, the use of “I’m sorry” is much more situationally specific – these situatioons don’t occur nearly as often, and they require the child to understand that a violation of some kind of norm regarding social interactions has taken place and that this violation can be remedied. Professor Gleason studied nine children aged between 1 year 2 months and 6 years 1 month.  The youngest child to say “sorry” said it at age 1 year 10 months after his mother said “Can you say you’re sorry?”.  Children increasingly used the word “sorry” in the course of their play (things like “So sorry, tow truck!”) between age two and four.  There was also a drop in direct parental prompts (where the parent says “say sorry!” and a rise in indirectly elicited prompts where a transgression is discussed but the apology isn’t specifically requested or required, over the same period.  The study also describes three ways that parents teach implicitly teach children how to apologize.  For example, when a child is working on a puzzle with her mother the child says “Oh, you forgot, Mommy,” and the mother says “Oh, I’m sorry I made a mistake” – so by explaining why she’s saying “sorry” the mother helps her child to understand when she, too, can use that language.  The second of these is the sympathetic apology, when the child says he doesn’t feel well and the parent says “Oh, I’m sorry” – it’s more of a showing of sympathy than owning up to any sense of responsibility for the child’s not feeling well, and is apparently indicative of the extent to which parents go out of their way to help their children ‘save face.’  And finally, when a mother causes a cart to hit her son and she says “whoops, excuse me!,” her three year old son says “why you said “scuse me”?  And the mother says “because I was afraid you were hurt,” again teaching the child about an appropriate use of the word.

Stepping back from the research a bit here, saying “sorry” is one area where we have definitely used modeling rather than telling our daughter to “say sorry,” probably partly because I feel that I have an alternate option that I’m comfortable with – if my daughter causes some kind of hurt to another child, I say very sincerely to the other child “I’m so sorry that happened.”  My daughter’s preschool actually doesn’t tell the children to say sorry either – instead, when someone gets hurt, they encourage the other children to ask the hurt child if he’s OK, and to think of things they might be able to do to help him feel better.  Initially I thought this sounded like a much better approach to me but then I realized that since two-year-olds don’t have much of a theory of mind, which is to say that they don’t understand that other people think things that are different from what they think themselves, asking if another person is OK is kind of just as meaningless as the forced apology.  We’ve talked about theory of mind a couple of times, in our episode on symbolic representation in art and also in the one on lying, and you can actually test whether your child has theory of mind yet – you should take her to the kitchen and get the cookies out of the cookie jar and put them in the fridge.  Then you ask her “when your Dad, or whoever he other parent is, comes in to the kitchen, where will he look for the cookies?”.  If she says “in the fridge” then she doesn’t have theory of mind yet, because she doesn’t understand that her Dad couldn’t possibly think the cookies would be in the fridge.  If she says “in the cookie jar” then she understands that it’s possible for her Dad to have a false belief about where the cookies are, and that she knows the truth about where they are.  So until children have theory of mind, they can’t truly apologize or, I think, fully understand what it means to ask someone if they’re OK.  But my daughter does produce this behavior without prompting when I bump myself or when I say “ouch” for some reason, and I suppose what’s happening is that we are scaffolding her ability to apologize by helping her to understand the kinds of situations that require apologies before she has the mental capacity to understand what it means to apologize.  If you don’t recall in detail what the term “scaffolding” means then basically it’s the notion of providing support for a child as they learn about an idea and gradually withdrawing that support over time and we did a whole episode on that as well.

Professor Gleason concludes her article on apologies with an anecdote about a mother whose 3 year, 3-month old son says “you’re the biggest stinker in the whole world!” at which point she pretends to cry, and the child says “I’m sorry I said that.”  By overplaying how much she was hurt the mother highlights the importance of atoning for breaches of social conventions, and her son offers a sincere apology that both offers a statement of remorse and acknowledges his wrongdoing, although it’s difficult to tell from the transcript whether the incident was more playful or manipulative.  This apparently represents a pretty sophisticated grasp of the apology routine and so is something I’m watching out for in my daughter’s behavior – she does spontaneously produce “sorry”s but very sporadically, and almost always at home and not toward other children, and I haven’t yet heard her say what she’s sorry for.

So that’s some of what the research says about the development of manners.  Honestly, I feel so personally torn on this issue.  I had read an article by Robin Einzig, a parent educator who is very familiar with the RIE approach to parenting (but not 100% wedded to it), several months ago that’s called “model graciousness” – I’ll put a link to it in the references for this episode.  The article is about what parents should do when their child refuses to do what the parent is asking, so not exactly about manners, but pretty close for our purposes since we often want our child to exhibit good manners just like we want them to do what we ask.  So the point of the article is that if your child does something she’s not supposed to, like pour a glass on the floor, you explain that the milk needs to get cleaned up, and you get two cloths and give her one and you say “let’s clean it up together; would you like to wipe or hold the container while I wipe?” and she refuses or laughs or runs off, then what you’re supposed to do is not put the child in time out, or force her to clean it up, or leave the milk on the floor until she cleans it up, but to model graciousness.  That means you clean up the milk yourself, and you trust that when she is ready (the next time the milk spills), she will help you.  You’re supposed to “quiet the anxious voices in your head that say “If I clean it up, she’ll never learn responsibility” and quiet the resentful voices in your head that say “I’m sick of doing everything for her when she’s perfectly capable of doing it herself” and quiet the punitive voices in your head that say “she spilled it; she needs to clean it up.”  The idea is that if you trust that she will help you to clean it up then one day she will, because she will, because she will have been watching you all that time and learning from you and she will know what it means to be helpful and generous and altruistic.  And if you want her to be that person then you, the parent, have to be that person and help others and accept others’ emotional or developmental limitations, and model graciousness.

So if we apply this idea to the development of manners, which I think we can because I had an extended instant message chat with Robin where she told me we can, we are to model graciousness in the way we speak to others as well, and that when our child is ready, she will be gracious with others as well.  It’s an approach that fits so well with so many aspects of RIE; for example, we trust that my daughter’s body will be ready to do what it needs to do in its own time, so we never “walked” her and always let her climb by herself if she wanted to – she could actually climb a play structure for 3-5 year-olds before she was even walking.  The daycare she goes to has a kind of spinner on the playground that she’s been watching the older kids use for months, and we were hanging out there after school recently when she wanted me to put her on it.  She had been trying to climb up facing forwards and couldn’t quite get her legs through.  I told her “if you can’t do it by yourself, then I think that means your body isn’t ready yet.”  She kept at it and in the end she realized that instead of climbing forward onto it she could actually back up into it and scooch up with her butt, and got up by herself – which she would never have realized if I’d just lifted her up.  Now she can get up and down by herself and has been figuring out how to make it spin faster and slower, which she can’t do when the teachers are holding it for her and making it spin slowly in case she gets scared.  She’s one of the more graceful three-year-olds I know; she certainly does fall down, but rarely seriously because she can look at a situation and know her limits and assess whether or not it’s safe for her, because we trust her body and so she trusts her body.

Robin Einzig trusts children absolutely to develop politeness skills in the same way – she believes that if *we* believe they can and will do it, then they will, when they are developmentally ready.  The problem we run into, of course, is that society believes children should be ready to be polite usually a long time before children are developmentally ready to be polite.  And the problem with that is that because so much of our own identity as people is wrapped up in our children once we become parents, that any criticism of our child’s manners becomes a criticism of our parenting, and, implicitly, of us.  I mean, who hasn’t been in a real-world situation just like Professor Gleason’s lab setting where someone gives something to your child, your child takes it, and there’s a pregnant pause while everyone waits for the “thank you” that isn’t coming.  It’s happened to me, many times, and I feel my own anxiety rising as I hope my daughter says it because don’t I trust her to say it when she’s ready?  And what am I supposed to say – to her or to the person who gave her the thing – if she doesn’t?

Robin puts it this way: It’s a matter of framing. I do not see parenting as akin to a recipe–put this in, get this out–or as a project in which we set out to produce a product that does or behaves in a specific way. I see parenting as an exercise in faith and trust and risk and perhaps most of all, an exercise in growth for *ourselves.* I see it as an opportunity to share our lives with another fully actualized human being, whose path is their own. ”

I know some parents will start drilling their child on how to say “please” and “thank you” starting around age 5 or 5 ½, perhaps because it seems as though by that age they really *should* be saying it by then, but Robin says that “if you have even an ounce of “how long must we wait” in you, then you have an expectation or a time clock or some sort of fear that it won’t happen,” and that she doesn’t operate that way.  Magda Gerber, who founded the RIE approach to parenting, said that readiness is when they do it, whether that’s age four or age six or never at home but often when around others.  She said her own daughter started saying please at around age two or three at home, but not really consistently, and she was never required to say it, and around age 9 or 10 she suddenly became so polite that people would compliment her manners to her parents.  That’s not to say that every child will go through the same process because that’s not the case at all, of course, but if we require that our children produce certain behaviors then they are likely to do it when we’re around, but as soon as we turn our backs they’ll be rude to all and sundry.  So much research on other topics supports this idea; if you force a child to eat vegetables to get another food then they end up liking vegetables less, and if you pay a child to do chores then they’ll do the chore as long as the reward is dangled but as soon as the reward goes away, they won’t do the chore any more.

But I do also recognize that manners and politeness is *not* the same as eating vegetables and doing chores; manners are something that are supposed to be a social lubricant, and *people notice* when they are absent.  I should also acknowledge, though, that my own tolerance for what I view as a lack of manners is probably lower than most people’s.  So Robin told me that if she was in a restaurant and the waiter asked what drinks the table would like and she said “I’d like a ginger ale” in a nice tone of voice and with a smile and eye contact rather than “could I please have a ginger ale,” that she didn’t think that would be rude at all, whereas I think “I’d like a ginger ale” would be just on the verge of acceptability and that in England, where I’m from, it would definitely be rude.  And as a side note, this speaks to the difficulties that children from other countries and cultures and especially who speak other languages have in attempting to mesh their own understanding of politeness and respect with that of the culture they’re now in, especially when teachers specifically and the dominant culture in general tends to hold pretty negative views of children from the non-dominant culture.  But I asked my husband what he thought and he said he didn’t think “I’d like a ginger ale” sounded rude at all.  So I think partly it’s that I do have different expectations about manners than most people, and especially the average American, but it’s also partly that society has a double standard and lack of respect for children that some people call “childism.”

Childism is embodied in a lot of different ways – when she stubs her toe and cries and someone says “stop crying, you’re fine” instead of empathizing with her.  It’s asking a parent if the child would like a banana when he can answer perfectly fine for himself.  It’s grandma forcing the child to give her a hug or a kiss when the child clearly doesn’t want to.  And it’s requiring that the child says “please” for something when the adults around him don’t say it to each other, or to the child, simply because it’s something society says we should do.  Society assumes that the adult knows what manners are and may have forgotten or chosen not to use them in the particular moment, but assumes that the child does not know how to use manners unless they actually do it, so we ask them to prove it over and over again.

So I want to push back on that, because that’s kind of what we do on this show.  Society says we should dress girls in pink and boys in blue and buy dolls for girls and trucks for boys and we know that science says that young boys and girls really aren’t that different and that the differences we see are mostly those that society has imposed on them.  Society tells us “don’t talk about race” because it’s scary and we might say the wrong thing but we know that science says that *not* talking about race with your kids is one of the most effective ways to create racist kids.  Society says to give your kids rewards for doing everything from pooping on the potty to doing chores, but we know that science says that extrinsic rewards are not a good way to motivate children in the long term.  So when society says “children have to say “please” even when adults don’t have to,” perhaps we should push back on that.  Robin reminded me that there are lots of ways to be polite that don’t involve saying “please;” one I use myself a lot – often in writing for work-related things – is “kindly,” so “would you kindly do this thing that I need you to do and I know you don’t really want to do?”  But we can’t really expect a young child to come out with a statement like that that we don’t often use in conversation because we know from the research that they tend to use linguistic routines until they fully understand something.

So what *are* we supposed to do?  Well, luckily for us, Robin Einzig has some suggestions for us.  Firstly, she says that age three is really too young to reliably expect children to say “please” and that we shouldn’t require our three year olds to say it. We can model the language we want to see, so if the child says “I want a banana,” the parent can say “You’d like a banana, please?  Sure, I’d be happy to get you one.”  The parent doesn’t require that they say “please” to get the banana, but the child still hears the routine and is supported in understanding the social convention, even as we don’t judge the absence of a “please” from them.  If we’re at a restaurant with a five-year-old who says to the waiter “I want a ginger ale” then we could put a gentle hand on his back and say to the waiter “he’d like a ginger ale, please.”  And if we think our child maybe has a harder time than most at reading social cues and grandma is holding a banana out but won’t actually hand it over until the child says the “magic word,” the parent could lean over and whisper to the child in an encouraging way “I think it’s really important to Grandma that you say “please,” without actually requiring that the word be said.

I do want to be clear that there is no scientific research that I’ve found, at least, which has conclusively shown that if you model politeness and provide these kinds of supports where needed that your child will grow up to be genuinely gracious and not just polite when you’re giving them the stink eye, but as we’ve seen the research on the coercion of children in other areas of their lives, it rarely produces the result that we intend.  The studies like Professor Gleason’s tend to lump all aspects of “prompting” together, no matter how coercive they are.  We do also have pretty good evidence that children learn through modeling adults – both from social learning theorists like Albert Bandura but also when our own children copy the things we say and the exact tone in which we say it.  I had noticed the discrepancy between my demands for my daughter to say “please” and the lack of coercion that I use in other aspects of her life, and I’ve been particularly struck by the fact that I don’t force her to say “thanks” or “sorry” but she more regularly uses those words than the “please” that I do require that she use.  But I didn’t know what else to say instead.  And now I do.

So I plan to make the switch to this kind of language pretty much right now.  Because I can see that even if I’m no longer requiring that my daughter to say “please” to get a banana, if I do say “You’d like a banana, please?” then I am still teaching her about manners; I’m not just throwing her out to the wolves and leaving her to figure it out for herself.  But I’m also aligning my approach to manners with my approach to most other aspects of my parenting, which is to say that I don’t make rewards contingent on good behavior, or pooping in the potty, or pretty much anything else.  So I will no longer withhold food from her until she says “please” for it, even if it irks me that she won’t say it by herself, and even if it is more effort for me to model the sentence for her.  And the other nice thing this approach does for me is to help me save face as a parent, when I’m with other parents or in a restaurant or another setting where “polite” behavior is required, and my daughter doesn’t produce the requisite “please” at the right time, I can still show people that good manners are important to me, and that I am helping my daughter understand when to use manners, even if she’s not quite ready to do it yet.  To use more technical language, we accept the importance of the child’s competence in understanding what the words that they use mean, rather than require performance of linguistic routines before that competence occurs, because it is only through that competence – through understanding the true meaning of “please” and “thank you” and the offering of things and gratitude for being offered things, that children fully grasp the much larger ideas of helpfulness and generosity and altruism that we all hope they come to understand.

So I hope this has been a fun ride for you guys, because you have literally watched me shift my approach over the course of writing this episode.  I’d also like to extend my thanks to both Professor Gleason and Robin Einzig, who took the time to explain their differing points of view on this issue.

We’ve referenced a lot of previous episodes in this show so if you want to go back and revisit those there’s a list of them, along with all the references for the research we’ve discussed today, at yourparentingmojo.com/manners.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Before we get going with the show today I wanted to take a minute to thank those of you who have been so generous with your time and money over the last couple of weeks.  Several of you have been kind enough to offer advice based on your personal expertise that really helped me to figure out the direction for the show, as well as how to reach some more listeners.  And a few of you have gone over to yourparentingmojo.com/support to offer either a one-time or an ongoing donation to support the costs involved with running the show. One awesome listener works for Adobe and used a discount code to get a cheap subscription to the editing software that I use and then donated the remaining amount, so I got a year of free access to the editing software – that is certainly a huge help.  Another listener sent a cool hundred bucks and when I wrote to say ‘thanks’ (as I do to everyone who sends a donation) she responded (and I do have her permission to share this with you):

You’re welcome…I listen when I can (sporadically)…usually while commuting. I always enjoy it. Honestly, though, the donation was almost entirely for the pleasure of watching my mother-in-law almost pass out when my daughter told her that the carseat buckle was “hurting her vulva.”    (I love her, but she’s quite proper and inhibited about some things.)  I was able to point to your episode on sex and walk her through the benefits of using accurate anatomical labels. She appeared to get it.  (And even if not, she now has something to think about…and I got a good chuckle.).

So whatever it is you get out of the show, I’m glad you’re along with me for the ride.  If you feel like contributing then awesome!  Thanks so much.  And even if you don’t, but you have a question or just want to say ‘hi,’ you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com as well.  I love hearing from you all.

Today’s episode is probably one I should have done a long time ago, but it was actually a question from a listener that prompted it.  Sylvia wrote to me and said “Hi – I very much enjoy your podcast.  I’m wondering if you can do an episode on the importance of siblings (or not).  We don’t want another child but are worried about the potential impact on our daughter of growing up without siblings.”

Now I don’t think it’s any secret around here that I’m not planning on having any more children, although we do have some friends who just announced their second pregnancy and I’ll say for a few minutes I did wonder what it would be like to think about having a second child.  But then I thought about an interview that I’m preparing for with Sara Dean of the Shameless Mom podcast (which may well be live by the time this episode goes live).  At the end of each interview she asks several rapid-fire questions, one of which is “what superpower would you grant moms?” And the best one I could think of was the power to experience time in a different way so that instead of having to look back on those early days with a baby and remember what they were like, we could actually experience them again.  Wouldn’t that be cool?  And at the same time, wouldn’t it just be the best birth control if we could also experience the day four mama meltdown and the wake-ups every two hours throughout the night again?

I never thought I’d have one child in the first place; I was quite happy to be childless.  I just didn’t have that urge that I’m told many women have that just makes them *want* children, but my husband actually did have it so I ended up having our daughter because I didn’t want to be responsible for the biggest disappointment of his life.  So far I’d say parenthood has exceeded my expectations, largely because I got a pretty easygoing kid who isn’t at all difficult to love.  But there’s really just no way that I can have a second one; I’m not at all ashamed to say that I meet one of the stereotypes of the parents of a single child – I’m too selfish to have another one.  I spent ten days hiking around Mont Blanc when my daughter was eight weeks old; it was a big part of how I reconciled my previous life with being a parent.  But how on earth would I do that with a three year old in tow?  How would I do pretty much anything except *be a parent?*  So the reason I hadn’t even thought of doing an episode on the single child was because mine was already committed to being a single child and I didn’t really figure there was a whole lot different about parenting a single child than more than one.  But when Sylvia’s question came through I realized that I hadn’t really given it the attention it probably deserves, so I have not one but two episodes coming up for you, no matter on which side of this fence you sit.  Today’s episode will focus on parenting an only child, and we’ll have one coming up in the near future on the relationships between siblings and how they impact a child’s development.

So parenting single children used to be a pretty strange thing.  Large families have been common for hundreds of years mostly because of the amount of work that needed to be done on a farm – and the infant mortality rate was so high that parents *had* to keep having children just to make sure they would have enough children to keep the land producing food.  Even once western society was well into the industrial age, it was almost like we just had a habit of producing large families that we couldn’t get out of, and this was supported by a variety of pieces of advice from the popular press up to neuropsychiatrists, who had a poor opinion of only children.  I should say that in this episode I’m going to draw on three books on only children (as well as the studies they cite), and primary among these is one called “One and Only” by Lauren Sandler.  It’s very well written and seems to be fairly well sourced, although it’s hard to tell for sure because Ms. Sandler isn’t very good at citing those sources.  Sometimes she does actually describe a particular study and it’s authors well enough for me to be able to find it, but often she just makes vague mention of something like a Gallup Poll, which doesn’t give me anywhere near enough information to find it and verify that it says what she says it says.  Having come pretty close to getting burned on that front in episode 18 on the book “The Spiritual Child,” where the author did cite her sources which enabled me to find that several of them were seriously misrepresented in her book, I didn’t want to get burned again on this one.  It did seem rather rude to email Ms. Sanders and say “could you please send me a list of your references so I can make sure you’re legit before I ask you to interview with me,” so I verified the sources I could, and was able to cross-reference many of them because there haven’t been *that many* studies done of only children, and the other two books I read as well referenced many of them.

Lauren Sandler gives passing mention to a study that was published in 1895 conducted by one E.W. Bohannon that I think lays such an incredible foundation for what seems to be a pervasive myth of the deficiencies of only children that I want to tell you quite a bit more about it than she did.  So our Professor Bohannon posted a notice somewhere, he doesn’t say where, for respondents to think about peculiar and exceptional children they might have known in childhood, whether any of their friends fit the bill, if they’re teachers or professors then to ask their students what kind of peculiar and exceptional children they know, and finally recount the characteristics of any exceptional children “you ever read of, whether fact or fiction.”  Professor Bohannon received descriptions of 1,045 children, fully 850 of them from a teacher at a state school in Trenton.  Categories of peculiar or exceptional children include the heavy, the tall, the small, the strong, the weak, the silent, the loquacious, and, of course, the only child.  45 of the cases are explicitly stated to be of this class, and I’ll quote the description of one of them which is representative of the whole: “Male, 10 years old. Light (we assume they mean light-skinned.) Selfish, spoiled, and ill-natured. Is so selfish that children of his own age will not play with him. Always wants his own way and plays with children much younger than himself.  Very ugly to them unless they allow him his own play in everything.  Children at school will very seldom play with him.  Is delicate.  Father’s mother not selfish.”  The commentary goes on to say that “46 of the 1045 cases are explicitly stated to be of this class, while there are a number of others that obviously are (although professor Bohannon doesn’t say how he knows this).  Thus one out of twenty of the entire number is an “only child” – a number entirely out of proportion to that found among children generally.  The only child in a family is therefore very likely to be “peculiar and exceptional.”

Now I suppose it goes without saying that the quality of this study was pretty low; the recruitment methodology was suspect in the extreme, since it relies on what individuals know and/or remember about the characteristics of other individuals as well as fictional characters.  Professor Bohannon made no attempt at all to obtain a sample that even came anywhere close to being representative, so the idea I want to leave you with here could be boiled down to the new title that we’re going to bestow on this article: “Crappy study finds only children suck.”  Unfortunately, once applied, the label stuck.  Lauren Sandler goes on to quote a variety of publications that I wasn’t able to get my hands on, including The Guide to Good Manners for Kids, published in 1926, which said that a parents’ chief concern is that an only child is bound to be a “spoiled child” with apparently shameful behavior.  The 1927 book “Child Guidance” says that “the only child is greatly handicapped.  He cannot be expected to go through life with the same capacity for adjustment that the child reared in the family with other children has.”  The book says that only children are handicapped because of their lack of contact with other children and because they have to constantly compete with adults.  “The only way in which he can exceed these adults is in infantile behavior.  He can scream, louder than they can.  He can throw himself on the floor.”  Needless to say, none of these works could be described as rigorous or scientific or even referenced in any way, shape, or form.

The best early study was conducted by Norman Fenton of the Whittier State School in California in 1928, who cites Bohannon’s work as well as both of the other books that Lauren Sandler quotes (she actually lifts Fenton’s quotes from these books), as well as an assortment of other articles and books which all have essentially the same message.  So Fenton decided to try to test whether only children really are different from children with siblings by studying a group of children aged between the kindergarten and sixth grade years, and two groups of university students, with both only children and children with siblings in each group.  Two teachers who had known each child for at least one semester rated each child on a series of twelve scales including self-confidence, generosity, sociability, obedience, and truthfulness.  Fenton’s conclusions are striking enough that I’m going to quote him: “It is noted that there is considerable overlapping in the teacher’s ratings of the two groups of the children studied, ranging from 73.1% to 90% or more (and, as a side note, when Fenton says “overlapping” he means that “the two groups are essentially the same.”).  In generosity and sociability, two traits in which in ordinary accounts only children are supposed to be especially inferior, the overlapping is considerable – 90% or more.”  On the other characteristics that he studied, the overlap between only children and children with siblings varied between 80% and 90%, with only children being very slightly more likely to be more self-confident, more aggressive and insist upon having their own way, be more optimistic, be more self-assured, higher in originality, and be slightly less obedient.  But again, the idea I want you to take away from this is that the overall differences between children with siblings and children without are very small.

Now keep in mind that Fenton’s research was published in 1928, just a year before the Great Depression began, and just a few years later only children went from being something of an oddity to being 30% of the total number of homes with children.  Despite the sudden “normalcy” of only children, the dual narratives had been established – study after study after study found very few differences between only children and children with siblings, while the popular press reported – and the general public opinion believed – that only children faced a serious disadvantage in life, that the “the usual overattention of a single child” was responsible for leading an English man to shoot 31 people before killing himself in 1987 and, of course, that the entire generation of only children born under China’s one-child policy were “indulgent, selfish, introverted, unconcerned, and unable to care for themselves.”

So what’s the status of the research right now?  Well, it turns out that research on only children was quite a hot topic in the 1980s and interest has rather cooled off since then, so the data isn’t the freshest, but the story remains much the same.

Professor Toni Falbo has conducted and analyzed much of the research on this topic; her first paper appeared in the Journal of Individual Psychology in 1977 and in 2012 she revisited the topic with an update.  She reports that the clearest findings are related to intellectual abilities, with preadolescent only children scoring higher on academic tests than children with siblings, the difference being greatest when you’re looking at only children contrasted with children with many siblings.  But apparently this difference evens out somewhat by the time the children reach adolescence, with only children still out-scoring children from many families, but about the same as children from two-child families.

A variety of studies have reported conflicting findings on interpersonal skills, with only children scoring better on likeability in some studies, worse in others, and the same as children with siblings in still others.

Professor Falbo conducted three meta analyses of other studies on only children.  The technique she used combines the quantitative data that are generated by many other researchers into a single statistic called an “effect size,” which can be evaluated in terms of its size, statistical significance, and direction.  She combined the data from 39 studies that looked at a child’s adjustment (so, characteristics like self-esteem and anxiety), 30 studies on sociability, and 30 studies on character (things like leadership), comparing only children to children with siblings.  The differences in adjustment and sociability were (and I quote) “not statistically different from zero,” which means that when you add up all these studies with conflicting findings the overall result is that there is no difference between the adjustment and sociability of only children from children with siblings.  Professor Falbo found this finding to be pretty remarkable because we assume that growing up with siblings is essential for children to acquire the skills they need for successful adjustment and social interactions with others outside the home.  On the topic of character, only children had an advantage, particularly when compared to children from large families.

When Professor Falbo looked at 16 characteristics related to achievement and intelligence, only children were essentially the same as children with siblings on 14 of the 16 characteristics they studied.  The only two that were different were achievement motivation and self-esteem, and the only children came out ahead on both counts, although the difference was small.  Only children also had greater verbal abilities when compared with peers from larger families, and particularly the younger members of those families.  Two professors who conducted a study on this topic hypothesized that the early intellectual capacity of only children is a result of the increased amount of time the children spend interacting with adults, using sophisticated vocabulary rather than the vocabulary of young children, which sets them on higher educational tracks early in their lives.  I couldn’t find an explanation as to why children with siblings tend to catch up with the only children by adolescence.  But by late adolescence a different mechanism takes over – families with just one child can funnel a lot more financial resources to that child’s education, so only children tend to achieve more years of education, which leads to greater occupational prestige, something which is important in American culture.  I haven’t been able to find any data showing that only children are ultimately happier or lead more fulfilling lives as a result of this increased status, and I might argue that it’s not inconceivable that the parental pressure on the only child to “be all they can be” could actually be responsible for less happiness and less fulfilling lives in the long run.

Finally, Professor Falbo looked at the data from 19 studies of parent-child relations, which found a small but statistically significant effect showing that only children have better relationships with their parents than children with siblings, which she hypothesizes may compensate in terms of providing the social interaction that children from larger families get from their siblings.

Professor Falbo has also done some research in China, and has looked at research that others have done in China as well, on one-child families.  Contrary to the popular assumption that the entire current generation of Chinese only children would grow up to be egocentric “Little Emperors” with the full attention of two parents and four grandparents, the reality has been rather more nuanced.  One study from 1986 did find that only children in Beijing were low in independent thinking, self-control, cooperation, peer prestige, and persistence, and high in frustration proneness and egocentrism, but several other studies found no difference between only children and those of their peers with siblings.  But more recent studies have noted the many different pressures on Chinese children – some of which drive them away from traditional attitudes and toward the pursuit of success in a market-driven economy, and some of which push them toward meeting the traditional Chinese obligations of family respect and support.  The Chinese government promotes the message that only children are supposed to be the vanguard of Chinese modernization, gaining skills which their parents don’t have and in many cases don’t know how to help their children acquire them.  Given that many parents still want their children to show traditional virtues, in direct conflict with the government’s goals, it’s no wonder that the popular attitude toward only children is a negative one.  Gradually attitudes have shifted, and many parents today report that even when they have an opportunity to have another child they won’t do it, primarily because they can’t afford to.

A poll conducted in the U.S. around 2004 found that only 3% of Americans think that one child is the ideal family size, and an important reason that many people give for their desire to have a second child is to prevent their firstborn from being an only child.  The stereotypes about only children aren’t limited to the U.S., though – they also exist in my home country of Great Britain, Korea, the Netherlands and, as we’ve already discussed, China.  A researcher by the name of Adriean Mancillas collected and analyzed several studies that assessed the stereotypes associated with only children.  One study found that college students thought that only children were “the most academic and spoiled and the least likeable.”  Another used the same methodology to test adults, who rated only children as spoiled, the least likeable, and the most academic, although parents of only children rated hypothetical only children as being worse than their own actual only child – the equivalent of saying “my child is lovely; it’s yours that are horrible.”  Another study found that only children themselves ranked only children more negatively than children with siblings.  Even counselors and psychologists hold the stereotype, with a hypothetical only child being described as being “particularly likely to experience problems.”  Given these findings, I’m sort of surprised that only children fare as well as they do – if everyone tells you you’re selfish and spoiled and unlikeable, and as an only child you even tell yourself that only children are selfish and spoiled and unlikeable, and some researchers believe it’s possible that people’s beliefs about only children could produce differences in their expectations for their own children and for other people’s children, which could lead to actual differences developing in those children.

The implications of these stereotypes for our society are really profound.  The fact that nearly everyone – even trained professionals – think that only children have more negative characteristics than children with siblings may result in decisions being made about a child’s educational or clinical needs based on a stereotype rather than on the child’s actual needs.  And that millions of parents have a second child simply to spare their firstborn from being an only child puts untold stress on these families – having more children than one wants or can manage has been shown to put the children at greater risk for abuse and pathological development.

So how do only children turn out as adults?  One set of researchers named Roberts and Blanton did in-depth interviews with twenty young adults who had been only children.  Overall, they were thankful for the absence of sharing, fighting, and competing with siblings, as well as not having to share parental resources and attention.  They valued and enjoyed time spent alone, and felt that being an only child facilitated creative and imaginary play in their childhood.  Their parents didn’t have to spread financial resources across multiple children so the children were able to engage in activities that interested them.  They also reported having close relationships with their parents and that they had been more mature at a younger age than their peers.  Another study found that only children have a greater degree of personal responsibility than do children with siblings – they believe that they are responsible for their successes and failures rather than these things being the result of external factors outside their control.  This has great implications for only children’s motivation to succeed, since believing you control the factors that determine what happens in your life is a key indicator for higher levels of achievement.  On the flip-side, researchers note that only children may not be as able or willing to accept help from others, and so may experience higher levels of stress than children with siblings.  Another study that compared adults who had been only children and those with siblings living in Boston found that there was a considerable overrepresentation in the sample of only children of men and women who would be considered “successful” in our society.

So overall, that’s certainly a lot of positive outcomes for only children!  There were some more negative ones as well.  Although the majority of the (admittedly small) sample size of respondents weren’t upset about their lack of siblings, some wished they had had one when they were younger who could have shared the experience of being in the family and also acted as a confidante.  Especially when there are two parents in the home and only one child, there can be no place for the child to hide when they need a break, as other siblings take some of the attention off each other throughout the day.  Only children benefit from their generally good relationships with their parents, but if the parents feel any stress at the thought of their child being their only shot to get parenting right, and make sure that kid gets into the best college and show the rest of the family that we’re good parents, that can result in an awful lot of pressure on the child.  Some of the interviewees reported feeling a great deal of pressure to succeed, much like the Chinese only children did, and another study has found that adolescent female only children report less life satisfaction and lower self-esteem than their peers with siblings when their fathers were unemployed, perhaps because only children are more likely to be attuned to what’s going on in their parents’ lives than children with siblings.

Some of the only children regretted not being aunts or uncles, and felt pressure to have children because it was their parents’ only shot at being grandparents.

In addition to not wanting their firstborn to experience childhood as a singleton, many parents also don’t want that child to experience their own old age as a singleton.  This was a definite concern among the young adults that Roberts and Blanton, several of whom were anxious about being the sole caretaker for aging parents, and also about being the sole survivor in the family after their parents died.  Having siblings isn’t any guarantee that parental support will be more evenly spread, though, as research indicates that one sibling usually ends up shouldering the vast majority of the burden of caring for aging parents – but at least there’s a chance to spread some of the load.

So where does this leave the parents of only children?  Well, for one, I’d say if you’re feeling guilty about only having one child, stop feeling guilty for only having one child!  There’s simply no evidence that, overall, only children experience any negative implications as a result of being an only child and in fact they are likely to do very well on tests and in school because of their larger exposure to adult-level thoughts and vocabulary.  So, please, relax and stop worrying!  (I always love it when I get to tell parents that.)  But there are some things to watch out for, particularly in yourself as a parent.  Have a good think about your opinions on only children and if you find negative thoughts, there, just hit ‘replay’ on this episode and listen to it again.  Since a majority of people do seem to hold negative stereotypes about only children you may find you have some yourself, and since it is possible that your negative thoughts about your child could actually impact your child’s outcomes, you should do what you can to at least hold a neutral viewpoint about only children.  If you wish you did have another child, you may find that the child you have comes to resent being an only child and asks you – often repeatedly and insistently- for a sibling.  And try not to indulge your child too much just because he or she is your only one – which feeds into the stereotype of the spoiled child and can set up conflicts in the child’s self-esteem when they feel like they don’t deserve all the gifts you’re giving them.  Plenty of research shows that marital relationships become more strained with each added child, so every once in a while you can leave your singleton with a friend or family member and take a break just the two of you, an opportunity that is much harder for parents of multiples to organize.

The second thing to keep in mind is to be sure to give your only child a childhood.  Your singleton will probably end up spending quite a lot of time around adults, so do make sure they also get time with younger people as well (even if they aren’t children of *exactly* their age) so they learn how to negotiate social situations among their peers.  If you want to give your child more of a sense of being part of a large family, you can become more ‘like family’ with a group of friends or neighbors.  My husband’s family were immigrants and they have a very large extended group who aren’t related to each other and yet who spend every holiday – and many non-holidays in between – together.  The “cousins” aren’t related to each other in any way, and yet they look out for each other as if they were.

The third thing you can do is to not put too much pressure on your only child.  I think this is something that is deeply embedded in a person’s culture; certainly in traditional Chinese culture there is a great deal of pressure to conform to societal expectations – as well as the government’s pressure for the current generation of only children to transform the country into a world power – whereas here we put more focus on individual success.  But just be aware, as you shine that bright lamp of parental approval on the activities and qualities that you value, that your child probably has feelings about what activities and qualities they value and you might consider allowing those to be expressed to the extent that is appropriate in your culture. Also be cautious of how much your child picks up on your moods – particularly when it leads your child to team up with either parent against the other one, which isn’t great for the excluded adult, the child, or even the parent that might be trying to curry favor with the child.  Try not to let your own emotional well-being get too caught up in your child’s achievement of things you think are important, and try not to be disappointed if your child isn’t *just like you.*

And, finally, I think the parents of only children are even more responsible than the parents of siblings to get their effects in order for later in life.  So set up living wills and also regular wills that provide for your child’s well-being while they’re still a minor, and try to have both financial and medical provisions in place as you get older so your child isn’t unduly emotionally or financially burdened with taking care of you.

And if we want to end on a bit of a self-righteous note, we should look no further than the environmentalist Bill McKibben’s book Maybe One, which reminds us that the average American uses twenty times as much energy as a Costa Rican, fifty times that of a Madagascan, and seventy times that of a Bangladeshi.  In a year we use three hundred times the amount of energy as a Malian, but because we live so much longer it’s actually about five hundred times as much by the time we die.  The childless among us are, of course, pulling more than their share of the weight in reducing environmental impacts (and research shows they are, on average, happier than parents as well).  But those of us with only one child are doing our bit to help keep the world the kind of place that our children will actually want to – and be able to – live on.

And on that cheerful note, you can find all the references for today’s episode at yourparentingmojo.com/only

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Now it’s no secret that I do some episodes of the podcast altruistically for you, dear listeners, because I’m not facing the situation that I’m studying – or at least not yet.  (Eyebrows were raised in our house when I started researching the impact of divorce on children but luckily for me I don’t need that episode…yet…)

But today’s episode is for me, and you guys are just along for the ride.  Because, friends, we are in the thick of what I now know to be called “oppositional defiance,” otherwise known as “Noooo! I don’t wanna [insert activity here]”.  There’s actually an oppositional defiant disorder that’s described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is more commonly known as the DSM-5, because it’s in its fifth revision.  And I should say that the DSM is not infallible and is susceptible to societal trends – homosexuality was defined as a mental disorder in the DSM until 1973.  But right now Oppositional Defiant Disorder is in the DSM, and it’s defined as having four of a list of eight symptoms which fall into three major buckets: 1. Angry or irritable mood, 2. Argumentative or defiant behavior, and 3. Vindictiveness.  And before you think “wait, I think I fit those characteristics some days” I should point out that it’s the persistence and frequency of these behaviors that should be used to distinguish behavior that is within normal limits from behavior that is symptomatic.  For children younger than 5 years, the behavior should occur on most days for a period of at least six months, and for children older than 5 years it should be at least once a week for at least six months.  There are additional critieria around whether the behavior is associated with distress in a particular setting or if it impacts negatively on social or educational outcomes.  I’ll put the link to the detailed critieria in the references in case you’re worried that your child might meet them, but today we’re going to talk about the non-clinical kind of oppositional defiance that can still be incredibly frustrating to deal with.

According to one group of researchers, “few periods in development are more important than when parents’ attempts to control and socialize children emerge in the second year,” so as you might expect, we’re going to need to sort through quite a bit of conflicting information.

So let’s start with why all this is important and, funnily enough, it actually goes back to the episodes we’ve done on culture – our second episode (which was the first real episode of the show, after the introductory one) was on how culture impacts our parenting and we just dived into that topic again recently with the episode on the book Generation:Me.  I’m going to read a short paragraph from a paper on compliance and defiance in early childhood: “Lay persons and researchers agree that compliance with parents is critical to child development.  Parents report that obedience is a principal childrearing objective, and researchers emphasize that compliance facilitates the development of morality, self-regulation, and a range of social competences.  When parents elicit compliance, they integrate children into interactions that help children regulate their emotions, internalize prosocial behavior, and in general coordinate their intentions and actions with the intentions and actions of others.  In contrast, noncompliance is often considered a marker for poor parent-child relationships, poor internalization of prosocial values, and increased likelihood of serious behavior problems.”  Now I was actually really surprised to see that both parents and researchers put so much emphasis on children complying with parental requests, especially since we learned in the Generation:Me episode that parents in this generation put a premium on encouraging children to think for themselves, which seems to contradict the emphasis on obedience we’re seeing here – unless, I suppose, your child learns to think for himself or herself and decides by himself (or herself) that you are right and of course they should obey you.  But researchers now understand that strong parent agency and strong child agency are not incompatible – in other words, both parties can have some control in the relationship, although who has what control and how it is asserted have be renegotiated over and over again as the child gets older.  In our culture, the child’s power assertion can be seen as having a positive role – the child not only learns how to negotiate, but also that it is possible in the first place to take initiative and oppose what the child sees as injustice.  Most of us want our children to learn that protesting what a person thinks of as unfair is fine as long as the protest itself isn’t defiant or antisocial in its character, so our challenge is to induce compliance where we need it while demonstrating that we are open to negotiation where the request is reasonable.

Part of the reason that these conflicts occur seems to be that the child reaches an age where they realize that they actually can assert their own opinion right at the same time as the parents realize that the child isn’t just a baby any more, but should start to learn about some of the social conventions that make both the family work as a unit and the child function successfully in the wider world.  So the child wants to assert their own ideas but the parents either want their child to behave in a certain way, or see that other people around the family want the child to behave in a certain way, then the stage is set for disagreements.  But I think we can agree that even if we value independent thinking there are times when we want our children to just do what we ask them to do, for goodness sake, so let’s talk about the factors involved in gaining that compliance.

The very highly regarded child psychologist Diana Baumrind described three types of relationships that parents can have with their children.  The first is a permissive relationship, where parents are reluctant to discipline and avoid dealing with their children’s problematic behavior.  It’s pretty well established at this point that an authoritative relationship between parents and children is good for kids, at least if you are White.  If you’re a regular listener you might recall having heard this term before; authoritative parents allow some give and take, provide reasons when they make demands of children, and are open to negotiation.  They provide a loving and warm relationship although they are not afraid to set limits when limits are needed.  And I say that this is the best style if you’re White because the vast majority of research on parenting styles has been done on White children with White parents, but some research shows that an authoritarian style, which is where parents have high demands but provide little in the way of feedback and nurturance and may also be coercive and make threats toward their children.  White children tend not to do well with authoritarian parents but Black children actually fare better.  Authoritative parenting might still be best, but authoritarian parenting is OK.

So that said, researchers have been curious to find out whether parents that have an authoritative relationship (which, as a reminder, is the “good” kind of relationship) with their children experience more or less conflict.  Relationship theories say that when children form secure, affectionate, reciprocal relationships with their parents then they’re more likely to want to please their parents and comply with their parents’ wishes.  So if parents are warm, sensitive, and non-coercive, then children will cooperate most of the time and not be defiant very often, and this has been supported by research as well.  Now this is troubling to me, of course, because I think I’ve worked pretty hard to develop a warm, sensitive, non-coercive relationship with my daughter and she still puts up a fight when it’s time to get dressed pretty much every damn morning.

But let’s set that aside for a minute and look at another set of processes in a child’s development that are also important, and those are the emerging sense of autonomy and self-efficacy.  The researchers in this camp observe that a child doesn’t say “Noooo I don’t wanna get dressed” just because she wants to be obstinate but because she wants to be autonomous and control what happens in her life.  They think that where parents avoid exerting too much control over their children and allow the child to take the lead, the child learns that their wants and actions control events around them.

So one group of researchers decided to try to test which of these apparently contradictory theories was mostly responsible for defiant resistance.  They thought that if young children resist being controlled primarily because their relationship with their mother isn’t very good, then even when control is not an issue, “defiant” children may display negative behavior toward their mothers.  But on the other hand, if young children resist being controlled because they have a strong sense of autonomy, then when control isn’t an issue, “defiant” children may display more positive behavior toward their mothers.  They conducted an experiment where mothers and children in a lab setting were put in a room with some things like a pair of eyeglasses and a jug of water with some paper cups that needed parental supervision to use.  There were also some toys that the mother and child were to play with together, as well as some attractive toys that the child wasn’t allowed to touch, and at the end of 15 minutes playing the researcher asked the mother to get the child’s help with cleaning up.  The researchers recorded the interactions between the mothers and children and coded those to analyze them.  It turns out that the more defiance children displayed, the more they initiated positive interaction with their mothers.  So among children who initiated a lot of positive interactions, 54% were also high in defiance, and among children who didn’t initiate a lot of positive interactions, only 21% were high in defiance.  Children who smiled more at their mothers and initiated positive interactions with their mothers were significantly more likely to display both high defiance (behavior like taking more toys of the box at clean-up time) and low passive non-compliance (which is behavior like just standing by while the mothers did the cleaning up).  The researchers also timed how long it took children to initiate positive interactions and display defiant noncompliance at cleanup time, and the more quickly children initiated positive interactions, the more they displayed defiant noncompliance.

So why does this happen?  Why are positive relationships with a parent linked to more defiant behavior?  The researchers hypothesized that because sensitive mothers adapt to children’s signals, use noncoercive forms of control and allow children to control the social interaction, their children may develop strong autonomy motivation, the belief that they can control events, and expectations that their mothers will respond favorably when the children assert their needs.  And children who exhibit strong defiance may elicit something from parents that helps children to develop ways to resolve frustration and reconcile conflict – things like rules around social interactions, the fact that others have feelings and needs that should be respected, and potential actions that can be taken to cooperate with parents.  A variety of researchers think that children who are securely attached to their parents feel comfortable enough with those parents to be less compliant; it’s the ones that aren’t comfortable with their parents who are compliant because they’re afraid to be defiant.  What isn’t yet well understood is whether children benefit when parents tolerate defiant behavior or try to inhibit it, but researchers do think that while defiant behavior is a hallmark of problematic development a few years after toddler-hood, there’s no indication that defiance in toddlerhood is linked to problems later in life.

OK, so we now have some evidence that just having a toddler who is defiant doesn’t mean we’re terrible parents (perhaps we should all carry a card with the link for this episode on it that we can give to strangers who give us snarky looks when our child pitches a fit out in public.).  But what are we supposed to do when our child doesn’t do what we ask?

One set of researchers that are focused on parental interventions based on behavioral management train parents to minimize their use of disciplinary reasoning and instead respond to noncompliance with a series of increasingly forceful tactics to assert their power – things like commands, then single warnings, then time-outs.  The idea is that children eventually learn that if they’re being given a command and they refuse now, they’re going to eventually get a time-out so they might as well just obey the command now.  But the research supporting this approach is largely based on children who have behavior “problems” that the parents perceive as so severe that the children have been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder or its relative conduct disorder, and it’s not at all clear to me that these approaches are suitable for children who have not been clinically diagnosed with these disorders.  Secondly, since these tactics are among the more common ones parents tend to use to gain compliance in the first place, it seems not inconceivable that the breakdown in relationship that may have occurred as a result of the parent’s frequent use of power to gain compliance might be in part responsible for the “disorder” in the first place.

Professor Wendy Grolnick has done a lot of research on a different approach; one of her major interests is on self-determination theory so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised where her results land in this arena.  Self-Determination Theory is the idea that humans have a need to feel as though they have control over their lives, and that they are competent, and that they are connected to and valued by people who are important to them.  So self-determination theorists believe that acknowledging the child’s perspectives, providing choice, displaying empathy, and engaging in joint problem solving helps to build not only a positive relationship between parent and child, but also the child’s own feelings of control, competence, and connectedness.  And if these strategies for gaining compliance sort of sound vaguely familiar to you then they should, because they are *exactly * the kinds of strategies that are described in the book How to Talk so Little Kids will Listen, which we discussed with the co-author Julie King back in episode 22 of the podcast.  So now we understand a little more clearly that the strategies Julie and her coauthor Joanna Faber describe aren’t pulled out of thin air; they’re actually grounded in research about how children develop a sense of control, competence, and connecteness.

We can look at parental authority in the light of characteristics like empathy, competence, and connectedness and try to understand what about parental authority – where it’s not forced or coercive – makes it helpful to children.  Professor Grolnick argues that when parents provide clear and consistent expectations about behavior, and predictable consequences, children understand how their actions lead to success or failure, which helps them to feel both in control and competent.  By contrast, when parents just assert power over children as a means of gaining compliance, that power isn’t connected to any need that the *child* has but rather just the *parent’s* need for the child’s compliance, so it doesn’t help the child to learn or develop.

Parents might also wonder “well, should I reward the behavior I want to see to try to get my child to do more of that and less of the behavior I don’t like?”  And Professor Grolnick’s answer would be “well you can, and if the reward is unexpected then that’s fine because the child didn’t have to do a certain thing to get the reward (which sort of defeats the point a bit).”  But rewards that are contingent on performing a particular behavior control the child but don’t support the child’s competence, and also undermine the child’s intrinsic motivation to comply in the future.  So if you tell them they can get a certain treat they really like after they clean up their room, for sure they’re going to clean up their room right now but next time you want them to clean up they’re going to say “where’s my treat?”.  If you’re interested in digging into the research on that topic then we did a whole episode on it in Episode 20 which was called, fittingly enough and definitely rather facetiously, “How do I get my child to do what I want them to do?”.  Professor Grolnick concludes that there may be some times when you don’t care if your child is intrinsically motivated to do a task; you just want them to do it, and in that case it doesn’t matter if you use rewards.  But if you want the behavior to persist even if you can’t or don’t want to give a reward one day, then best not to start using the rewards in the first place.

There’s some evidence that parents naturally, without prompting, adjust their own attempts at achieving compliance depending on the goal.  One study asked mothers to get their children to help organize some spoons and forks, rather than play with some attractive toys that were also in the room.  Some mothers were told that the children’s compliance would only be assessed in the mothers’ presence – this was the short-term condition.  The mothers in the long-term condition were told that there would also be a test of the child’s cooperation later on, when the mothers weren’t in the room.  Actually, both groups of children were tested both with and without the mother but because the mothers in the short-term condition never expected there to be a later test, the researchers thought that they might use different strategies to gain the children’s compliance.  And it turns out they did – mothers in the long-term goal condition were more nurturing toward their children before the task began, used reasoning more frequently to get the children to help sort the cutlery, they used more different kinds of explanations, and they were also more likely to use reasoning as an initial strategy than mothers in the short-term condition.  And the children who were in the long-term condition, so, whose mothers had reasoned with them on getting them to sort the cutlery, were more likely to continue sorting the cutlery after their mothers had left the room – so the mothers were using effective strategies at gaining “long-term” compliance even when they weren’t explicitly told to do this, although I will say that “a task that takes another five minutes” does stretch the definition of “long-term” just a little.  Some of us think of “long-term” as meaning something more like “months” or “years.”

This finding reminded me of some research I learned in a negotiation strategy class a long time ago – it turns out that adults are susceptible to improving compliance in the face of reasoning as well – a study conducted all the way back in 1978 had people try to cut in on a line of people waiting to use a photocopier, using one of three carefully-worded requests.  The first one was “excuse me, I have five pages.  May I use the Xerox machine?”.  The second was “excuse me, I have five pages.  May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?”.  The third one was “Excuse me, I have 5 pages.  May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”.  How many of the people in line do you think let the researcher cut in in each condition?

60% of people waiting to use the copier let the person cut in line if they just asked to use the machine.  94% of people let the person cut in line when they said they were in a rush. But, surprisingly, 93% of people waiting to use the copier let the other person cut in line when they said “may I use the Xerox machine because I have to make copies,” even though the phrase “because I have to make copies” was both obvious and didn’t give the people standing in line any additional reason to allow the cut-in.  The researchers hypothesized that our brains go on some kind of automatic pilot when we hear that “because” and don’t really evaluate the reason.  We only come off the automatic pilot when the stakes are higher – the researchers repeated the experiment saying they needed to copy 20 pages, and in that case only the “real” excuse induced compliance.  I’m not aware of any research that assesses what children perceive to be low-stakes or high-stakes requests or perhaps they haven’t yet learned this distinction yet.  Either way, it could be a handy tool to use when you have a long-term goal in mind, and perhaps you could test the high-stakes/low stakes conditions on your own child!

One thing I do want to talk about a bit here is punishment.  I want to quote the concluding paragraph of a paper by a very well-respected researcher, Dr. Joan Grusec, with whom I happen to disagree.  Dr. Grusec says “children have to understand that unacceptable behavior brings with it appropriate consequences that cannot be avoided.  Punishment is one of those consequences and, when applied appropriately, a necessary part of the process.  Appropriateness is the key concept there, and we as researchers must continue to discover what is, indeed, appropriate.”

Now I hope I don’t shock anyone too much by saying that my daughter is almost three and I’ve never punished her.  Never.  And, honestly, I’m having a hard time thinking of an instance when I *would* punish her.  That’s not to say that there are no consequences to her actions, because that’s not the case at all.  But I never deliberately attempt to think of something I need to do to her to show her the consequence of her behavior, because I think the consequence that happens by itself is usually a powerful enough lesson for her – or maybe a lesson for me.

So some of these things have actually happened, and some have not, but I just want to give you some examples.  If she were to get hold of something of mine that I don’t want her to have, perhaps something I’d previously told her not to touch, then I would consider that my fault for giving her access to it in the first place instead of putting it out of her reach.  If she hit me, I would move away from her and say “I don’t like it when you hit me; it hurts me.  I’m going to move over here.”  She usually wants to be close to me, so me moving away from her is “punishment” enough.  If she’s messing around with her food at the dinner table, I say “please finish your food, or I’m going to take it away;” if she continues to mess around with it then that just means she’s had enough to eat, and I take the food away.  If she were to do something that wasn’t safe I’d remove her from the situation and tell her I can’t let her do whatever it is, and I wouldn’t let her be in that situation again until I thought she was ready, and even then I’d talk with her about it first to make sure she wasn’t going to do the thing I thought was unsafe.

Right now we’re struggling a lot with getting dressed in the mornings, and she loves to wear pajamas at night time.  So one evening, long enough after the difficult morning we’d had that we were both calm, we talked about how much she doesn’t like geetting dressed and how long it takes and how I don’t like to fight with her about it and I can tell it doesn’t make her happy either.  So I let her know that if she can help me to get her dressed in the mornings, she can continue to wear pajamas at night time.  And on the mornings when she resists getting dressed I remind her of what we talked about and that I need her help to get her dressed, and that if we don’t have time to get dressed we’ll need to wear tomorrow’s clothes to bed tonight.  Often that’s enough to induce compliance but when it doesn’t, we just put on tomorrow’s clothes before bed, which makes the next day much easier.  The important part is that I don’t see this as a punishment, and I don’t believe she does either because she is in direct control over whether or not she gets to wear pajamas.  At the first sign of resistance in the morning I remind her of the conversation and give her the opportunity to rethink her approach, which she usually does.  And if she doesn’t I get her dressed anyway because going to school in pajamas is not an option in our family, and she wears tomorrow’s clothes to bed that night.  And, honestly, I don’t see that as a punishment because I’m basically doing everything I can to not threaten her, and to give her as much control as possible over the situation while still holding my ground on something I think is important.  Now where I draw the line on wearing pajamas out of the house is irrelevant, but the point is that even in the face of what I perceive to be active defiance I give her as much control as I can while still achieving my goal.

One psychology student actually wrote a doctoral thesis on this, and found that offering alternatives explained virtually all of the effect that reasoning induced compliance more effectively than any other parental strategy, regardless of the type of noncompliance, the toddler’s temperament, or the mother’s characteristics.  What’s important is that both of the choices – in this case, complying with getting dressed or wearing tomorrow’s clothes to bed – are acceptable to me.  My daughter is also free to suggest alternatives herself, and sometimes she already does suggest them.  She doesn’t love brushing her teeth right now either and she will suggest brushing them in the living room, although I can’t say for the life of me why it’s better to brush your teeth in the living room than in the bathroom, but I think it’s that she appreciates the control she has over the situation by saying where she wants to brush them.  Her feeling a sense of control seems to deescalate the situation so we don’t get to the point of a tantrum, and I try to fine-tune my own reactions to her, adding more explanations and offering her more control to avoid that tantrum state.  You might want to observe your own strategies when you’re dealing with non-compliance as well; you may find you do these things too, and now you’re more consciously aware of them you might choose to use certain strategies more than others.

Going back to something we talked about in the episode on the book Generation: Me, I use my own irritation as a guide to where those limits should be set, because when I’m irritated it means my values have been overstepped.  That allows me to set a limit that I am happy to hold, because I know the limit is “real” and not something I just set arbitrarily, and as we already learned, consistent boundaries help a child to feel competent and have a sense of agency.  I also try to keep in mind that she is still learning the language, and research has shown that toddlers are less likely to comply with a maternal request when they don’t understand it.  Of course, I still want to improve her vocabulary as well, so I might say “I need you to help me out; I need you to cooperate.”  Now she uses the word “cooperate” by herself, because I scaffolded her learning of that word, but I still made sure to use very clear language to be sure she’s not failing to comply just because she doesn’t understand what I’m asking her to do.  You can also watch for your child’s use of reasoning in other areas of your lives together as an indicator that they’re ready for more advanced reasoning in negotiations over their compliance.

So I hope this episode has given you a bit of consolation if you feel you have a good relationship with your child but are still exasperated that they don’t comply with your requests a lot of the time.  Because, as we’ve learned, that is pretty normal.  It’s what we do next that has profound implications not only for our child’s development, but for our relationship with them as well.

Thanks for listening – if you’d like to read the references I used for today’s episode, you can find them at yourparentingmojo.com/defiance.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Today’s episode is another that comes to us via a question from a listener, and it’s the second in our three-part series on how the adult relationships in a family affect the child.  We kicked off a couple of weeks back with an episode called All Joy and No Fun, which is about the book of the same name and discusses how parenting today can seem very joyful when you look at it as a whole thing, but if you ask yourself during an average moment with your toddler or preschooler whether you’re having fun, I think many parents might say ‘no.’  And I don’t mean to suggest that having all joy and no fun is a leading cause of divorce but it could certainly be a contributing factor, and that’s our topic for today.  The listener who sent me an email said “I was divorced when my husband was 2 ½ years old.  He is now 5 years old and has a very hard time expressing his feelings.  I have an intuitive “gut” feeling that it has to do with the fact that he went from being with me every day (I was a stay at home mom) to suddenly spending 7-10 days away from me and with his father, and also away from me as I set up a career.  Do you know of any research on this?”  Well, I didn’t, but when I started looking around I realized there’s actually so much of it that it makes sense to break it down into two episodes which is what we’re going to do.  So today’s episode focuses very much on the factors leading to divorce and the impact of divorce itself on children, and the final episode in the series will look at how what happens after divorce – things like single parenting, ongoing contact with both parents, ongoing arguments between parents, and remarriages and stepparents impact children.

I also want to say before we get going that I have no position on whether or not you should get divorced if you haven’t already done it, or whether your divorce was a good thing or not (if you have); I’m not arguing for divorce to be outlawed in the interests of our children or that we should all try it once just to see what it’s like.  I have nothing against divorce – I’ve done it myself, although not with children involved – but I’m also not going to try to persuade you to stay in a marriage.  My goal here is simply to help you to understand the impacts of divorce on a child’s development so you can better support that child through the changes that might one day happen or have already happened in your family.

Throughout this episode we’re going to examine a number of factors at play when we talk about divorce and the impact that these have on a child’s development, but the one idea I want to leave you with (and so I’m going to tell you about it now so you can keep it in mind as you’re listening) is that the research paints a picture of a series of risk factors that exist in the child, the family, and the larger society that make a particular child more or less vulnerable to the kinds of disruption that occur through divorce.  These risk factors interact in ways that aren’t always expected; we might see some children with a lot of risk factors who sail through a divorce and adjust relatively well afterward.  And there are others whom we might expect to do fairly well who fall apart after a divorce and have a hard time recovering.  But the one that seems to be more important than all the others is the quality of the parent’s – and particularly the custodial parent’s relationship with the child, and whether that is warm and loving while setting and maintaining appropriate limits.

So let’s dive in.  California enacted the first modern no-fault divorce law in 1970 which, for those who don’t live in the U.S. is the idea that you can get divorce just because you want to, without having to prove that one party was at fault – by committing adultery or abuse or something like that.  Popular wisdom says that the divorce rate has skyrocketed since then, although actually it has slowed down over the last twenty years.  There’s a nice graphic on it in a New York Times article that I’ll link to in the references which shows that about 70% of marriages that began in the 1990s reached their 15^th anniversary (excluding those in which a spouse died), up from about 65% of those that began in the 1970s and 1980s, and those who married in the 2000s are so far divorcing at even lower rates.  The Times cites later marriages, birth control, and the rise of so-called “love marriages” as some important factors in the drop in the divorce rate.  In some states (including Louisiana, Arizona, and Arkansas) couples can *choose* to have a “covenant marriage,” which can only be divorced under fault-based circumstances, although only about 2% of couples in Louisiana opt for it.  Nevertheless, politicians and family activists continue to advocate for the modification or repeal of no-fault laws, and the rhetoric around this tends to focus on how divorce affects children, although it tends to take a simplistic view along the lines of “divorce leads to single parenting, and single parenting leads to an increased juvenile crime rate and costs taxpayers a lot of money in the form of welfare subsidies. The breakdown of the family is a result of no-fault divorce laws, which must be repealed.”  We’re going to take a bit more of a nuanced view today and examine what really are the impacts of divorce on a child’s development, as best as science can help us to understand them at the moment.  What is fairly well understood is that the children of divorced parents have, on average, more behavioral and emotional problems than children in intact families – but the reasons for this are quite complicated.

The first thing we’re going to look at is the idea that divorce is not a single event in time, with the child being fine before and falling apart afterward; people tend to divorce because of longstanding problems that may have been simmering (or boiling) for months or years; there may have been one or more separations within the marriage, and even after the legal divorce has occurred there are still ongoing negotiations and transitions.  It is also possible that “difficult” children can put stress on a marriage and may contribute to parental conflict that eventually precipitates parental separation, but it’s very hard for researchers to untangle these factors and say how much of the negative behavior they see in the child after the divorce might have been caused by the divorce itself, and how much preceded it.

Many researchers believe that the interparental conflict that precedes the divorce (and, in many cases, follows it as well) is a very important variable related to the child’s adjustment to the divorce – in fact, it might be a more important factor than the divorce itself in regard to child behavior problems, particularly aggression.  Some studies suggest that the frequent expression of parental conflict appears to be more strongly associated with childhood aggression than the absence of the father.  This becomes especially problematic when the divorce itself becomes a drawn-out conflictual process, particularly where one parent doesn’t want to disengage from the relationship and sees an ongoing conflictual relationship with the spouse as preferable to a complete disengagement.   What looks on the surface looks like a custody dispute may actually represent the efforts of one or both of the spouses and remorse about the dissolution of the marriage, and the custody dispute becomes the vehicle that one partner uses to serve as an avenue that one partner uses to remain in contact with the other.  The extent to which one member of the couple is unable to disengage from the relationship is associated with increased problems in their post-divorce adjustment, particularly depression.

Contrary to popular belief, parental conflict doesn’t always decrease following divorce and may actually increase.  One study found that 66% of the exchanges between ex-spouses two months after a divorce were conflictual, mostly related to finances, visitation, childrearing, and intimate relations with others.  But many couples do manage to have a nonconflictual relationship after the divorce and several studies have found that children from relationships where conflict is avoided or at least quickly resolved have fewer problems than children from high-conflict divorced families.  Other studies have found that it isn’t necessarily the presence or absence of conflict per se that it’s important, it’s whether or not that conflict occurs in the presence of the child that is associated with the most detrimental effects on children.  So the take-home message here is fairly simple – try to avoid or quickly resolve conflicts with your spouse, and at the very least, don’t fight in front of your child.

The second major factor is the adverse impact that divorce tends to have on family finances, and particularly those of the mother.  The U.S. Census bureau actually puts out some nice statistics on this issue, although unfortunately the most recent ones available are from 2007, and were published in 2009.  83% of mothers receive custody of their children in divorces, proportions that were statistically unchanged since the government last published data in 1994.  Just over three quarters of custodial parents who were due support received at least some payments in 2007; 47% got the full amount and an additional 30% received some support.  Child support represented almost half of the average income for custodial parents below poverty who received full support.  One quarter of all custodial parents had incomes below poverty, while 18.2% of those who received some child support payments were below poverty; the overall poverty rate for the total population in 2007 was 12.5%.  The poverty rate of custodial mothers actually fell from 36.8% in 1993 to 27% in 2007, which is something to be thankful for, although it is still more than double the poverty rate for custodial fathers, at 12.9%.  Custodial parents who are under age 30, Black, or never married tended to have higher poverty rates (of 35%) than older, non-Black, formerly married people.  Custodial parents with full-time, year-round employment had a poverty rate of 8.1% while custodial parents who didn’t work or were participants in public assistance programs had poverty rates of 57% in 2007.  Even among parents who are doing relatively well financially when they’re together, the expense of maintaining two households virtually guarantees some decrease in the family’s standard of living.

The reason all this economic information is important is because socioeconomic status is a key indicator of post-divorce adjustment.  Low income has been shown to predict anxiety and depression among preschoolers from both divorced and intact families.  Other researchers have shown that it’s the change in socioeconomic status after a divorce that’s very important.  Girls seemed to fare especially poor psychological adjustment when the income of the custodial mother was much less than the non-custodial father, whether that resulted from a drop in the mother’s income or an increase in the father’s.

And why is socioeconomic status linked to poor adjustment outcomes?  Well, there are a variety of reasons.  Parents who have more money are able to offer their children more privileges than parents with more meager family incomes, which provides children with the opportunities to achieve social competency and personal goals.  It’s also possible that the drop in income might necessitate a move to a new neighborhood, perhaps with more affordable housing and schools of lower quality.  Fitting in at a new school can be hard under the best of circumstances, but fitting in at a new school you’re your whole life is being turned upside down makes everything more difficult.  Parental divorce, parental income, and school quality have all been shown to affect eighth-grader’s achievement test scores.  Doing poorly in a new school, particularly a new school in a not-so-good neighborhood that might not have much in the way of support sets a child up for potential missed educational opportunities, which can even become a factor a child’s deviant behavior, timely high school graduation, premarital fertility, and possibly the child’s own early marriage and possible following divorce.

Socioeconomic status also impacts the mother’s psychological adjustment, which is a key predictor of the child’s psychological adjustment.  In other words, if the loss in the mother’s household income causes the mother to feel depressed, her ability to provide effective, authoritative parenting may be compromised which can lead to poor adjustment outcomes for the child.

Regarding which gendered child is more severely impacted by divorce – a variety of studies have shown that boys are more severely impacted by divorce than girls.  Another variety of studies have shown that girls are more severely impacted by divorce than boys, and a third set shows no gender differences in children’s adjustment to divorce.  The one thing that does seem fairly clear in all of this is that you can design a study that will show that either boys or girls or neither are most severely impacted by divorce.  It is possible that boys more often respond with externalized responses (like aggression, school behavior problems, and stealing), and girls may respond by demonstrating anxiety and withdrawal – which may not even be noticed by teachers and parents but may have more serious implications for long-term adjustment than the externalizing behavior problems exhibited by boys.

The age of the child at the time of the divorce may also be an important factor, and many studies have been done on this, with mixed results from which we can still draw some conclusions.  Overall, the research suggests that divorce has a particularly negative impact on very young children, and that the impact is less if the child is a teenager when the divorce occurs.  Children whose parents divorce in the preschool years will be acutely aware of the departure of one parent, and will fear the possibility of abandonment by the other parent which may be manifested in extreme anxiety when the child is temporarily separated from the custodial parent.  The child may become very clingy and unwilling to go to daycare or preschool when they were previously happy to go.  They may also see bedtime as a separation, and may experience terrifying nightmares.  They may experience disruptions in their normal ability to resolve inner conflicts through play and fantasy, or may even stop playing altogether.  They might be restless, noisy, and irritable.

Very young children might experience a loss of recently acquired motor skills, and because slightly older children can’t fully understand the circumstances that led to the separation, they may blame themselves for the divorce, and even think that they themselves are not worth loving.  Some children will concoct elaborate reconciliation fantasies, where they believe the departed parent has gone on a trip and will soon return, and it may be impossible to convince the child that this is not the case.

Unfortunately, we also see that problems in adjustment of young children may be sustained or even appear for the first time in adolescence, which can trigger behavior problems in children of divorced parents who had appeared to be functioning pretty well up to that point.  There is about a twofold or greater increase in problems like delinquency, teen pregnancy, truancy, school dropout, and substance abuse in teenagers whose parents divorced some years previously. Later on, these problems may include problems with the workplace and with family and spouses, more behavior problems, lower socioeconomic status, and lower reported well-being.  A researcher called Nicholas Wolfinger at the University of Utah wrote a whole book on what he calls the “divorce cycle” – he found that the reduced educational attainment that can result in growing up in a non-intact family is strongly associated with the child’s own divorce later in life.  The main reason for this seems to be that children from divorced families exhibit a variety of problematic interpersonal skills that make it difficult to sustain a relationship, including getting angry easily, having their feelings hurt easily, jealousy, won’t talk to the spouse, can’t calmly discuss disagreements, unccoperativeness, and hostile passive behavior.  Three studies have linked parental marital conflict with offspring marital conflict, and we already saw that conflict in a marriage has a negative impact on a child whether or not a divorce ultimately occurs.

Some researchers have tried to understand whether children from divorced families marry earlier than children from intact families, and Nicholas Wolfinger realized that you really have to disaggregate the data to get a clear picture of what’s going on.  The children of divorce do have high rates of teenage marriage, but if they remain single past age twenty, their ultimate chances of marriage dip below those of adults from intact families.

Strangely enough, children of divorce actually don’t report lower levels of happiness in their own marriages than children from intact families, but researchers explain the reason for this as being because the children of divorce must have a different understanding of happiness than children from intact families.  The children of divorced families more often say that their marriage is in trouble than children from intact families, even when the child from the divorced family is happy in that marriage.  Marriage does seem to be a very different experience for children of divorce than children from intact families.  When one child experienced parental divorce then that child’s own marriage has about a 100% greater chance of ending in divorce, but if both spouses come from divorced families then they actually face more than a 200% greater chance that their marriage will end in divorce.  A marriage is more likely to survive when only one of the two parties brings the problematic interpersonal skills that can come with being a child of divorce, but can still work out if one of the spouses was a more resilient child and was able to develop those skills even after the divorce.

Given all these negative impacts on a child’s development associated with divorce, parents might be wondering if the old adage that it’s better to stay together for the children’s sake might ring true after all.  In fact, it seems to depend on the children’s perception of the marriage and the stability of the post-divorce situation that determines the answer to this question.  If the marriage is characterized by a high degree of conflict and the post-divorce situation is relatively stable, conflict-free, and a high degree of parenting skills are maintained, then the divorced situation tends to be preferable.  But if all conflict has been hidden from the child and the child perceives the marriage as essentially conflict-free, then the child may go on to experience more psychological distress and lower overall life happiness as a young adult, possibly because of the completely unexpected nature of the separation for what may have seemed to the child as reasons that were totally unwarranted.

But I do want to be sure you realize, though, that the reactions of preschoolers that I’ve described are neither uniform nor inevitable.  Not all children of divorce will exhibit these problems – far from it; when we talk about doubling a certain risk for children of divorce we’re talking about doubling a fairly small chance to begin with.  The majority of children of divorced parents are resilient and grow up into adults who are fairly well-adjusted.

A researcher by the name of E. Mavis Hetherington studied divorce for many years before her retirement from the University of Virginia, and she was instrumental in developing what is known as the risk and resiliency perspective of children’s adaptation to divorce.  The basic idea is that an individual child has certain risk factors that come from factors within the child him- or herself, like an irritable temperament or the child’s gender, which doesn’t make the experience of divorce “worse” but does change the way in which the boy or girl experiences it, and the types of responses they might display.  These aren’t deterministic characteristics, in that it’s not possible to say that all children with an irritable personality will have a certain experience, but they are aspects of the child’s genetic make-up and personality that are stable and increase the liability for adjustment problems after divorce.  In addition to personal risk factors a child also has sociocultural or demographic risk factors like poverty, unstable household characteristics, living in an unsafe neighborhood, the number of stressful life events the child has faced, and parental stress and social isolation.  Finally, home and family risk factors include conflict between parents (and also violence, when it occurs), conflicted sibling relationships, and parental psychopathology, including factors like depression.  Dr. Hetherington found that the number of risk factors present ended up being less important than the risk factors themselves, with problems in parenting and in the home environment (so things like maternal negativity, depression, parenting stress, and the use of physical punishment) were particularly important statistical predictors of children’s adjustment, although these are correlational attributes so we can’t be sure that negative parenting techniques cause poor child adjustment; it could be that mothers parent more negatively in response to the child exhibiting difficult behavior.  The child’s response to a divorce is really an interplay between the individual characteristics of the parents and children, their family relationships, as well as factors outside the family that either support or undermine the well-being of family members as they negotiate the challenges that divorce brings.  E. Mavis Hetherington notes that adaptation to divorce tends to occur over a period of several years, with the first year or so representing disruption to relationships and living conditions that usually become stabilized two to three years after the divorce, which is followed by an improvement in the relationship between the parent and child and the child’s adjustment.  Hetherington reports that two of the major challenges that parents face that can have a material effect on children’s adjustment to divorce are to minimize the amount of conflict that the child is exposed to, and also to maintain authoritative parenting (which we discussed in more detail in episode 20, called “how do I get my child to do what I want them to do?) – briefly, authoritative parenting means having a warm relationship with the child with a high degree of communication and responsiveness, effective limit-setting, and low coerciveness.  She notes that the effects on child adjustment of other stressors that often accompany divorce are frequently mediated or moderated by the quality of parenting, and this seems to have really profound implications for divorced parents.

What this says is that divorce isn’t necessarily going to screw up our kids for the rest of their lives.  If you’re about to get divorced or have been divorced yourself, the first thing you might want to do to assess what you’re working with – take a look at which risk factors your child has.  Did they have an inflexible, irritable personality before the marital problems became apparent, or have they always been generally easy-going?  Are they at least of average intelligence?  Overall, the more easy-going, intelligent children tend to be more resilient, although these characteristics are less important in predicting resilience than the mother’s parenting ability.

Do you have supportive family around to provide a sense of continuity even as the nuclear family changes form?  Do you feel as though you have the societal support you need, from the very practical child support and a job that pays your expenses, to a feeling of belonging in your neighborhood?  These factors can help to support your own mental health which turns out to be the key indicator of resilience in children of divorce.

We’ve seen that the economic decline that families face after divorce is associated with a variety of negative outcomes, so it’s important to try to minimize these to the greatest extent possible.  The research does seem to indicate that it isn’t necessarily having money per se that is the critical factor, but it’s the things that money enables you to do, some of which could be achieved with less money if you think about them in creative ways.  So when you’re choosing between two places to live, try to pick the more stable of the two – the one that will be less likely to require you to move again if you change jobs, for example.  And when you think about providing educational opportunities for your child, try to see how you can do what you used to pay for, and get it cheaper or for free.  So go to the free days at museums, and if your child is struggling in a certain subject at school, perhaps look for a high school student who might be willing to be a tutor rather than a far-more-expensive professional.  And don’t forget about the myriad learning opportunities that are available for free in nature.  So try to be like a parent who has money to spare, even if you don’t.

You can also limit the amount of conflict that the child is exposed to, and preferably limit the amount of conflict the child isn’t exposed to, if that conflict has a negative impact on the custodial parent’s mental health.  Because maintaining that mental health is key to the third and most important factor, which is keeping the kind of warm, supportive, authoritative relationship that will help the child to develop the interpersonal skills they will need to adapt to life after the divorce as well as be successful in their own subsequent marriage.  It’s going to be harder to be a good parent after a divorce than it was before simply because the child may have a hard time adjusting; it can be difficult enough to be a calm, supportive parent in the face of one tantrum a week, never mind one tantrum a day.  But do everything you can not to let it get to you; you want to try to avoid a cycle of negative reinforcement where your child’s poor mood puts you in a bad mood, which makes you short-tempered and punitive.  Instead, try to set up a cycle of positive reinforcement where your own warmth and patience generate a warm response from your child, even though sometimes the limits you will necessarily set will still create the occasional tantrum.  You can also try to encourage your child to spend time with other people who will attempt to teach your child how to build trust, manage emotions, and communicate effectively – interpersonal skills that will serve them throughout their lives, but especially in their own marriages later on.

I hope this has been helpful to those of you who are approaching a divorce or have been recently divorced, and I look forward to wrapping up this mini-series soon with an episode on the impact of single parenting and remarriage on a child’s development.

If you’re interested in the references for today’s episode you can find them at yourparentingmojo.com/divorce.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast.

Before we get going today, I’d like to ask you for a favor.  I’ve been doing some reading about goal setting lately and I’ve read that if you set a goal you should both tell other people about it and ask for help in achieving it, so I’d like to do that today.  I’ve set a goal for myself to double the number of subscribers I have to this podcast – subscribing doesn’t cost anything at all; it just means that new episodes show up in your podcast feed when they’re released on a weekly basis, so you don’t have to remember to go and look for them.  Weekly podcasts on science-based parenting advice delivered straight to your feed?  What could be better?  The trick here is that if you subscribe through iTunes, I’m afraid I can’t count that as meeting my goal – iTunes never actually tells podcasters that a person has subscribed or how many subscribers I might have in iTunes at any given time.  Let’s just say it’s yet another way that iTunes doesn’t help podcasters out.  So to count toward my goal, new subscribers have to go to my website at YourParentingMojo.com, enter your email address in the box at the top, and hit ‘subscribe’ – you actually get a gift for doing it that way too, which is a package of seven relationship-based strategies to support your child’s development – and maybe make life a bit easier for you.  So if you haven’t yet subscribed to the show on my website I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t mind doing that, and if you have already subscribed then would you consider telling a friend (or perhaps many friends) about the show?  I’ll let you know when I reach my goal – thanks so much for your support!

Now on to today’s episode, which is about a book I read way before I started the podcast, called All Joy and No Fun by Jennifer Senior.  I actually got a question from a listener recently asking me whether there’s any research on whether and how her divorce might have impacted her son’s development.  It turns out that there is, and quite a lot – so I decided to make a mini-series out of it with one episode on how divorce impacts children, and a second on single parenting and step families, and we’ll open the whole lot up with this one on All Joy and No Fun, which is basically about the idea that if you ask a parent what is their greatest joy they will pretty much invariably say “my kids,” but if you ask them moment-by-moment if they’re having fun with their children then unfortunately the answer is pretty often “no.”  I know that a lot of factors can lead to divorce but surely “all joy and no fun” is among them, so I’m going to lump these three together in a sort of mini-series.  Since I first read the book several months ago I’ve had a chance to think about it a bit, so I’ll start as usual with the research and will end with some thoughts on how we can change this idea to “some joy and some fun too.”  And because I think I’m an especially interesting case study for this phenomenon, I’m going to illustrate today’s episode with some personal experience.  Because, why not?

Before we get going I should pause and say that if you are not a family that looks like a mother and a father with children then I’m sorry, but there is not a ton of research on your kinds of families which does suck.  I imagine it’s possible that one of you might work longer hours than the other and take on the more “father-ish” role and the other works shorter or no hours and spends more time with the kids that looks like a more “mother-ish” role.  If so, there will still be plenty here for you.  And even if not (and if you really do split everything evenly then you should send me an email and you can be a guest on the show), if you’ve ever found yourself wishing there was as much fun as joy in your life then there will still be something for you to learn.

A sociologist named Alice Rossi was one of the first people to study the effect of parenting on the parents, rather than just on the child.  She describes four factors that inhibit our abilities as parents: firstly that preparation for the role of parent is virtually non-existent, in large part because our educational system provides for children’s cognitive development, but not for emotional development or the subjects most relevant to successful family life, which Rossi says are “sex, home maintenance, child care, interpersonal competence, and empathy.”  I’d say this was doubly so for me because I never really liked children that much, so while I had few opportunities to engage with children as a teen and young adult I actually went out of my way to avoid those opportunities I did find simply because I wasn’t interested – and anyway, babies cried whenever I held them.

Secondly there is limited learning available during pregnancy – I was among the lucky ones here in the U.S. to have health insurance that provided a couple of prenatal classes, so I had actually changed a diaper on a doll before my daughter’s birth, even if not on a real baby.  I spent a great deal of time reading about pregnancy and labor and delivery and was determined to have a natural birth for two reasons – firstly because I was afraid I would struggle to bond with the baby and secondly because I wanted to do a 10-day backpacking trip around Mont Blanc a few weeks after the delivery, which would have been impossible if I’d had a C-section.  So let’s just say that I was highly motivated to avoid that recovery from surgery, but that means I spent virtually no time trying to think through what it’s like to be a parent.  I figured I had 18 years to work on that part, although I will say that I don’t have too many regrets in parenting so far, but one of the few I do have is that I didn’t find the idea of respectful parenting until my daughter was about four months old, and I now look back on those first few months with a bit of sadness that I wasn’t able to begin our relationship in a way that really respected her needs rather than just assuming that no crying = good, so do whatever you can to stop the crying.

The third of Rossi’s four factor is the abruptness of the transition to parenthood – there simply is no internship for parenting as there would have been in our society in centuries past, or that still exists in other societies today where young adults see others in their families with young babies and can ‘practice’ their own skills in advance, and today more than ever our lives totally and permanently shift when we have our first child, and I would argue are irrevocably changed once we have two.  My husband and I had a pretty nice life before we had our daughter – we rode bikes on mountains or on the road most weekends during the summer and skied 15-25 days over the winter, and I hiked a lot, and I did yoga classes pretty much whenever I felt like it.  Life was busy and full and pretty fun.  In fact, even though it was my husband who wanted children whenever I would ask him “are you ready yet?” he would say “let’s just get through bike season first” and then at the end of bike season he’d say “let’s just do one more ski season first,” so finally I said “if you keep saying that, there’s never going to be a baby.”  To which he responded “well then I’m ready now” – famous last words, as it turned out.  With one child we are still able to do some of these things; one of us can cover while the other goes out for a road ride, although we haven’t mountain biked in months.  I’ve been able to do a lot of hiking with our daughter on my back, although now we’re at the unfortunate age where she is too heavy to carry and also won’t walk in a straight line.  But if we had two children as I know many of you do, so I’m probably preaching to the choir – the chances of you being able to engage regularly in things you used to find interesting and enjoyable are pretty slim.

Fourthly, there is a lack of guidelines to successful parenthood, by which Rossi means that it isn’t too hard to figure out what are nutritional and clothing and medical needs and follow the general advice that a child needs loving physical contact and emotional support, but what else is needed to help a child develop into a successful adult?  Surely there must be something?  Well it turns out that there are just one or two things, which is a major reason I started this podcast in the first place, to fill that gap between all the books about how to support an infant’s growth and development, and the changing skillset a parent needs once the child becomes a toddler and preschooler.

This suddenness of transition is the major theme in an even earlier paper by E.E. LeMasters, who found that thirty eight of forty six couples he interviewed in urban middle-class Wisconsin between 1953 and 1956 reported “extensive” or “severe” crisis, the two most severe criteria on a five-point scale, in adjusting to the arrival of their first child.  89% of these couples rated their marriages as “good” or better, ratings that were confirmed by close friends in all but three cases, and thirty five of thirty eight pregnancies in the crisis group were either planned or desired – so it wasn’t that the couples were in crisis because of an unplanned pregnancy.  The parents didn’t have major psychiatric disabilities and were, in general, of average or above average in what LeMasters called “personality adjustment,” but all of the couples in the crisis group seemed to have romanticized parenthood and felt ineffectively prepared.  As one mother said: “We knew where babies came from, but we didn’t know what they were like.”  The couples’ descriptions of early parenthood could have been lifted from any Facebook parenting forum today – the mothers reported loss of sleep, chronic tiredness or exhaustion, confinement to the home and loss of social contacts, giving up the satisfactions and income of a job, having endless laundry to do, feeling guilty about not being a better mother, being “on” 24/7 in caring for an infant, the decline in their housekeeping standards (although I have to say I wasn’t personally afflicted by this problem) and worry over their appearance (including increased weight after the pregnancy).  The fathers apparently echoed most of these adjustments and added a few of their own – the decline in the wife’s sexual responsiveness (which I’ll just leave right there without further comment), economic pressure from becoming the only breadwinner at a time when expenses are increasing, worry about a second pregnancy in the near future, and a “general disenchantment with the parental role.”  These are sobering statistics, and are among the more dire ones that have been reported – subsequent studies have confirmed the sudden deteriorations in the relationship between couples after the birth of the couples’ first baby, but have found smaller to medium-sized effects rather than the large-scale crisis event that LeMasters reported.

As several researchers have noted and Jennifer Senior comments as well, one is more likely to be happy raising children as part of a couple rather than raising them alone, and also that the level of happiness in marriages tends to decline over time whether a couple has children or not.  But at no point in a marriage does it seem to decline as far and fast as after that first baby is born, and while we can debate the extent of the decline there is little doubting its pervasiveness.

And what causes this erosion in happiness?  It seems as though there are two factors.  Between the parents themselves, there is one topic that causes more arguments than any other, and if you don’t know what it is then you haven’t been living in my house lately: it’s the division of work between parents.  Men and women work, on average, about the same numbers of hours each day but women, on average, still do about twice as much “family care” – which is defined as housework, child care, shopping, and chauffeuring – as men.  My husband would be quick to add that he commutes for 2 ½ hours a day, which is true – a situation he chose for himself over my objections for precisely the reason that I knew he would walk in the door most nights shortly before bedtime expecting the child to be fed and bathed and his own dinner on the table.  And he’s not alone – in a study that analyzed a set of video recordings of families in Los Angeles on weekday evenings, mothers were found most often in shared spaces with the children, while fathers were observed most often alone.  The least frequently observed configuration was the couple together without children.  And we all know that there’s a reason why doing the dishes after dinner, that once loathed task, is now seen as the ‘plum’ assignment over supervising bath time – it’s because doing the dishes is far mentally easier than wrangling a two-and-a-half year-old into the bath “But I don’t WANNA bath!” followed after shampooing and soaping by “But I don’t WANNA get out!”.  But most nights I end up doing bath AND the dishes anyway, so the choice isn’t so bad.  And at my house we see this pattern repeated on the weekends as well – if my daughter and I are in the living room together then my husband sees himself as “relieved” and free to read drivel on the internet at his leisure.  I will say that he may be better than most husbands at making some effort to protect a small amount of leisure time for me; he will suggest that I go out for a bike ride some weekend mornings, as long as it’s not more than an hour and I don’t expect things to be any further along at home by the time I get back than when I left – things like getting either of them dressed, for example.  He’s quite happy to just enjoy his time with her and leave the ‘chore’ aspect of childcare to me – unless I set expectations about what I’d like to have done while I’m gone, which I’ve started to do even though I wish I didn’t have to.

A subset of this first factor causing the erosion of marital happiness is the overscheduled nature of our children’s lives these days.  Recall that “family care” includes chauffeuring the kids around to various activities, often one or more each night of the week (especially when you factor multiple children into the equation).  This never-ending series of activities is apparently a uniquely middle-class affliction – it’s what middle class parents do (in the short term) to try to expose their child to a variety of experiences, and (in the long term) to give them the ‘edge’ they’ll need to get into an elite college.  And it’s exhausting for both the parents and the children.

So the second main factor I see in the decline of marital quality is more related to the children and, specifically, what it’s like to spend time with children – especially young children.  Now I have to say that I’ve been very lucky to have a relatively easy-going child, although she has just, over the last few weeks, started saying “No, I don’t WANT to [insert activity here],” no matter what the inserted activity is and how much she really wants to do it – if I want her to do it then it’s enough for her to say she doesn’t.  And a side-effect of being over-scheduled when children are young is that they don’t know how to tolerate boredom, and they look to us to alleviate it when it occurs.  While our parents were cooking, cleaning, hanging out with their neighbors, and running a network of nonprofit organizations, they would typically tell us to go clean their rooms if we were bored.  We are more likely to ship our own children off to a gymnastics class.

I want to digress here for a moment to discuss the concept of “flow” – please trust me that it will all come together in just a couple of minutes.  This term was coined by the psychologist Mihaly Cheeks-sent-mi-halyi, although the idea has existed in other forms, most notably in some Eastern religions, for thousands of years.  When you’ve achieved “flow,” you’re in the zone.  The original six characteristics of flow are: (1) intense and focused concentration on the present moment; (2) merging of action and awareness, (3) a loss of reflective self-consciousness, so you’re not easily distracted, (4) a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity, (5), a distortion of temporal experience – some people say time seems to slow down; others say it seems to speed up; and (6) an experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding.  These aspects can appear independently of each other but it’s only when they occur together that a person is experiencing flow.  Cheeks-sent-mi-halyi later added a criterion that the activity must have a clear set of goals and progress markers, which add direction and structure to the task.  Another researcher, Kendra Cherry, adds three more components of the flow experience: (1) immediate feedback on what you’re doing; (2) feeling that you have the potential to succeed, and (3) feeling so engrossed in the experience that other needs – like hunger, perhaps, become negligible).  Finally, one more researcher, Owen Shaffer, adds an element I find particularly important – the idea of having a high degree of perceived challenge, and the skills and abilities to meet those challenges.

Perhaps you can already think of an activity you do (or you used to do…) where you get into flow – I always think of a friend of mine who likes to surf, and when I asked him why he said “because I’m 100% focused on that wave” – he gets immediate feedback from the board about how well he’s doing and has the skills to be able to adjust his performance to meet the degree of challenge that the waves offer.  Flow states are actually pretty common in sporting activities, where a person really enjoys the activity and is skilled at it and is able to get into a flow state perhaps during competitions so that while the performance is extrinsically rewarded by a prize, it’s the intrinsic reward of having surfed well, or vaulted well that represents the real reward.  It’s also not uncommon at work, if you’ve been lucky enough to set up a work environment that you enjoy and are good at, as well as in video gaming (because the game designers specifically design games to maximize flow) and in music.  And, very often, these characteristics make flow a solo pursuit – something that happens in your own head, rather than something that is shared with others.

Now imagine the last afternoon you spent with your toddler or preschooler.  How much of it would you say you spent in a flow state?  Probably not very much, and you are not alone.  Jennifer Senior actually tracked Cheeks-sent-mihalyi down at a conference a few years ago and asked why he doesn’t devote more research to flow in family situations.  He actually said that he first experimented on himself when he created a new kind of sampling method, which is called Experience Sampling, where a person is given a pager that is paged randomly throughout the day; when it beeps the person is supposed to write down what they are doing as well as how they feel about what they’re doing, which was the first time anyone had tried to gauge how study participants feel in the moment rather than asking them about it afterward.  So he invents this method and tries it on himself and at the end of the week, he realized that when he was with his sons his moods were usually pretty negative – and he wasn’t even dealing with toddlers.  He said he thought to himself “this doesn’t make any sense to me, because I’m very proud of them, and we have a good relationship,” but what he realized was that the activities he was doing were about as un flow-like as you could get – nagging them to get up so they wouldn’t be late for school, or to put away their cereal dish from breakfast.  Nagging, as it turns out, is not a flow activity.  But he observed that when family life is relaxed, we find it boring.  And when it’s not relaxed, we’re dealing with a tantrum which overloads us.  And instead of clearly understanding the rules of the game so we can minutely adjust our performance, our toddlers and preschoolers keep changing the rules of engagement which makes it even harder for us to optimize our performance – bathtime wasn’t such a huge fight a month ago, and perhaps it won’t be again in another month, but who knows?

This is why the little moment can seem so gosh-darned irritating, because she’s dawdling down the hallway having just taken off her shoes *again* when we needed to be out of the house ten minutes ago.  But when we look back on the whole experience of parenting we’re inclined to see it as a joyful thing – it’s the difference between the way we think about things as we experience them and how we remember them afterward, and in psychology circles it’s called the rosy view – it’s actually been documented that people recall having a far better time on holiday than was the actual experience.  I suppose if we didn’t have this overall image of parenting being a positive thing then we’d just stop having children, which wouldn’t be much good for the species.

So what are we supposed to do about this?  Well, the experiment that I’ve been trying at home – with some success – is to create more flow-like states in everyday activities with my daughter, which is especially interesting to me because it’s very time-efficient.  It allows me to get chores done that need to get doing, while attending to her needs to develop as a person and my needs to spend more of my time in a flow-like state rather than being stressed out about all the things I need to do.

Those of you who listened to our episode on chores a couple of weeks ago know that I’ve been making an effort to engage my daughter in everyday activities around the house because it not only gets work done that needs to get done, but it actually aids in her own cognitive and social development.  If you missed that episode then you should really go back and check it out, because there’s a lot more information on how the social aspect of working together helps to engage children in doing work they might otherwise be uninterested in doing.

So let’s take cooking dinner, for example.  It’s actually something my daughter enjoys “helping” with but it’s still a chore that needs to get done every night.  What I realized is that if I just shift my perspective a little bit from “we need to get dinner on the table right now!” to “let’s just enjoy this moment together as we cook dinner,” I can get into more of a flow-like state.  I need to concentrate intensely because my daughter really does want to help, and managing that plus moving the recipe along and making sure nothing gets burned requires a lot of concentration – to the extent that I’m really not easily distracted while we’re doing it.  I have a sense of agency in that I’m a decent (although not amazing) cook myself so I know the techniques I need to use, and providing activities that are sufficiently challenging to engage my daughter while not being so challenging that she can’t do them challenges me as well.  I do find the experience intrinsically rewarding – I enjoy cooking, and I enjoy the healthy meal we get out of it at the end, and I also enjoy the fact that I know the activities are making positive contributions to her development.  There’s a clear goal at the end (dinner) and steps that must be followed (the recipe), and immediate feedback as my daughter finishes the tasks she takes on, or gets stuck, or drops an egg on the floor.

The most critical element to me is my immersion in the task in the moment (much as toddlers do all the time) – I’m not thinking about all the things I need to get done later in the evening because I know roughly how long the recipe takes to prepare and that we will have enough time for those things later, so I can put them out of my mind right now and just concentrate on having this experience with my daughter.  For this reason I deliberately pick easy or moderately difficult dishes to cook on weeknights, and save the more complicated recipes (or just recipes I am trying for the first time) for weekends when I have backup coverage, if it can be distracted away from the drivel on the internet.

Honestly, I’d say it’s working out pretty well for us at the moment.  It’s WAY less stressful for me to have to find other time during the day to do dinner preparation so I can set up some artificial “learning activity” for her when we get home from daycare.  It’s certainly not perfect, which is why I use the term “flow-like state” rather than just “flow” – on any given day one or two of the required elements might be missing.  But you know what?  I’ll take a flow-like state over a stressed out dinner preparation any night of the week.  There’s also great potential for a flow-like state while I’m grocery shopping with her – instead of just rushing through the store as fast as we can (like we do have to do on some days), we can take the time to talk about the things we see in the store, pick out new fruits to try, and weigh several different items on the scales and guess which of two items will be heavier (and, as a side note, this activity has led her to ask “how much pounds?” when she wants to know how much of any item we need or are using, including those that are commonly measured by volume, like oats and bath water).

So my challenge to you is to pick a chore that you need to do on a regular basis, preferably one that your child has already expressed an interest in helping you out with, and reorienting your mind around it so you can get into a more flow-like state while you’re doing it to increase your enjoyment of your time with your children as well as just your own life in general.  Because, really, isn’t life too short for “All joy and no fun”?

And what about those pesky chores and the fact that we tend to over-think every decision about our kids?  Well, Jennifer Senior recommends that if you don’t have a French mother hanging around to tell you to relax your housekeeping standards (luckily for me I don’t need a French mother to tell me that) or worry less about your kids, or take more time for yourself, then you should consider looking to your husband as an example – because chances are he has a thing or two to each you about these things.

If you’re interested in the references for today’s episode, you can find them at yourparentingmojo.com/joy