Discover insights on why no one will play with your child and explore effective strategies for building social skills in children

Jen Lumanlan  00:02

Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast.

Jen Lumanlan  00:06

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

Jen Lumanlan  01:00

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. And today we’re going to discuss a topic that I think is about to come into parents’ consciousness in a way that it really hasn’t as much over the last year. And for some of us, that’s a result of our privilege. And I was reflecting that as vaccinations for children become more available, we’re probably going to start moving towards indoor play dates without parents being around because when my daughter went into when we went into sort of lockdown, she was young enough that she wasn’t really doing playdates indoors with other people in anyone else’s houses. And so I never really felt as though I needed to ask, “Are there guns in your house?” because I was always there to supervise. And so of course, over the last year, she’s played with a lot of kids on our street, and they’re always outside and I can always hear them. And so the danger doesn’t seem to be there in the same way for me in those outdoor playdates scenarios. But of course, as vaccinations become available, and these things start to move inside, I don’t know which of my friends has guns in their houses. And if I’m kind of uncomfortable asking about this, I’m guessing that a lot of parents haven’t even thought about it and don’t have it on their collective radar yet. So I wanted to bring that up into our consciousness before we actually need it. And then, of course, there’s another issue here as well, that we’re going to delve into fairly deeply today, which is that gun violence is becoming increasingly common in a wide variety of settings that children live in and are exposed to, and that this can have really big impacts on them. And that that isn’t necessarily talked about or studied nearly as much.

Jen Lumanlan  02:29

And we have a very special guest here with us today to talk about these issues. Dr. Nina Agrawal. She’s a pediatrician who is board certified in Child Abuse Pediatrics, and she has expertise in Violence Against Children. She was on the faculty at Columbia University in Child and Adolescent Health. She co-founded the Gun Safety Committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics in New York State, and she’s leading the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force for the American Women’s Association. Welcome Dr. Agrawal.

Dr. Nina Agrawal  02:56

Thank you so much for having me, Jen.

Jen Lumanlan  02:58

All right. So I wonder if we can maybe start by just understanding how big is the scope of this problem, and piggybacking on that, how much do we know about how big is the scope of this problem, and why don’t we know as much as we might want to know?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  03:12

Right, great question. Right now, guns are the leading cause of death in children 1 to 19 years of age. Before it was motor vehicle accidents.

Jen Lumanlan  03:22

Yeah.

Dr. Nina Agrawal  03:23

Now it’s firearm. So it’s something that’s a health issue. It’s a public health issue. It’s a safety issue affecting all children.

Jen Lumanlan  03:34

Okay. And yeah, I actually hadn’t seen those latest statistics, the peer reviewed papers I was looking at from 2018 still showed it in that number two position, so. So that’s an unfortunate development over the last couple of years that that position has switched then. And it doesn’t affect everybody equally, right? It affects some children more than others.

Dr. Nina Agrawal  03:53

Yes, definitely. Racially, it affects Black children disproportionately. Blacks, and then Hispanics, and then White children.

Jen Lumanlan  04:00

Okay. And I noticed that actually, the way that this data is collected, we might think, Oh, it’s fairly easy to understand how prevalent this kind of thing is, how prevalent injuries are. And actually, there’s a couple of different ways of estimating it. But the most common way is using data from the Centers for Disease Control, which is sampled from 100 hospitals. And I’m just thinking, Okay, there are 1000s of trauma centers that are dealing with this kind of thing. Can a sample of 100 hospitals give us a complete picture of what the actual prevalence rates for this are?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  04:34

Right? Yeah, as with a lot of injuries in children, it’s a combination of hospital data and mass data and media. We’re increasingly using media data. There’s a gun violence archive that looks at shootings in communities, and then the CDC data. I think one of the problems with the CDC data is that it doesn’t include non fatal injuries and only includes fatal injuries. So we’re missing a lot of children who suffered non fatal injuries and understanding those so that we can prevent them.

Jen Lumanlan  05:09

Yeah. Okay. And I think when a lot of parents think about guns, one thing that they may be most kind of afraid of the immediate fear is of a mass shooting. Because there’s get so much publicity, right? Is that the thing that we should be the most afraid of statistically speaking?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  05:25

Statistically, definitely not. It’s 1% of shootings. So much more common is homicide, and suicide, and unintentional injuries. And then mass shootings are a small percentage, but they gain the most immediate attention. And because again, the most immediate attention, they gain the most resources – prevention resources. And so we have children dying every day from homicide and suicide and yet, we’re really not devoting the investing in prevention of deaths in those children due to firearms.

Jen Lumanlan  06:00

Yeah, okay. And I think a big reason why we’re not investing as much in the pieces of this that really matter are that we don’t understand it well enough. And there’s a reason we don’t understand much about gun violence, right? Can you tell us about that reason.

Dr. Nina Agrawal  06:15

I love telling the story. It’s a story that’s not known and once people hear about it, they’re like, Oh, my God, this makes sense. So anyhow, enough of the preamble. What it is, is that in 1994-95, there’s a study that came out in the New England Journal of Medicine that found that if you had a gun in your home, you’re a gun owner, you or somebody else in your home are more likely to die or get injured from that firearm, rather than protect yourself from an intruder. So, most people a lot of people keep it for self protection. It actually doesn’t work that way.You know, the statistics tell you you’re actually more danger from hurting yourself or somebody that you care about in your home. And so this study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The NRA was not happy about it, because that would affect firearm sales. And they, you know, they basically lobbied Representative Dickey of Arkansas, and Representative Dickey inserted a amendment called the Dickey Amendment after his name, saying that no funds can be used by the CDC or the NIH eventually went to the NIH that could be used to advocate or promote gun control. And so what they did is this Congress took away money from the CDC that had been used for firearm prevention research and earmarked it for concussions. And the CDC doesn’t have this pot of money where they can use it indiscriminately. It has to be earmarked for a certain, you know, injury or health issue. And so then basically, they had very limited funding and research plummeted. And it you know, that Dickey Amendment created a chilling effect on the entire research community, because funding is so limited for research and, you know, people didn’t want their funding taken away for other things that they could do research on. So gun violence research plummeted. And with that, are solutions. So this was in 1996, the Dickey Amendment passed. And every year, it gets reapproved. And there have been efforts through certain presidential administrations to try and repeal it, but it just keeps going on and on and more recently, in 2019, for the first time, the CDC was appropriated $25 million for gun violence prevention research. And I just want to make a distinction between gun control and gun violence prevention. And the distinction is that public health issues are not trying to control an injury or an illness. We’re trying to create safety when it comes to injuries. So just like we don’t say highway control, we say highway safety. We don’t say cars control, we say car safety. We don’t say cribs control, we say crib safety. So this is gun safety. We understand that you can have guns, but we just want them to be safe around children.

Jen Lumanlan  09:22

Yeah. Okay. Thank you for that. And I just want to pull out some pieces of what you said, particularly for listeners who are outside the US. So what we’re talking about here is that the CDC is the Centers for Disease Control, and NIH is the National Institute for Health and that these organizations fund scientists working in academia to conduct studies on a whole array of things related to health, but specifically here we’re talking about gun safety issues. And the NRA, the National Rifle Association, which has an enormous amount of lobbying power here in the US, and that they had approached Jim Dickey and said, You know, this is this is something that you need to be with us on and he agreed. And I was actually interested to see that he has more recently flipped on that. And he has regretted his role in the stifling the research. He didn’t want there to be more gun control. And that was why he advocated for that, because he, he was, I think, worried that the research was going to lead to ammunition, I guess, as it were, for people who wanted gun control to put that into effect. But he now says that he regrets his role in stifling the flow of research on that. So it’s encouraging to see that we are now starting to see the spigot loosened and some money flowing through.

Dr. Nina Agrawal  10:35

Yes, for sure. Yeah, right before he actually died. But right before he died, he became before he died. Well, before he died, he became friends with the person who is Head of the CDC at the time and together, they tried to advocate for Gun Violence Prevention Research.

Jen Lumanlan  10:53

Yeah. Okay. All right. So so thank you for, for telling us that story. And it’s always amazing how the politics ends up impacting our view of public health issues. And, and I think that seeing this as a public health issue is really at the core of your approach here. And part of that is because of the way that gun violence impacts children. So I wonder if you can tell us more about your ideas and your research and thinking on how gun violence impacts children and how we should be thinking about it?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  11:24

Yes, I think we need to think about gun violence in children more broadly. We have been in the research setting, we’ve been thinking about his injuries and deaths. How do we prevent an injury? How do we prevent a death? And we’re making some headway in that, but what we want is, you know, we’re making headway in certain areas. So suicide and accidental injury. So like the toddler who picks up a gun on a play date, how do we prevent that from happening? We haven’t made a lot of inroads in homicide affecting children. And that is the most common intent in children and youth. So we haven’t made a lot of inroads and prevention of homicide. The other thing that we don’t talk about his exposure to gun violence. And when I was working in the Bronx, you know, as a pretty some of I was working in the South Bronx, and it was a busy ER, a lot of people come in with gunshot wounds, but the ones that we weren’t, weren’t coming in or weren’t presenting to medical attention, were the kids who are having mental health problems because of exposure. You know, they’re having anxiety they’re having, they’re having depression.

Dr. Nina Agrawal  12:32

I am actually authoring a book chapter on exposure. And in that included this anecdote of a five year old that I was interviewing, and I asked her about eating and sleeping and you know, school, and she said, she didn’t sleep well. Why not? And she goes, she told me there were noises that kept her up at night. I was like, Well, what were those noises and not expecting her to say this. She said they were gunshots. And I was like, Well, what do you do she when that happens? And she said, Well, I get a snack, and I go back to sleep. And it was this five year old living in this, this world of trauma in her bedroom. So the gun violence is going on physically outside her bedroom, but it’s coming through into her home, it’s coming through into her development and and her health. And what happens to those kids and from the adverse childhood experiences studies, we know that those violent exposures affect children’s health across the long term. And they you know, they may develop academic problems, behavioral problems in adolescence, with gun violence, they may become victims and perpetrators. And then later on in life, if they don’t die from gun violence, they may have chronic health issues. So basically, you know, what happens before age five children see and hear can affect their brains and their lives, the trajectory of their lives forever.

Jen Lumanlan  14:04

Yeah, yeah. And so to dig a little more deeply into some of those things that you mentioned, firstly, you said that, we’ve made some progress on the things like the accidental deaths and the suicides, which primarily impact White children. And we have not made so much progress on the homicides aspect, which primarily does not impact White children. It’s primarily Black children. And so there’s a very racially differentiated issue right on where we focused our attention where we’ve been able to make progress on this.

Dr. Nina Agrawal  14:34

Yeah. And, again, you know, unintentional injuries where a toddler picks up a gun is, again, a very small percentage of gun violence in children. The biggest bucket is homicide, but within that bucket, we haven’t made a distinction between unintentional homicide and intentional homicide. So we see this in the news all the time. You know, people are children and even adults getting hit by stray bullets, and they see the wrong place at the wrong tie but is it that person’s, you know, I guess it’s like, where does the onus? Is it that person, he shouldn’t have gone to that restaurant, he shouldn’t have gone to that place, the child didn’t go into that playground. So I think we need to make a distinction between the unintended target and the intended target. Because the dynamics are going to be different. The environments may be the same, but you know, a mother of a five year old, you know, getting shot by a stray bullet, like, how can we help her keep her child safe? Can we say, you know, look, maybe this area of your neighborhood is not safe. Or maybe we need to go to the community leaders and say, like, hey, this playground is not safe for our children. There’s shootings that happen there. They’re drug deals that happen there. Let’s make this safe. So, you know, there’s work that says that it’s found that [unrecognized] of safe green spaces, reduces shootings in communities. And I think that is, I think that’s a very viable way of keeping children safer.

Jen Lumanlan  16:03

Yeah. And also thinking back to that five year old who’s saying, you know, I get woken up at night, and what I’m hearing is gunshots and, and thinking about how that’s gonna play out in that five year olds, academic career, you know, maybe she’s asleep at school the next day, because she couldn’t, she couldn’t sleep at nighttime. And then it’s like, well, what are the parents doing? Why don’t the parents make sure she goes to bed at the right time, the parents might be seen as well, this parent is failing this child, maybe the child gets referred for a special services, because special education because she can’t concentrate because she can’t focus because she didn’t sleep at night. And so all of a sudden, we see all of these potential ramifications happening down the line of something that seems completely unrelated, like what teacher in school is going to make the connection necessarily between this child who is being referred for special services and the fact that there are gunshots in her neighborhood at nighttime. It’s such a broader issue. And we tend to focus so tightly on the individual child, like why is this child struggling? And they must need special help, when actually we just ignore the broader society these children live in right.

Dr. Nina Agrawal  17:09

Yeah, I think that’s a great, great point is that, you know, there’s exposure, and then there’s buffering that exposure, and what are the variables that buffer that exposure and that toxic stress? You know, that damage that might come to that child? And so, you know, the, you know, we talked about resilience? What is resilience? Is resilience, internal? Is it internal and external? Is it something that we can do in the children’s environment to help them be stronger? So, you know, I think the exposure element came to light when it was the Parkland youth. They you know, for the most part, you know, they grew up in a in a suburban community with resources, a resource community. They came from economically advantaged families. They were very verbal children, or verbal use. And that was very, that was a game changer. And those kids told us, look, I am depressed, I am suicidal, because of the exposure because I’ve lost friends. I’m scared that this is going to happen to me. So the trauma of that exposure became real. And this is real in Black children growing up in the South Bronx, like my little patient, but she’s not getting the resources nor the recognition, like you said that the fact she’s not doing well in school is not because she’s you know, it’s not that she’s not capable. It’s that she’s in an environment that doesn’t allow her to learn.

Jen Lumanlan  18:38

Yeah, yeah. And even deeper on what you said about the Parkland children. You know, we’re paying attention to them, because they’re expressing this in words that we choose to hear in language. Maybe there are Black children who express it through acting out, we know what is what is seen as acting out in school. They’re expressing this trauma, this post traumatic stress disorder and the other stuff that’s going on. And we see that as misbehavior as something that they need to correct as a problem. And not as an expression of “I am hurting.” There is something here that is hurting me. And we choose to kind of turn the other way and say, you know, you have a problem. We’re going to you’re going to deal with it. We’re going to suspend you, expel you, whatever, because you’re misbehaving. I mean, it’s just when you say it like that, that we listen to the Parkland children. And it’s so clear that we don’t listen to other children. What, how does that sit with you?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  19:31

Yeah, I’ve thought about this a lot. You know, and I think what it is I think about these things, because how can we change things? How can we change the language? How can we change policy, and I think language matters. And when we talk about the children, you know, like the Parkland children, like how do we create a safer school environment for children? You know, they talk about it in the schools. The lawmakers talked about it. Research has been devoted to this. How do we make Schools safer? But yet, when it comes to Black children in these economically disadvantaged communities, we don’t talk about is how do we make these children safer? We talk about it as violence prevention. We started out with a different baseline. Okay, it’s violent. How do we bring down the violence? rather than, you know, how do we make the environment safer for these children as well. They both deserve to be safer with the children, the Black children in these under-resourced communities. They don’t feel safe getting from school to home, they might feel safer in school. It’s all their environment, however you define it where children live, where they go to school, where they play, they should feel free in all of these areas. Yeah,

Jen Lumanlan  20:46

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. And so, so we’re making some progress here, not enough. On the other side of this gun purchases are up. Gun purchases are up in the last year, specifically, 32% of households had guns in the US in 2016. It’s now 39%. We have 120 and a half guns for every 100 people in the US, which is more than twice as much as the second highest country, which is Yemen. And there was an article on this just the other day in the times and they interviewed people who were working at gun stores and stores that have gun counters and talking to the employees and saying, well, who is buying guns? And these employees are saying, well, it’s not the usual people, it’s not our usual clientele. This is now White people coming in. People who have never seen a gun in real life before. Who have absolutely no idea how to hold it, what to do with it, and they’re telling the store owners, we’re going to be locking down, we’re constrained to our homes, we want to keep safe. And so and that fits with a Gallup poll that it published in 2018, that found that the percentage of people who believe that having a gun in the home makes it a safe place to be rose from 35% to 63%. Between 2000 and 2014. I mean, you you already gave away the lead here, right, which is that the guns are not safe, their homes are not safer when they have guns in them. So what’s going on here? Why is there such a disconnect?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  22:10

Right, I think it’s the lack of a public health approach. And, you know, we saw this with COVID. And that when you don’t have a central approach from the CDC, you know, issuing prevention guidelines, you know, people, you know, make up their own theories, and you know, to fit whatever their needs are, and you can’t blame them. Right, if they don’t have the information, they can act on it, and they may not trust the information that they’re getting. So we need to have a public health campaign that gives, you know, evidence-based guidelines. It’s not based on politics. It’s based on what the science says. And if the science says that safe storage, decreases injuries in your children and that we all like as doctors, as school providers, we all embark upon that campaign, I think we can make a difference. But the problem is, it’s very varied right now. I do want to say, though, you know, it’s who’s buying the gun. So, you know, we are seeing more people buy guns, but it’s also in the other the populations that weren’t buying guns, like Black people are buying guns legally. Asian people are now buying guns legally. And you actually can’t blame them. You know, like, why should I be a sitting duck? If so, and so has a gun, and I don’t. So I think, you know, we need to equalize this. Guns need to be kept out of the wrong hands on all ends.

Jen Lumanlan  23:39

Okay. Okay. And so, so as the rate of gun ownership increases, there are going to be more children living in houses that have guns. It seems unlikely that only people who don’t have children are buying all of these guns. And so there have been a bunch of studies done actually, obviously, a lot of them fairly old now, because of the stifling of the research. But in 1994, more than 22 million children lived in homes in the US that had guns. 55% of these people who responded to a survey reported that they had one or more firearms in an unlocked place. Thirteen percent had firearms stored, unlocked and loaded. And so they’re incredibly accessible to young children. And these numbers may actually be an underestimate, because people know you’re not supposed to have loaded firearms in house for children. And so they may not have reported truthfully on the survey. And so in another survey, parents will say, Oh, yeah, this it’s important. I need to store my gun safely and 85% of them will say yes, safe storage is important, and then they’ll go on to say, but they don’t do it themselves. And so I think at the heart of this is is a misunderstanding of what children are capable of and that if we just tell them you know, I we have a gun, don’t touch the gun, then the children won’t touch the gun. What do you think about that?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  24:53

Yeah, there definitely is lack of knowledge in this area. The NRA, the National Rifle Association, had the Eddie Eagle campaign, and that was tailored to children. And you know, look, don’t touch the gun, you know, or if you do have a gun, this is the way to handle it safely. It didn’t work. There’s no evidence behind it. There’s no science that says that we were able to reduce injuries and deaths in children because of that campaign. What works is educating parents. If you educate parents on safe storage, not gun control, safe storage, and keeping the gun unloaded loft with the ammunition in the separate place, you can reduce unintentional injuries and suicide injuries in youth. But again, that message needs to get out there. What we mean by gun safety, we mean gun storage, safe birch, I’m sorry.

Jen Lumanlan  25:47

Yeah, yeah. And just to make it super clear, for any parent who’s thinking, Well, my kids different, my kid could tell the difference, my kid would never would never touch a real gun. Because I’ve told them not to do it, there was a fascinating study that he did, where the researchers had two water pistols and a real gun in drawers in a room. And the gun had a radio transmitter on it, that would make a light flash when the trigger was pulled hard enough to actually pull it if it was really enabled. And it was a really small study, admittedly, it was only 29 kids, they were all boys, 72% of them found the gun and 76% of those handled it, and 16 of them pulled the trigger. And about half of the boys who found the gun, were not sure if it was real or not, more than 90% of the boys who had handled the gun or pulled the trigger reported that they’d received some kind of safety instruction. So putting all of that together, children cannot tell if a gun is real or not. If they find the gun, they are probably going to handle it. And even if you have told them not to touch a gun, if they find the gun, they’re probably going to do it. So I just want to reiterate what you’re saying that teaching our children to not touch guns is not enough. It’s probably necessary, do you think, but not enough?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  27:00

It’s necessary, just like anything else, like don’t touch a hot stove. You know, things that may cause injuries. But you know, I talked about this with like lead paint, you know, like, we kept on making lead paint. And you know, you could tell kids don’t eat the paint, but they’re going to do it. We just stopped making the lead paint, and we need to make the paint safer. So what does that mean? Like with guns, you put a trigger lock on it, you put it you lock it up, because just telling a kid don’t touch it doesn’t work for really anything. And I guess to go to your study that you’re talking about, there’s a really great TV special with Diane Sawyer, where they put two boys in a room with a real gun, and they instructed the boys don’t touch it. Don’t… you know, they told them over and over again, don’t touch it. And then they leave them alone in the room and there was a camera and they’re both looking at it. They’re both looking at it. And then one kid picks it up. And the other kids, I don’t think we should do that. And the kids still the other kids still picks it up. And I think he does, like, you know, like motion on the trigger. So even if it is even if you tell a kid not to touch a real gun, you know, it’s it’s the same thing like with kids, like they want what they you know, what could be perceived as something they can’t have?

Jen Lumanlan  28:17

Mm hmm. Yeah, and it’s almost like the marshmallow test. Right. But like, if they can wait 15 minutes, they can have two marshmallows, and a lot of them can’t do it. So um, okay, so then we talked about educating parents and you’ve talked about a public health and public safety campaign is this advertising or the the primary way that I see this discussed in the literature is that pediatricians are supposed to be the ones delivering this message and that when your kid goes for their well-baby visit, the pediatrician is supposed to give you advice on this and most pediatricians are not trained in this. They have no idea what to do what to say. And so this advice is not happening right now. Do you see that as a viable way of getting this information through? Are there other more effective ways?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  28:58

Just like a public health campaign requires multiple messengers, I do think it does belong and the pediatrician in the pediatrician sphere, and for normalizing it from birth on just like, you know, we talked about the stove, you know, don’t leave your baby near a stove. Well, the babies aren’t crawling yet. But you know, hey, start, like making your room safe, or your house safe, because one day your child will get there. And we all know that children move quickly, and they’re there before you know it, and then you’re in the hospital. Before you know it with an injury that was preventable. It happens. But what can we do to prevent those things from happening? Because guns are highly lethal. And so like other unlike the other ones, like a burn, you can treat but guns, you may not have that opportunity. So yeah, I think that doctors do need to do prevention, but they don’t really have the language to do it. And it’s become this touchy thing about how to approach we do injury prevention all the time, but we don’t really have the language to do this one because it’s been politicized. Really, it should be policy. You know, as far as a play day, it becomes like, hey, my kids coming over your house. And you know, we asked about pools, if your child can’t swim, we asked about nuts, if your child’s allergic, it’s the same thing. I just want to make sure my child is safe. And do you have any guns in the house? So I probably wouldn’t just say the one thing about guns, but put it in all of the the typical injury things we ask about. And the other thing is, is that we have to meet people where they are. And it may not be, is there a gun in your house, it may be just provide the education and say, you know, if you do have a gun, this is what you know, this is what I recommend for safe storage.

Jen Lumanlan  30:45

Okay. Okay. So we’re sort of, we’re coming at this from two different perspectives here a little bit where we’re talking about how the pediatrician might influence the parent or encourage the parent to change their own storage practices in their own house. And then there’s also the how do we talk to other parents about this? And, and I think you studied the effectiveness of the Asking Saves Kids campaign, right, which is the idea of asking when your child is playing in another place, if there are guns available to them? What did you find out about the effectiveness of that program?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  31:15

Yeah, I studied it in the South Bronx, we asked parents of children being seen in our clinic and our pediatric clinic, you know, about the asking Safe Kids information, where, you know, again, it’s making sure if there’s a gun where your child plays, that it’s safely stored. They overwhelmingly wanted gun safety education from their physician. Ninety-six percent. But only 11% received it from their pediatrician. So there’s a gap in what parents want and what they’re getting.

Jen Lumanlan  31:47

Okay, yeah, I can imagine based on positions, discomfort and lack of training and all the rest of it. And also, when we’re thinking about who do you ask. If I’m the mother, it’s possible that I’m going to be interacting with another mother making plans for a playdate. And there was a study I found that said that women who are frequently not the primary gun owners, and that they often don’t know what guns are in their house and how they’re being stored. So if I’m having this conversation with another mother, it’s entirely possible that that person doesn’t know the complete picture of what’s going on in their house. So do I need to like have this message go out to both parents? Or like, how do I navigate that which I hadn’t even considered?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  32:33

Yeah, I think that’s a great point. I think you go for the parent that you have. And you ask them to distribute it to all caregivers, whoever’s taking care of your child. That’s what we tend to do, whether it’s a babysitter or the grandmother or the father, but I do want to take a note that or make note that domestic violence from firearms is a public health issue as well. And so I think it is an area we don’t talk about enough, you know, screening mothers for domestic violence related to firearms.

Jen Lumanlan  33:06

Yeah, yeah. And then just sort of while we’re on this topic of issues in the home as it were, you said something we had a call two weeks ago just to check that the alignment was right with the kinds of topics that you’re studying and what I was looking to cover on this episode and you said something that just caught my attention so much, you were talking about how Peloton Treadmills are being recalled. That one child has died as a result of interacting with the Peloton Treadmill 72 reports have been received about users, children, pets, other objects getting pulled onto the back of the treadmill. Of course any death of a child is tragic but what what does this Peloton recall say to you?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  33:45

Yeah, I was watching the news and they said you know there’s been a recall on Peloton treadmills because kids are getting hurt. It’s just as basic as that kids are getting hurt. Whether it be an injury or a death each each single one was important. With guns it’s 10 children per day. So what does that say about you know about the safety I guess the safety policies in place for each of these industries. Peloton is regulated right by it could be the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but there are different entities in the federal government that regulate consumer products. Firearms is the only one that falls outside of this. It is not… the sale is regulated of firearms but not the safety firearms. So if a two year old picks up a firearm, drops it it discharges and hurts him or somebody else. You would think that should be a recall on that firearm. And look what can we do? Do we need to put micro stamping on it? Do we need to put a lock on it so that a child is unable to injure themselves or others from that firearm? Again that’s a gap. And we need to repeal that protection from immunity for the gun industry. They need to be held accountable and they need to put safety mechanisms in place. It can’t be voluntarily. It doesn’t happen with any industry voluntarily. It didn’t happen with cars. You know, data found that if you put a child in a car seat, they’re more likely to be safer. If you put a seatbelt in a car, you’re more likely to be safer. We didn’t get rid of the car. We just made it safer for that child to be in the car. Same thing with firearms.

Jen Lumanlan  35:29

Yeah. Okay. And I want to sort of tease out the distinction between what I see is what you’re describing here, which is we’re trying to make firearms safer. And what seems to be the American Academy of Pediatrics’ stance, which is their official policy statement says “The safest home for children is a home without a gun.” And yes, that may be fact. I mean, it is factually true. But that that part is not really under debate here. But is this stance likely to be the one that improves the safety of the largest number of children if parents who own guns just kind of stop listening to the AAP and or their pediatrician or anyone else they’re getting this information from? Where do you kind of walk that line?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  36:07

Yeah, I think there’s a move to meet people where they are. And while like you said, that is the safest place, but people can have firearms, and we just need to have them be safe in the presence of children. So I think we need to meet people where they are. Do they have a firearm? What kind of firearm is it? Why do they have that firearm? It’s for hunting? We ‘ll you know what then you you can keep it safely stored, because you’re not using it for self protection. We need to learn about firearms. So many of us don’t know, like, what’s it like to pull a trigger? What’s it, you know, what are. a kind of 2 year old, you’re all like, hang on, hold the gun. So I had gone to a gun show in New Hampshire, where I, you know, ask people about background checks and about safe storage. I saw a family of four with an adolescent and a baby that must have been like six months old. And, you know, I was just, I was playing, you know, like consumer, and they all believed in safe storage, background checks. You know, the mother said of her baby, like, of course, we keep it safe. Of course, we keep it locked up with the user. Like, of course, we’re not buying in a, you know, an assault weapon, he wants to buy a rifle for hunting. You know, again, that’s not my culture. But that is a culture. And I think we need to understand it. And I think we need to meet in the middle about keeping their children safe.

Jen Lumanlan  37:33

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Great. Thank you for teasing that out a little bit. And so I kind of linked to this idea, I think, is the idea of pretend play with guns, either with fingers being held up or with, you know, BB guns or other gun like objects. And so we covered this a while ago in the show. And we talked to Dr. Diane Levine, who has spent a long time studying this, and basically told us that you can try and ban children from engaging in gun play/war play if you want to, but they’re going to do it anyway. They’re just going to push it underground. And if you support them in doing it, you can actually help them from getting out of these kind of bang, bang, you’re dead storylines that they can otherwise end up just repeating over and over again, and help them to understand well, what aspect of this story is it that they’re really exploring here? And how can we help you to explore that rather than necessarily focusing so much on the gunplay itself? And so I think the parents who are in the communities I work with are generally fairly comfortable with this approach. And sort of acknowledging also that even if their children are allowed to play with pretend guns, that we’re never doing it in a public place. This is always something that’s done in our backyard, partially in acknowledgement that our friends, if I’m White, and I have a friend over who isn’t White, that they may not be as safe as my child is being out on the street and playing with a pretend gun. And that even if everybody involved is White, that in acknowledgment that not every child is safe to do this. So I’m wondering if you are aware of any evidence based reason why we might need to shift our thinking on that at all, or if you are comfortable with children playing with pretend guns?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  39:10

It’s a really great question. I don’t know of any research in that area. I think it is something that does need to be done. You know, we have there have been studies that looked at exposure to media violence, and they have found that media violence exposure in and of itself can result in perpetration, but as far as the pretend gun I don’t recommend it. I think there are different place simulations you can you can do that don’t involve you know, the ultimate goal is to kill somebody. Cause what it is you kill like, you shoot somebody what they fall back in there, you know, simulating death. I don’t know if that’s what we want to teach kids. It’s kind of like cowboys and Indians. We used to do that, but we don’t do that anymore. You know, robbers. We don’t cops and robbers. We don’t do that anymore. So I think we maybe need to think about other things that children can play.

Jen Lumanlan  40:05

Okay. All right. And then from a parent’s perspective, if a parent is concerned about children’s exposure to gun violence, whether it’s their own child, or whether it’s children in general, because ultimately what we want to do is to make the world a safe place for all children to grow up in, not just my individual child, what do you recommend? What kind of actions can we take that are maybe grounded in evidence, I know that there had been some places where child access prevention laws have been put into place, you know, people will lobby for them, and the research on whether these are effective is is extremely mixed. ]Because there are so many confounding variables involved. We don’t know if the law is being enforced, or if people are actually changing their behavior. So I’m wondering if you can help us understand are the research based practices we can engage in to make the world safer for all children?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  40:53

Right, there is evidence, as we said, to support safe storage, and then it becomes the laws, the laws that are effective. And there was recent study that came out by a colleague Eric Siegler out of Boston Children’s that found that when you did look at these Child Access Laws in different States, where there were higher penalties for violation of that, then that was more effective, or was more effective in reducing injuries and deaths in that State versus an area that had weaker laws or weaker penalties from the same law. If that makes sense.

Jen Lumanlan  41:30

Yeah. Okay. So parents should be advocating for safe storage laws in their states, is that the thing that we can focus on that’s most useful in terms of reducing children’s exposure to violence, or is there are there other things that should be our primary focus?

Dr. Nina Agrawal  41:45

What I’ve been interested in is creating safer environments for children. And so creating sort of this environmental health framework. You know, we talk about climate, we talk about noise pollution, I think we need to put firearms in that. I live, you know, in New York City in a nice neighborhood, but just a block over last week, my neighbor was in the news over gunshots at 4pm. That doesn’t usually happen. But it happened. You know, my since the pandemic, I don’t walk around at night, because it actually has not been safe. But now it’s not safe in the daytime, you know, so I think we need to look at our environment, just not in our home, but our you know, our community. And I think we need to solve this as a community. So whether what, however you define your community, as a community of parents, to community of teachers, however you define that I think, you know, come together and figure out what solutions matter or would make a difference in your community, it’s not going to be a one size fits all. And it’s not going to be one thing either. I really love the work that Charles Branas, he’s a gun researcher that in Philadelphia, they found that if you remediate blighted land, like abandoned buildings, create safe green spaces where you involve the community, you can reduce shootings, and you can reduce crime in that area. And ultimately, children can be safer in that neighborhood.

Jen Lumanlan  43:12

Okay, so this ultimately doesn’t necessarily have to be about advocating for anything related to guns specifically, it could be a much broader picture of how do we make this a community that we all feel welcome in. And that if we can create that, then the gun violence issue sort of becomes less of a focus as it were.

Dr. Nina Agrawal  43:31

Yeah. And then I think the other part of that is after school programs. In New York City, they’re trying to mandate that all children are eligible for after school programs, because it’s like an added expense. That’s a time where children can get into trouble. And so I think, you know, all parents could benefit from after school programs for their child, whether you’re in a suburban environment or in an urban environment.

Jen Lumanlan  43:54

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here and sharing your thoughts on this and your research and ideas and leaving us with some really some things that we can do. This is not about necessarily getting out a billboard and taking on the NRA. This is not what we’re trying to do here. What we’re trying to do is create communities that feel welcome to everybody. So thank you for sharing your time with us.

Dr. Nina Agrawal  44:15

Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Jen Lumanlan  44:19

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

Jen  00:02

Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.

Jen  00:06

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Jen  00:29

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Jen  00:42

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Jen  01:00

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re going to look at the topic of implicit bias. Now I’ve been thinking for a while about running a series of episodes on the connection between our brains and our bodies because I’ve been learning about that and the wisdom that our bodies can hold and wondering, well how can we learn how to pay more attention to our bodies? And then I started thinking about intuition. And I wondered, well, how can we know if we can trust our intuition? What if our intuition is biased? So I started looking at the concept of implicit bias and it became immediately clear who I should ask to interview Dr. Mahzarin Banaji. Dr. Banaji studies thinking and feeling as they unfold in a social context with a focus on mental systems that operate in implicit or unconscious mode. Since 2002, she has been Richard Clarke Cabot professor of social ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where she was also the Chair of the Department of Psychology for four years while holding two other concurrent appointments. She has been elected fellow of a whole host of extremely impressive societies and was named William James Fellow for a lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology by the Association of Psychological Science, an organization of which she also served as president. Along with her colleague, Dr. Anthony Greenwald. She’s conducted decades of research on implicit bias and co-authored the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.

Jen  02:21

I should also say that there are a lot of issues that we only got a chance to skim over at a fairly high level in this conversation, which I’m recording this introduction afterwards, because Dr. Banaji was quite pressed for time. And I’m planning to release an episode that follows up into these issues and dives into them at a much deeper level soon. So please consider this part one of a two-part conversation with you.

Jen  02:42

Alright, let’s go ahead and get started with the interview.

Jen  02:45

Welcome Dr. Banaji. Thanks so much for being here.

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  02:48

Hi there.

Jen  02:49

So I wonder if we can start out by understanding a bit more about what implicit bias is. I hear it all over the place, and can you help us to just define what that is, please?

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  02:58

Sure. So implicit bias, quite simply, is a tendency in every human being to favor one individual over another, one social group over another, and to do so without conscious awareness, or without the ability to be able to exert conscious control over the judgement that one is making. So let’s just break the phrase down into the two words that constitute it. The word implicit and the word bias, okay? Bias, what is it? It’s simply for us a deviation from neutrality, it is privileging one option over another, right? If I say I prefer blue to red, I’m biased in favor of blue, and not in favor of red relatively speaking. So that for us is what a bias is. And implicit just means that that favoring of red over blue or blue over red is something that I’m not even aware of. It’s just that when I go into a store, I pick up clothing that is all blue rather than red. That put together tells us that implicit bias is a deviation from neutrality in ways we ourselves would not be happy to see ourselves doing. If it’s in the domain of color, who cares whether I prefer blue to red or red to blue but imagine now that it’s not blue and red. Imagine that it is a native born child in the classroom, and an immigrant child in the classroom. And even though I as a teacher believe very much that both should be treated equally that is to say, if they do something good, I should reward both equally. If they did something that’s bad behavior, I should reprimand them equally, I should encourage both equally to pursue new things in their lives. I should support both of them equally to meet their goals and so on. A deviation from neutrality would mean that I’m doing these things both the good and bad things in order to teach a child something, that I’m doing them selectively, that I’m doing more for one category over another. So that’s all biases. And teachers are so well intentioned, just like parents, what they want is the best for all of the kids in their class. And so when we discovered that a teacher may not be aware but is systematically calling on certain people in the classroom, or saying, “Aha!” or “Good idea!” to some rather than others, then we would say it’s implicit. And as you can imagine, teachers, by and large, are very good people and so when they’re biased it is almost always without their awareness.

Jen  05:41

Okay, so is this lack of awareness perspective, that’s really the key, then?

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  05:45

That’s exactly right. And the reason this is interesting is because if you look in almost any society, but let’s just take American society or the Western world or whatever, some large group of people, you will notice that explicit forms of bias have been coming down, at least in what people say on a survey. If you say to a teacher, “Do you think that native born children are just inherently smarter than immigrant children?” The teacher will likely say, “No, I don’t believe that that is the case at all. I think all children are talented in all these different ways.” So if you measure it explicitly, if you say, “Tell me is this immigrant kid better or worse than this native one kid?” You will not see any evidence of bias. But when you sit in the back of the classroom, and you just measure what the teacher is doing, who the teacher looks at who the teacher says nice things to who the teacher calls on, and you see that there is a systematic difference, then we say we must become interested in this, because the child is experiencing these good and bad things the teacher is doing, but the teacher has no awareness. And think about the child. What does the child think is going on? The child might think I’m bad, or I’m good, right? And that’s why we should be interested in both kinds of measures, what people say to us directly, and also what they may not be able to say because they don’t think they’re that way.

Jen  07:10

Okay, I’m wondering if we can just pull that apart a little bit. And we’re sort of using teachers as an example. But this could just as well apply to managers or anyone in any situation. I can understand if a researcher were to come and say, “Do you think that native born children have different capabilities than immigrant children?” Then, I understand the correct thing for me to say in that moment is “No, of course not.” But I may still be thinking that and I may have awareness that I’m thinking that. So I’m trying to understand the difference between an explicit bias that I know it’s not a socially correct thing to say, and implicit bias that I might not be aware of, how can I parse that difference?

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  07:48

Yeah, it’s a great question. For now, I would say, an explicit bias is something that you know, even if you don’t say it to other people, but you know. So let’s say that I believe that boys are better at math than girls are. But I’m not going to say that because I don’t want my girl students to hear that or feel bad about that. And so I’m not going to say it, but I think it and I’m able to consciously put those words together in my mind, boys are better at math than girls, I know that. As long as that is the case, we would say it’s consciously accessible to you. Your mind is capable of saying A is better than B or whatever and to do that to yourself, at least. What makes it implicit is when you say boys and girls are equally good at math, I believe it. You never say to yourself; boys are better at math than girls. But if we look at some other aspects of your behavior, who you spend more time teaching a difficult math problem to, etc., then we would say it is.

Jen  08:56

Okay, perfect. Thank you for helping us to understand that distinction. And so then I wonder if we can go from there into the Implicit Association test, which is something you’ve spent a bit of time working on over the years. Can you tell us what that is? And how does that measure implicit bias?

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  09:11

Yeah. So as you can imagine, your listeners and you will easily see what the problem is. A person, if asked genuinely and truly says, “I have no bias.” And when you measure their judgments and actions in some way, you’re seeing a systematic effect. How do you measure that? When the person themselves is saying no? In psychology, we’ve relied for over 100 years on what we call explicit measures. If you want to know something about what a person is thinking, ask them. How stressed are you feeling? Okay. Well, sometimes maybe I can tell you that I’m feeling stressed. But there are lots of studies where people like me say that they’re not stressed at all and you’ll see me breaking out into hives or something, which is a response to the stress. Now you have to have a measure of those hives, you have to be able to measure skin complexion, you know, when one is stressed and not stressed and say whether the person knows it or not, there is some physical response that we can measure. What can we do when the response we are looking for is locked up between our ears in a box that is not easy to penetrate? So the first thing to do is to just imagine the difficulty of trying to even track anything implicit and the measure that you mentioned, the one that we are most familiar with, and the one that I believe today is the dominant measure of implicit cognition in the science as a whole is the Implicit Association test, and I’m one of three co developers of that test. The test has a very simple assumption that underlies it. The assumption is that when two things in our experience have come to go together repeatedly, they’re joined in time and in space, let’s say, that they become one for us. If when I see bread, there is usually a bowl of butter, bread and butter come to be associated when I think bread, butter comes to mind more quickly than some random word like water, or couch or something like that. So that’s very easy to understand and neuroscientists, actually, in order to teach people how neurons in our brain fire after having learned something, they teach it to us by the phrase, if it fires together, it wires together. And we use that when we teach how learning occurs. By firing together, it means in the same moment, if neurons for bread and butter becoming activated, your brain learns that there’s something about these that go together, and that’s how we learn everything. We learn, you know, that mother and father are a unit, like bread and butter, but we also know certain experiences we have in the presence of something. When I see flowers, I feel happy, and flowers becomes associated flowers almost become synonymous with good, even though the words that we might use to capture goodness have nothing to do with flowers. So you know, not just words like beautiful or peace or joy, but if we use words like you know, angel, or satisfied, or whatever that have no semantic relationship to flowers, those words should become more easily accessible in the presence of flowers because our experience has made them repeatedly be associated. Unlike insects, when we think of an insect, we think yucky, I mean, unless you’re a five-year-old boy, yes, I will put them aside for a moment. And say that, yes, that may happen. But even young boys, when they take our test, if it’s flower or insect, they have learned that in our culture, flowers are good, and insects are bad. So all we’ve done is made a test that measures the strength of association between insects, and bad and good flowers and bad and good. Okay, that’s what the test is. And now we can begin to go beyond the test by keeping the test logic identical. If I have you look at flowers on a computer screen and press a key – left key when you see flowers on the right key when you see insects – very easy for you to do that. Now I’m going to say okay, not just flowers and insects, but words are going to pop up on the screen words like love and peace and joy, good words, or bad words like devil and bomb and war and things like that. And your job is to use the same key to say flower or good words, and the same key, now a different but the same key when you identify an insect, as having appeared on the screen, or a bad word is having appeared on the screen. Now, if flower and good have truly become one in our minds, this should be a very easy task. Left key for flowers left key for good. Right key for insect right key for bad, right? That’s easy. But now let’s switch. This is the moment in the test when people groan because I’m saying to them left key for flower and left key for bad things, right key for insect and right key for good things. And they can’t do it. By can’t do it I mean, they can, but it takes them a whole lot longer to do this and they make many more mistakes when they do this. I show this bias, you show this bias. You know, even entomologists who study insects and love them, show it but to a lesser extent than we do. So they acquired the cultural thumbprint that says insects are not as good as flowers, but because they love insects and they work with them. They show a lower anti insect bias.

Jen  14:51

Fascinating.

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  14:52

Okay, so now, the logic of the test should be very clear to people, and they will mostly agree in fact, everybody will agree that this is a decent measure of whether we like flowers or insects. And when the data come back and tell you, you have a strong preference for flowers over insects, people nod their head and say, “Yes, I do.” There’s no quarrel with the test. The quarrel with the test emerges when we replace insect and flower with Black and White faces, Asian and White faces, fat and thin people, people who are Native Americans and European Americans. And sometimes when we even change the good and bad words, to be things like bad and good things like weapons and musical instruments or something like that. Is it easier for me to associate, you know, certain groups with bad things and certain groups with good things? And the startling result is that for people who have, and I would say, genuinely have no explicit bias, now, I can’t say what your explicit bias is, because you may think that you think that you know, male is better than female, but you may not be willing to tell me, but I’ll take myself, I know that explicitly, I do not believe that Black is bad, and White is good. I know that for sure because it’s me, and I can tell myself the truth about what I consciously think. And yet for people like me, who seem to have no explicit bias, this test throws us a curveball, because it demonstrates that people like me are not able to associate good with Black as easily as we can associated with White. And when that happens, it’s troubling to us. It’s troubling because it doesn’t feel like the test is telling us anything true about ourselves. I don’t blame people who say what a stupid test is just telling me, you know, it’s just all complete lies. I felt the same way when I first took the test. I thought, “What’s wrong with this test?” Obviously, I’m the great Mahzarin I’m not biased, so if the test is telling me I am, something’s wrong with the test. And you know, a few minutes later, I came to my senses and I realized it’s not the test that’s the problem. It’s my head that’s the problem. I have accumulated all this learning two things have gone together, it fired together, it wired together.

Jen  17:22

Okay. All right. Well, thank you for that. And I think there’s a lot of different pieces to come up from that, that we’re going to get to in due time as we go through the conversation, but I’m wondering if maybe we can start with “Where does this come from?” Because in preparation for this interview, you sent me an epic paper that you had written with one of your grad students, and the reference list alone was enough to make me weep when I saw it, and realized I was probably I need to read most of those.

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  17:50

Which paper was that?

Jen  17:51

The one with Dr. Charlesworth on, I hope I’m remembering her name, right?

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  17:56

Yeah. Charlesworth is writing, but she’s written too many papers.

Jen  18:00

You’ve written a lot with her. But the idea of the assessment of where implicit beliefs and attitudes about gender and race and language come from. So…

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  18:08

Oh the language paper.

Jen  18:09

Yeah.

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  18:09

I got it.

Jen  18:11

Yeah, sort of the overview of what does the research say about where all of this comes from in all of these different domains of gender, race, language, and age, and so on. So wonder if you can walk us through what we know about where these implicit biases come from?

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  18:26

Yeah, so whenever we talk about where does something come from, in this domain, you must always think about it in two buckets. The data that we know, female is nice, male is strong, whatever those beliefs might be. They’re obviously coming from somewhere, right? And that’s usually outside of the human in some sense first. When you’re born into the world, you don’t know that you’d know in a few days that mom is nicer than dad because you’ve been attached to mom. And infants, by the way, do notice very, very quickly, that is they know, they prefer other females if their primary caregiver is female, and male, they prefer other males if their primary caregiver’s male. So they’re clearly learning that. But the very fact that they’re learning that female is good or male is good, depending on their experience tells us that those experiences are coming to them from the outside. But there is a machine inside. That’s the second bucket. It’s not like it takes a long while for these things to get learned. There is a learning machine in our brain is… it’s like a sponge for anything new that comes to be paired with each other. We’re seeking those associations and when we see them, we form immediate hypotheses. “Oh, a person who looks like this is a nice person.” They feed me, they take care of me, they feel cuddly and warm, they stroke my cheek and some other group that has never done anything bad to you, but just hasn’t done anything good is not associated with that, right? So, when we think about where this comes from the specific content, female is soft and nice feeds me, etc. Male is strong, you know, can carry large objects, whatever those are, those are obviously being learned, it is not something that the brain knows on day one. But the thing to focus on is that it’s learning it extremely fast. So fast that as I said, within the first, you know, two months of life, babies are showing preferences for dark skinned people if their caregivers are dark skinned, and for light skinned people, if their caregivers are light skinned.

Jen  20:45

Okay, and so there’s sort of a shift that’s happening in there. And I want to make sure that we see it happening. In the very early days, there’s a noticing which researchers are measuring things like looking studies, like how long does a child look at one person versus another person, one picture versus another picture.

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  21:02

Yeah, I don’t think looking at any, as really anything, like just looking. Looking almost immediately is going to also be reflecting either a preference, or that it’s something startling and unique and I better look at it, because this doesn’t sound like the usual thing. So looking time is telling us more than just here are two things and I’m going to look at one over the other.

Jen  21:24

Okay. And that’s sort of linked to the categorization that’s happening, right that one particular person has these features and here’s another person that has these features. And this person brings me milk and stuff that I like, and this person looks sort of like this person. And so we start to lump these together. Is that right? That that’s how the categories form?

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  21:46

Yeah, when I say that, babies very early starts to show a preference for others who share the gender of their caretaker, that’s exactly what’s happening. If one woman is good to you, your brain apparently thinks that’s more than enough data. And you will generalize from that to other women. And if you have a mother and grandmother, it’s over now all women are going to be good, right? Because two of them have already shown that they did not harm you. So yes, I think the question of categorization and then forming liking for one, and the other is too complicated to get into, because there are many different views about all of this but the important thing is, yes, very early babies can put things into groupings. And very quickly, and this is the interesting part, the fact that they can see that things are different is not so surprising, but what is surprising is how quickly beliefs and affects come to be associated with that. How quickly things become good and bad. That’s the part that I would be interested in.

Jen  22:48

Yeah. And so why do we do that? Like, why does the good and bad thing happen? Where does the preferences part come from?

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  22:54

Because it’s so adaptive. For babies that didn’t do this, they would just die. I mean, imagine that a baby fails to distinguish between people who take care of them and people who harm them. A baby like that would not survive a day because they would approach people who are likely to harm them. So for a baby, to not go in the direction of people who look unfamiliar, is a very protective mechanism. For the baby to learn very quickly that when somebody has not harmed me, others, like that person are not likely to harm me is a decent hypothesis. It will pan out in their little universe. So that’s where it comes from. It’s not for nothing, that they’re, they’re not stupid, right they’re, this is how humans evolved. Humans who did not have the capability to distinguish between categories and assign a positive or negative value to those would have died out in our evolutionary history. They didn’t survive long enough to have their own children, so that they would be amongst us people who don’t make those distinctions. This was so important that it is now a basic human quality because only those…

Jen  24:03

And it happens across categories, like gender, and race and language and age. Those were some of the ones that you covered in your paper,

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  24:11

And tables and chairs and cups and saucers, and apples on everything.

Jen  24:16

Okay. And then I was curious to see that boys undergo a shift, girls undergo less of a shift as they get a little bit older and go from and start to see female with good and male with bad on a version of the Implicit Association test that’s designed for children. And so instead of preferring their own group, because I think the tendency is to prefer own group and to for boys to say, “Oh, boys are better than girls.” And girls say, “Well, girls are better than boys.” And then over time, it becomes sort of a female preference. What’s behind that?

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  24:50

Yeah, you’re asking a really important question. So let me just back up a little bit and say, you’re exactly right. In group preference, we see in some ways is ubiquitous. You can go anywhere in the world and you won’t be surprised when you see that people like their own group better than they like other groups. If it’s something like the Red Sox and the Yankees, it’s very explicit, I can actually scream all kinds of epithets about the Yankees considered socially completely. Okay,

Jen  25:22

I enjoyed the research paper on that particular…

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  25:25

I can wear a T-shirt that says, “The Yankees suck.” And even though they don’t, and they’re far better than the Red Sox, it is okay for me to do that. So in group preference, starting with something as clear and as socially acceptable as commitment to a sports team, and hating the rival team, starting with that, and going down to other kinds of groups. American, is American better than European for Americans, Americans are better and for Europeans, Europeans are better. So let’s just start with the assumption that in the psychological research literature, this has been shown thousands and thousands of times in every possible way, that in group preference is strong and ubiquitous. When you find that not being the case, you have to get interested as a scientist, how can it be that something as pervasive is failing to appear? And we see it more on the IAT on the implicit tests. So on the explicit test, if you ask Black people, which group do you like more White or Black, they will say with lots of passion, we think Black is better than White. When you ask White people, which group is better White or Black, they will say their own group is better, but a little more modestly, because they know their history. They know that it’s not so cool for them to say White is better than Black. So they will, they will still say it but in a much more modulated way than African Americans will. So that’s what they say. Now let’s go to the IAT and we’ll use both examples race and gender here. On the IAT, White people show strong preference for White over Black, and young children, six-year-olds, and even younger, we now know, show that same preference. So they’ve already learned by the time they’re four, we know it can be seen on lots of complicated tests that they prefer, just like the adults of their group. So why do adults and White kids look the same to each other, they reflect each other and they show clear in group preference much stronger in group preference than they might say, on a scale if you ask them the question, which group do you prefer, and so on. Now, let’s go to Black Americans. If the world were fair and equal and nonhierarchical, Black Americans should if 70%, or 75% of White Americans show White preference, then 75% of Black Americans should show Black preference. And if that’s steam, then we would say this is symmetric, opposite but symmetric, right. But that’s not the case. 40% of Black Americans show in group preference 40% show out group preference that is to say they prefer White to Black and 20% are neutral. When you collapse the data for Black Americans, you see a graph where you see roughly half the people on the side have White preference, and the other half on the side of Black preference. And young Black children, six years of age will show the same result. They have learned. This is to me one of the morally difficult results that by that age, a Black child knows enough that even though they might say I like Black kids, they do not show that preference on the IAT. So what is the IAT and the value of implicit measures is that they are capturing the thumbprint of the culture on our brain, not what we think we ought to say. And now you start to see the same thing with gender, but in a way that will perplex people. In the world there was this wrong belief that because women are oppressed, because women have been subjugated by men, because women have had many fewer rights than men, that women will be seen as bad. Well, women are not respected or seen as strong or competent but they are loved because a very defining meaning of female is mother in every culture. The basic meaning of female is somebody who is nice, who will cook for you, will hug you, is warm, smells good. All of those things are associated with mother. So if you give people an IAT – male, female, good, bad – girls will show in group preference just like it’s supposed to be. Girls would like girls, but young boys who have learned that mother is wonderful and nice they will show a lower preference for female but they won’t show just like Black people don’t show a strong preference for Black over White, boys won’t show as strong a preference for male or female, because they’re members of that group. So they like the group male, but they too have learned that in our culture of the two groups, male and female, the good one is mother. Not necessarily the competent one, the strong one, the one who brings in the money, the one who, you know is going to be able to kill off the enemy for us all of that, not that. So what you now see is that it is silly for us to assume that any particular group is all good or all bad, it depends in which category you’re looking. There’s a fundamental warmth that we might feel towards some people over others. And that’s one dimension on which we like or dislike certain groups. But as Susan Fiske, a psychologist has shown there is a second variable that does not run parallel, it runs almost in opposition to the warmth one that are loved but seem to be not so strong. Or you could be seen to be strong, like father, like CEO, like feminist women, these groups are seen as strong, but not necessarily nice. So that’s what you see and the amazing thing is that what we see in adults we’re seeing in young children, and that’s the important message here that a lot of parents struggle with this. I have had numerous parents write me, email, tell me, please don’t tell anybody this but you know, my child said something, something terrible, racially. And I have no idea how they could have gotten that because it’s never said in our home. It’s never said in the school that they go to. How did this happen? And I say to them, that it’s because they have a very impressive view of their own influence on their child. Their child is influenced by what it sees in the world. And if they go to a school where there are Black and White kids and the Black kids, you know, have a lunchbox that is more beaten up than the White kids’ lunchbox, that might be enough to say that’s not as nice as this other nice, shiny thing. And that’s all it would take to figure all this out.

Jen  32:18

Okay. And so two things to pick up on that. Firstly, the implications for Black children  and even Black adults have this sort of two humped curve as it were, with half of the people preferring the outgroup. And with all of the messages that our culture sends about the outgroup’s superiority in this case, what implications does that have for the psychological health of the people who are in this group?

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  32:46

So I’ll tell you two things and they will I hope both be interesting. The first thing is that as soon as you combine what I just told you about in-group and out-group preference, that in-group preference is robust and strong, in dominant group members, but it’s not present in members that are minority groups or disadvantaged groups. We begin with that result and then we can actually make the effects even worse by saying they’re not even the same size statistically, in every culture. If White Americans are about 60% of the population, but Black Americans are only 10%. Just count up, just do simple math. How many good things is a White person likely to get being thrown towards them in a given day? Oh, 60% of their population, or other people like them who show preference for them in their group, African Americans, even if they showed strong preference for their own kind, would only have that be available in the 10% in that group. So statistically, it makes the result worse, even worse. So I think that this is a battle that has to be fought inside of each person. What am I to do? I love myself; I want to love myself, I want to love my home and my people and my thing, but I know that they aren’t good. The results that I will give you next is a very shocking result. When you measure self-esteem – how much do you love yourself? – and even when you use measures that are implicit, associate good things to yourself, we find that African Americans have the highest self-esteem in our culture, followed by White and the lowest is in Asians. So how does this happen? How does a group that is discriminated have the highest level of love for self in some ways? And I think it’s because Black kids all the way to Black adulthood are constantly being tested. Self-love is not something that can be set aside. We love ourselves. We have to protect ourselves. That is so powerful that Black Americans have to work harder. This is my conjecture, that the reason they show high self-esteem is because they don’t have the luxury of deriving it from their social group. White Americans can feel good because other White people’s achievements are theirs. Black Americans have much less of that to lean on. And so it has to be done based on yourself, I have to be the good one, I’m going to have to do the good thing. And I think that it is this kind of constant mental work that goes on to make sure that the self is protected, the self is seen as good, that leads to an almost better developed self-love that in African Americans is coming from the hard work they have to do to make sure that the goodness they associated with themselves is coming from their own performance from their own being good, or what that might mean because it’s not going to come from just, you know, having it showered on you by others in your group, or by even having your own group members show it to you. But this is a very complicated story. But the result is not the result that Black Americans, so this is a contradictory result, because we used to think that, you know, if your group is discriminated, you will have even had a word for it, we call it you know, self-hating x, we would say, well, that’s it’s not so simple, psychologically, we should just be aware that love of self is so primary, that we will find a way to love ourselves. And at the even at the expense, even when we know that the group we belong to is not so good, culturally speaking.

Jen  36:37

Okay, then that should sort of an additional layer of the next thing that I wanted to follow up on, which was when you said that parents come to you and say, you know, my child said something inappropriate and where did this come from? And you said, Well, this is sort of the culture exerting its thumbprint on your child’s mind. Of course, there are also many studies showing that children at very young ages, if a researcher asks them and presents them with a picture of a Black baby and a White baby, a doll, or an actual child picture than both of those Black and White children, who are the study, participants will say, “h, yeah, the White baby is nicer. The White baby is cleaner. The White baby is better in some way. And so how can we know that these results are from implicit biases, rather than explicit biases that the child hasn’t yet learned that society says that they need to cover up because it’s not socially acceptable to say this?

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  37:29

Yeah. So in our very first study that we did, using an implicit measure, it was done with Andy Baron, who’s a professor now at University of British Columbia, we were the first to just try and IAT with young children. And so we first asked six-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults to just tell us, you know, here two people, which one do you like. Six-year-olds are the most honest, White six-year-olds, 90% of them tell us I like the White one better than the Black one. By ten, they have started to learn that that may not be so cool to say. So they still show fairly decent in group preference when they are asked, but explicitly, they’re not as likely to say the same. And when you ask adults, you see, nobody said Oh, because they say half the time White is good. And half the time Black is good. And that’s a good measure of how civilized these adults are, at one level, right? At least explicitly, I’m going to take them at face value. They’re saying my values are such that I prefer both equally. When you look at the IAT data, of course, there are no such differences. six-year-olds, ten year olds and adults all show strong in group preference. All right. So kids are in fact, honest, they will tell us what they think and in fact, young Black children are being honest, when they say the White doll is better, because they know that in their culture, that’s the case. There is one videotape that’s been made of the Clark and Clark doll study, which is the one you bring up originally done in the 1930s by Kenneth and Mamie Clark, a study that was cited in the important legal decision Brown v Board of Education, and that’s the original doll studies. But somebody did a version of it not in a systematic way as the Spencer’s have done, but just sort of videotaping Black kids, as they’re shown Black doll and they picked the White doll when they’re asked which one is good. The kicker is when the experimenter then says, which one is more like you. And you can see a child’s face almost turn adult-like in its demonstration of conflict when it very slowly and hesitantly points to the Black doll to say that’s more like me. What I’m saying is that, yes, they know that and at that age you know, who knows what it’s doing to self-esteem? What we do know is that exactly that process must be working its way, all over the place as they grow older, so that by the time they’re reasonably old, they’ve learned that I am good. My group is not good. And they figured out a way to derive self-esteem. But this is not studied very well. So I don’t want to go too far into it but I can tell you that’s been well studied is that Black people show a fairly high self-esteem that we know. And it’s a puzzle as to how is it possible given our simplistic belief that people who belong to disadvantaged groups will dislike themselves and so on? It’s not so simple. We can’t say that.

Jen  40:44

Yeah. And so then, then we could, of course, come to the issue of well, what, if anything, can we do to potentially prevent implicit biases from developing, and I’m just thinking to the study that you just published this year, again, with Dr. Charlesworth on the massive study of gender stereotypes and natural language. I mean, this is enormous in scope, it’s millions of words of assessment that would never have been possible to do before computers that could analyze such high volumes of data. And so when we think about the findings from that study, which are the words associated with gender are everywhere, in natural language interactions in movies, and everything that we interact with our children, what can we do when all of this stuff is so baked into our culture to potentially prevent implicit biases from developing?

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  41:40

Yeah, so let’s start with the answer to the parents who say, I never say to my child, anything that’s gender stereotypic. I’ve known parents who will doctor their children’s books to put breasts on truck drivers so that their children don’t learn a standard. And still, the kid somehow seems to know the right answer, truck drivers don’t have breasts. Let’s start with that. On the one hand, the parent says that, and then let’s look at just parent-child conversations. So in the work with Tessa Charlesworth one data set that we used to look at this using this technique called word embeddings, which words go with which other words which words are semantically more connected, if I say to you, kitchen mitt and mother are going to be more associated than kitchen mitt and father, you would have no trouble understanding that that might happen. If I say to you, baseball mitt and father are more associated than baseball mitt and mother, you would not be surprised. That’s what the data would show that in our language, when kitchen mitt appears, it’s usually what she mother etc., when baseball mitt appears, it’s more with pronouns and names that are male. What parents are telling us is that we don’t explicitly say girls are, you know, not competent, and boys are competent, but parents need not say that. Right? If in our culture, a person who’s working on a car in their garage, is somehow culturally seen as more valuable than stirring soup on a pot in a kitchen, and mother and kitchen are associated and father and garage and cars are, then automatically children are learning that fathers are better than mothers, because what fathers do the work they do is better than the work mothers do. Mothers are nicer than fathers, but mother’s work is not so good. So when you look for stereotypes, of associations to in our culture, things lower on the hierarchy, you know, helping and following rather than building and leading, you see that in the conversations parents and children are having, so this is the brilliance of the data set test out worked with, she has one data set of just parents and children talking. In the course of normal life. We know the age of the child, the gender of the child. We know a few things, but not much else, because we only have audio recordings. So we subject these audio recordings to this analysis and we find that the evidence for use of gender stereotypes in both parents’ language and the child’s language is just as robust as it is in TV shows and in music or in encyclopedias or in books of fiction or nonfiction books or whatever. So that’s the important data. Stereotypes in the language when we’re speaking, are robust. They’re seen equally across many different language corpora, including parent-child conversations. And I think for your parents, this should be an interesting idea that they’re right when they say I never say that girls can’t work on a car. No, they never said that. But in their life, they’re demonstrating that by having the male in the family do that and the female not do it. So they don’t ever have to say it. It’s seen in the behavior of these individuals. And that’s how children pick it up because it would be silly not to be a good learning machine that’s trying to learn what goes with what.

Jen  45:16

And then I mean, it seems to have so many links to patriarchy as well and the idea that they use you said helping and following are not good. And creating and leading are good. And these are stereotypically male and female traits.

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  45:30

So older feminists often argued that we’ve got to get women into these high positions, so that they will be associated with all those values of, you know, respected work, and so on. And I think a newer breed of feminists might say, no, we have to make sure that housework becomes seen as important. That, you know, in cultures where it is paid work, or whatever, that’s a way of a culture signaling that it really believes that the work mothers do is just as important, in fact, more important because there are the schools, I’m told in Denmark, where to just send your child to school, you would be paid, you know, 700 something a month. And that’s saying, you know, we care enough about protecting mothers time and sending kids properly to school, that we’re going to pay people to do that. Until that happens, I don’t think, and that’s why people are perplexed, why isn’t that explicitly, nobody really believes in gender stereotypes anymore. But when we look at the world, and who’s where and how much money people make, and so on, it still seems to be there. And the answer today is yeah, because it’s there. It’s not, it’s just not something we say, it more of something we do.

Jen  46:40

So then it seems to me that the trick here there’s a trick is to firstly, have the conversations with your child about the value of these different professions and roles and careers. And then secondly, is taking on non-traditional roles and responsibilities to the extent that you want to do that.

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  46:56

Yeah, so Tessa’s tests, the ones we analyzed are twofold: we take a gender test, where we measure how strongly do we associate, male and female with the categories of career or work-related things, and then home-family related things. It’s a robust relationship. You know, many, many people, the vast majority showing association between male and career female and home, including women at the same level as men do, so men and women do not differ in this bias. Women just as much as men, if not a little bit more associate female with home and male with career. But in the 10-year period that we’ve looked at roughly 2007 to 2016, we see that this bias is coming down as a function of time, but also a function of age of the child. And that’s because that is the world, right? I’m an old person. So I learned what those are. But my world today is different than my world in the late 50s. And so I am changing. But a kid who was born only 10 years ago, begins with a world that is already very different than 1950s and they’re changing. So what’s great about Tessa’s data is that she doesn’t just look at absolute levels of bias. She looks at change over time. And even in attitudes towards gay people. Everybody’s changing as it turns out. We’re all becoming less and less anti-gay. Conservatives and liberals, men and women, older people and young people, the coasts, the middle, rich, poor, educated, less educated, everybody is becoming less anti-gay. But two groups are becoming anti-gay faster than everybody else. And that’s young people and people who identify as liberal, those two are almost already close to neutrality. When we talk about bias, we said, a bias is a deviation from neutrality. If you like Black and White equally, or if you’re like gay and straight equally, your IAT score would be zero because whatever bias you’re showing here, you’re showing there, and when you subtract one from the other, what’s left is zero, which means there’s equality in whatever you feel it’s equal. And what we’re seeing is that zero point is being reached for today already by young people and by liberals. They’re not showing in anti-gay bias. So those data make us very hopeful. We just have to figure out a way of bottling whatever is going on with sexuality, and then see if it can be applied to changes in other ways that are not changing as fast. So race is changing anywhere as fast. And age bias. Your older parents or grandparents might be interested, although it’s a sad result, that one of the most robust biases that we’ve detected is an anti-elderly bias. In elderly people show this bias to the same extent as young people do. That’s how strong it is in just about every culture, even though cultures do vary in how much age bias they show, every culture is in that direction of elderly bad, young and good. Yeah. And that’s not changing over time. And we have to ask why. You know, and I have a feeling that. I mean, I can give many it’s a very complicated set of answers, which are all hypotheses at this time, but I think we’re not working on that bias. Our culture cares about race, we talk about it, we argue about it, we get into fits about it. We talk about sexuality, we pass laws, you know, we do things. But on age bias, or disability bias, or body weight bias, those three are not changing at all. In fact, body weight bias, a liking for thin over fat is actually getting worse, over the same 10-year period. Not better.

Jen  50:50

So some good progress, and still a lot of work to do as well.

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  50:54

Exactly.

Jen  50:55

Alright. Well, thank you so much for spending your time with us today. I’m so grateful. I know how busy you are. And I’m really grateful for the opportunity to read papers before they are publicly available and get a preview into what’s coming and that you were so generous here with your time today.

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  51:10

Thank you for doing what you do. I think this sort of translation is so necessary, and so few people do it. And so few people do it as well as you so thank you.

Jen  51:20

Well, thank you very much.

Jen  51:21

And so our listeners can find links to all of the references and there are many of them to the studies we’ve discussed, as well as the background reading that I did. And also the book that Dr. Banaji coauthored with Dr. Anthony Greenwald, which is called Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People all of that can be found at YourParentingMojo.com/ImplicitBias.

Jen  51:40

Thanks for joining us for this episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Don’t forget to subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com to receive new episode notifications and the FREE guide to seven parenting myths that we can leave behind and join the your parenting Mojo Facebook group for more respectful research based ideas to help kids thrive and make parenting easier for you. I’ll see you next time on Your Parenting Mojo

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Oswald, F.L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., & Tetlock, P.E. (2013). Predicting ethnic and racial discrimination: A meta-analysis of IAT criterion studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 105(2), 171-192.

Oswald, F.L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., & Tetlock, P.E. (2015). Using the IAT to predict ethnic and racial discrimination: Small effect sizes of unknown societal significance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108(4), 562-571.

Papageorge, N.W., Gershenson, S., & Kang, K. (2016). Teacher expectations matter. IZA Discussion Papers No. 10165, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn.

Payne, B.K., Vuletich, H.A., & Lundberg, K.B. (2017). The bias of crowds: How implicit bias bridges personal and systemic prejudice. Psychological Inquiry 28(4), 233-248.

Rae, J.R., Newheiser, A-K., & Olson, K.R. (2015). Exposure to racial out-groups and implicit race bias in the United States. Social Psychological and Personality Science 6(5), 535-543.

Reyes, R.M., Thompson, W., & Bower, G. (1980). Judgemental biases resulting from differing availabilities of arguments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39(1), 2-12.

Singal, J. (2017, January 11). Psychology’s favorite tool for measuring racism isn’t up to the job. The Cut. Retrieved from https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html

Staats, C., Captosto, K., Tenney, L., & Mamo, S. (2017). State of the science: Implicit bias review. Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, The Ohio State University.

Jen  00:02

Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting.

Jen  00:29

If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won’t Listen to You and What to do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners and the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group.

Jen  00:48

I do hope you’ll join us.

Jen  01:00

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We have an odd person to thank for what has turned into a bit of an epic episode, and that’s Malcolm Gladwell.  His 2011 book Outliers: The story of success opens with an anecdote about the junior league Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants ice hockey teams.  The point of the book is to demonstrate that personal explanations of success that draw on a narrative of self-made brilliance have a lot more to them – that successful people are the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and opportunities that help to give them a leg up in a way that isn’t open to most of us.  In the example of the ice hockey teams in the book (which we’re calling ice hockey for my English listeners, to distinguish it from actual hockey, which is played on a grass field), Paula Barnsley, who is the wife of psychologist Dr. Roger Barnsley, noticed during a game that the majority of the players on teams just like the Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants had birthdays that clustered in a certain way.  Roger Barnsley went home and researched all the junior league players he could, and then the national league, and found that in any elite group of ice hockey players, 40% of the plyers will have been born between January and March, 30% between April and June, and 20% between October and December (Gladwell doesn’t say what happened to the 10% born between July and September).  Barnsley said that “In all my years in psychology I have never run into an effect this large.  You don’t even need to do any statistical analysis.  You just look at it.”

Jen  02:28

The reason for this is that the eligibility cutoff for age class hockey is January 1, which means that children born at on January 2nd are a whole year older than children born on December 31st, which is a large proportion of a young child’s life.  The same effect replicates in baseball and football (which I refuse to call “soccer”), because these also have similar age cutoffs in youth sports.

Jen  02:56

Then there’s a half page of text that really caught parents’ ears – reference to a study by two economists who looked at the relationship between scores on a standardized test, and the child’s age at the time of taking the test, and the effect was found here as well.  One of the authors of that paper, Dr. Elizabeth Dhuey, was quoted as saying “Just like in sports, we do ability grouping early on in childhood…so, early on, if we look at young kids, in kindergarten and first grade, the teachers are confusing maturity with ability.  And they put the older kids in the advanced stream, where they learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better; and the next year, the same things happen, and they do even better again.”  Dr. Dhuey subsequently looked at college students and found that students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6%.  Gladwell concludes: “That initial difference in maturity doesn’t go away with time. It persists. And for thousands of students, that initial disadvantage is the difference between going to college – and having a real shot at the middle class – and not.”

Jen  03:59

Now those words are almost guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of parents, even though the real problem here is the perception that college is the only path to “having a real shot at the middle class,” who responded by holding their children back from kindergarten when their birthdays were within the last few months of the kindergarten eligibility cutoff.  In the U.S., this practice came to be known as redshirting, which is a term borrowed from sports.  In college athletics, which is big business in the U.S., athletes are only allowed to play for four years but they might ‘redshirt’ the first year which means they wouldn’t formally participate in competition while they get bigger and stronger.  Then they can still play four years after that.  But they’re not just sitting out in that year; they’re practicing with the team and getting bigger and stronger, and they wear a red shirt in practice to indicate that they’re in redshirt status.  From what I’ve read on Wikipedia a coach can tell you at the beginning of the year that you’re redshirting but it isn’t confirmed until the end of the season, so if the star quarterback gets injured then the redshirted player can give up their redshirt status and still play.  So that aspect doesn’t come into play in the academic setting, but the practice of holding a child out of kindergarten for the year when they are technically eligible to attend has become widely referred to as redshirting, and that’s what we’re going to discuss today.

Jen  05:11

In some ways this was a very easy episode to research, and in other ways it was incredibly difficult.  We’re going to aim to answer a series of questions:

Jen  05:20

How common is redshirting?

Jen  05:22

Who does it and why do they do it?

Jen  05:24

What are the benefits of red shirting and who realizes those benefits?

Jen  05:28

And if someone benefits, who is on the other end of the stick and misses out?

Jen  05:33

And then in conclusion, what does the preponderance of the evidence indicate about whether we should redshirt our children or not?

Jen  05:39

Now before we get going on these interesting and important topics, I do want to take a slight detour here to make sure we’re all together and understanding the kinds of data and analysis that we’re working with here. In many ways, this episode was an incredible relief to research because there’s been a lot of interest in the topic, so papers were really easy to find, and the majority of them are based on State-level or National-level datasets.

Jen  06:02

So often on the show, I have to caveat the findings by saying, “Well, now I do have to warn you this study is based on what five White people in Chicago told a researcher.” or “This study is based on 100 college students who receive course credit for participating.” Here, our datasets are amazing. There are a couple of qualitative studies where researchers are interviewing just a few people, but these add a richness to the quantitative data that would otherwise be missing. The majority of the data sets are produced by State-level records of children’s birth and enrollment in school and standardized test scores with some National-level data produced in the same ways as well, combined with National-level surveys of teachers. Researchers using this data are trying to find out what happens under normal conditions when nothing is being manipulated and find correlations between things they think are related. Of course, the problem with correlational data is we can’t be sure that just because the two factors vary together that one causes the other. For example, we can find data showing that as seatbelt usage increased in cars in the 1990s, that far fewer astronauts died in spacecraft. So should we try to save astronauts life by putting on our seatbelt, maybe not.

Jen  07:08

And then sometimes States do things like change the cutoff date for kindergarten entry, and that creates what researchers call quasi-experimental data. And we can see what happens when conditions change, and people aren’t allowed to do something that they could have chosen to do in the past. And this can help us to get a bit closer to a Cause-and-Effect relationship. Although these effects may not be generalizable outside the area where the experiment happened. But we do have to be a little bit careful with big data sets. One of these issues doesn’t apply so much to us, which is the problem of having a sample size that doesn’t accurately reflect the population. There’s a nice example in one of the papers and the references about a survey of 2.4 million people, which indicated that Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas would win the 1936 election by a landslide. Now you’ve heard of President Landon, right? If not, that’s because the incumbent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, won 46 of the then 48 States. The magazine that ran the poll surveyed its own readers who skewed towards supporting Governor Landon, so the poll respondents didn’t accurately reflect the actual population it was trying to measure.

Jen  08:13

In the State-level data, it’s possible the results wouldn’t be generalizable to populations outside the State, but they do include the vast, vast majority of students inside the State. They might exclude students who opted out of standardized testing, for example, but we have a number of National-level data sets as well, and these National-level data sets don’t necessarily include every child in the country, but they are specifically designed to be representative. So, our data sets are often fully representative of the population, and when they’re not, these are very large data sets designed to be nationally representative.

Jen  08:47

And the second thing to be aware of when you’re looking at working with large data sets is differences between the two conditions you’re studying can look statistically significant very easily. You could get a result with a State or National-level data set, that’s statistically significant at p = 0.05, which is the generally accepted standard, but which has an effect size that’s tiny and inconsequential to your life. And I always think back to research on tantrums on this topic, which might find that parents who take a certain action when their child’s having a tantrum can achieve a statistically significant reduction in the frequency of tantrums their child has. Doesn’t that sound amazing? Well, it ends up being a reduction from something like 15 to 14 tantrums a day. Is that change meaningful in a parent’s life? No, it is not.

Jen  09:33

And so one final thing to be aware of in this data is that it isn’t always super current. Even when I restrict my searches to papers published in the last five years, the data they often use is far older, especially when you’re looking at long term effects. You have to look at data from when children were in school 20 years ago, so we can’t be sure that educational methods use then are comparable to what’s used today. We’ll come back to the idea of there being more standardized testing now than there was in the past even in kindergarten, so the educational conditions that were in place when children were redshirted 20 years ago, and they’re experiencing certain outcomes now are no longer in place for your child to experience. So a study might find that children who attended kindergarten on time in the 1980s had better lifetime outcomes, but the kind of kindergarten those children attended doesn’t exist anymore.

Jen  10:20

All right, so now we’re all square on that. Our first question, How common is red shirting is actually excitingly easy to answer. A pretty good conservative estimate came up with a US national average prevalence rate of four to five and a half percent, which in a way makes us wonder why are we even doing a whole episode on it if it’s just a small percentage of people that this affects. But the national average conceals considerable variation within specific schools and demographics. In one fifth of schools that serve primarily families of high socioeconomic status, redshirting rates can be as high as 15% of all children, which translates to 60% of children being born within the three months before the cutoff for kindergarten entry being redshirted.

Jen  11:04

All right on to our next question. Who redshirts and why do they do it? Nearly 6% of White children redshirt. But fewer than 1% of Black children do. About 2% of Hispanic and 2.7% of Asian children redshirt. About 2.3% of children in the lowest socio-economic status quintile redshirt compared to 6.4% of children in the highest quintile. Boys are held back in far larger numbers than girls by a ratio of about two to one. The most surprising finding about redshirting rates occurred after North Carolina adjusted its cutoff date to enter kindergarten from October 16 to September 1 in 2006 – we’re going to come back to the data on this study pretty often – and the rate of redshirting essentially went to nil. The authors of that study say that these findings suggest that children’s absolute age rather than age relative to classmates plays a dominant role in the decision to redshirt.

Jen  11:58

Children who had been born in October would have previously been considered for redshirting, but the authors wondered, “Well did parents of August-born children just start redshirting instead? And it turned out they didn’t. For reasons the authors didn’t seem to be able to explain. And the rate of redshirting for children born between September 1 and October 16, was close to zero.

Jen  12:18

So why do parents redshirt their children? While allowing children’s absolute age to increase before they enter school is one reason which is based on the idea that children need to be mature enough when they enter school to be successful primarily because this increases children’s attention spans, their tolerance for seated instruction, and it improves their behavior. This approach to looking at redshirting has been around since the 1960s and 70s, when researchers at the Gesell Institute argued that children should be entered in school grouped and promoted on the basis of their developmental or behavioral age, not on the basis of their chronological age or IQ. The book School Can Wait was published in 1979 and perhaps this accounts for the fairly large number of parents of my generation who were surveyed about their decision to redshirt their child who report having been redshirted themselves.

Jen  13:04

In addition to popular books, there was quite a bit of enthusiasm for redshirting expressed in journal articles in this period. Like this statement from a paper in the journal education: “Redshirting is a program that can be applied at any level of the educational system nationwide, statewide district-wide or in an individual classroom with minimal or no extra costs and no disruption of things as they are and with benefit to everyone who is involved in educational systems.” Well, we’ll say more about those extra costs and those amazing benefits to everyone involved in just a bit. Following the maturationist approach, nearly half of States push their birth cutoffs back between 1975 and 2007.

Jen  13:04

The title of the legislation passed in North Carolina approving their kindergarten entry date pushback, was written, “To ensure that every child was ready to enter kindergarten.” And went on to say that raising the minimum entry age would contribute to “Reducing student dropout rates in later grades” A state representative who co-sponsored the bill commented to a New York Times reported that the State’s relatively younger students’ S.A.T. results look bad compared to older students in neighboring States who are all applying to similar colleges.

Jen  14:14

So in addition to ensuring that students would be ready, there was the additional motive of saving face on comparisons of standardized test score results. And it turned out there was some money saving that needed to happen as well. The North Carolina General Assembly’s Fiscal Research Division published a report after the 2007 legislative session that highlighted fiscal and budgetary actions and noted that the reform would reduce the Fall 2009 incoming kindergarten class by 15,360 students statewide, saving the state and counties combined more than $100 million. Now it was nice that the state and counties save some money but of course that money came from somewhere and it came out of the pockets of parents who had to find other ways to keep their children entertained during the days. Perhaps some of them were enrolled in free preschool but others were in private preschool or their parents had to be out of work longer so they could be home for the children. The State had very effectively shifted the cost burden onto parents in the name of helping students.

Jen  15:10

Teachers also tend to favor a maturationist view of development and may advise parents of children experiencing difficulties in preschool to give their children the gift of time in an attempt to promote school readiness, which is kind of surprising to me because it discounts the value of their own interactions with children.

Jen  15:28

And professional organizations of teachers tend to refute this perspective. The National Association of Early Childhood Specialists and State Departments of Education published a scathing statement in 2000 that the National Association for the Education of Young Children endorsed in 2001 and it’s called Still Unacceptable Trends in Kindergarten Entry and Placement part of it read, “Some educators believe that instruction will be easier and more effective if the variability within the class is reduced. There is, however, no compelling evidence that children learn more or better in homogenous groupings. In fact, most of them learn more efficiently and achieve more satisfactory social and emotional development in mixed ability groups. The primary consideration should be what is best for young children, not institutions, politicians or professionals. Children do not benefit from retention or delayed entry or extra year classes. The case has been made that children are placed in double jeopardy when they are denied on highly questionable premises, the same educational opportunities as their peers. Belief in the pure maturational viewpoint underlies many of the deleterious practices described in this paper. The adult belief that children unfold on an immutable timetable however appealing cannot be over generalized to intellectual, social, linguistic and emotional development. A responsive success-oriented kindergarten curriculum and a well-trained teacher are bound to have a powerful effect on young children’s learning. children come to school as competent, naturally motivated learners. One of the school’s critical responsibilities is to ensure that these characteristics are maintained and strengthened, not destroyed. The issue is not whether to keep children with age mates heterogenous – multi-age grouping can stimulate and support children’s development – it is whether we can continue to uphold practices and programs predicated on failure.”

Jen  17:16

So in other words, it is the teachers and the schools’ job to see where a child is and to meet them there and sensitively support their learning. And I think where we get tripped up is when teachers can’t do that because their job is to bring everyone into line to homogenize everyone that everyone needs to do well on the standardized tests. So that’s the maturation hypothesis.

Jen  17:36

Another reason parents redshirt their children is to give them an advantage against other children in the class. So taking on Malcom Gladwell’s argument, although this is usually couched in language about rectifying a disadvantage specific to their individual child rather than engineering or reproducing an advantage. Sometimes this is a reaction to the dominant discourse about the ‘failing boys’ crisis, which pits boys against girls for academic success. Boys are widely described as being behind girls but the achievement gap in fourth grade reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress Standardized Test was seven points in 2019, while boys actually outscored girls in math by three points. By contrast, White students outscored Hispanic students by 21 points and Black and Native American students by 26 points in fourth grade reading. And White students outscored Hispanic students by 18 points, Native American students by 22 points, and Black students by 25 points in fourth grade math.

Jen  18:34

So it’s not clear to me why parents are worried about their boys being behind girls, when the real issues here are that even White students’ performance levels are below what is considered to be proficient in reading. And they’re at proficient level in math, when proficient means a score of 250 out of 500, or 50%. And that the discrepancy between White and Asian student’s performance compared to Hispanic, Native American, Black students is far wider. I don’t want to call this an achievement gap for two reasons. Firstly, it fails to acknowledge that very few students are actually doing well on these tests. So it’s not like closing the gap is actually going to solve all of our problems. And secondly, because the reason it looks like there’s a gap is because the skills and abilities that Hispanic Native American and Black students bring to school aren’t valued in school or tested on standardized tests. So it’s not that they don’t have skills, it’s that on average, they don’t have the skills needed to succeed in a White dominant culture. And redshirting already relatively successful White boys does nothing to address issues related to who really has the advantage here. But often redshirting is done for extracurricular reasons rather than academic reasons. A researcher who interviewed a sample of 60 parents 59, of whom were women, 90%, of whom were White, and more than half had a graduate degree, found that many parents said their sons were academically ahead. For example, they were reading by age four. The authors of another study hypothesize that parents of children who had lower social skills would be more likely to delay their children’s kindergarten entry, but we’re surprised to find no relationship between redshirting and social skills either as assessed by parents or teachers.

Jen  20:09

Many of the parents who were interviewed had actually been the youngest in their class and had been quite comfortable with it. interviewee Susan, who was considering redshirting, her son said, “I did for a second and third grade in two years. So I was always a year younger than my peers growing up. I personally don’t think it was a hindrance at all. I thought it was kind of cool. I always thought my smaller height, size, and weight, were always kind of a bonus. I thought it made me stand out because people would recognize I was the youngest and you can still do this.”

Jen  20:34

Another researcher report is the key difference here is that while girls tend to be seen as socially adept copers who take things in their stride, “middle class, White parents expressed angst at the prospect of their son’s subordinated position in the school’s masculinity hierarchy.” Here are some more quotes from the interviews of the 60 parents. Parent, Ella said in her interview, “It’s hard. There’s a difference there. I always feel like for boys, for Ethan, it seems like it would be to his advantage to have a little bit more size. Whereas for a girl, girls, I don’t know their size seems not a big deal. I didn’t want my son to be in school and be the smallest kid and be super verbal and sometimes a bit mouthy and be the kid, the lone nerd who gets beat up all the time.” Christie said, “You’re always worried that kids are going to tease them if they’re two small or little. We’ve talked to him about it being small. He does ask questions and wonders why other boys are taller than he is.” Deborah said, “And I think of the size thing too, because he’s still even as one of the oldest, one of the smallest boys in the class. So I think if we hadn’t redshirted him, he’d be even smaller, he’d be the smallest. My husband is not much taller than me and for boys, that’s important. So I thought an extra year would give him an advantage. I think school would be much more of a struggle for him if he were a grade ahead.” And then finally, Sarah said, “And so I just didn’t want my boy to be behind just because he was born over the summer and would already be the youngest. And there’s also the physically development side there. You know, I didn’t want him to have this little pipsqueak.”

Jen  22:02

And so, this corroborates with the finding that children with very low birth weight, who are likely to be on the smaller side as they grow up, are more likely to be redshirted. And linked to this is the issue of sports, which are an important proving ground for displays of masculinity. Because the 59 of the parents who were interviewed were women, there was no discontinuity in their experience, going from school on time, or skipping grades is acceptable for girls when they were young, but it’s not for boys. Here are quotes from three more parents, Hillary said, “Especially with boys and during sports and stuff, it’s always a disadvantage when they go out for sports when they’re really little. I don’t want them to be little, but he’s not. So that’s a good thing.” Deborah said, “The pressure came from my in-laws’ side. They pushed us to redshirt so he will be older and better at sports. I could see size being an issue if you were particularly tiny, but it wasn’t that at all. It was just that he’d be more competitive. He’d that have that leg up.” Sarah said, “You know, my husband’s really into sports. And he hopes that one of our boys at least will be and I mean, I think even in just that area where boys are older and developing sooner and they’re stronger and bigger, they’re going to excel more.”

Jen  23:07

And the researcher notes that parents frame the notion of struggle either academically or physically as being harmful for boys. The male child’s self esteem is to be protected at all costs, and parents assume that being among the younger children in the class will put their child at a disadvantage that requires the child to struggle while being the oldest is seen as an obvious competitive advantage. Parents often identified leadership ability as an important factor in their redshirting decision, although they often framed it in the negative saying they didn’t want their son to be a follower, which was often then trailed by a sheepish admission they wanted him to be a leader. Participant Mary Ann said, “He had just turned six and everyone else was going to be seven are already was so he became a follower. He was very intimidated and very insecure.” Another participant reported, “So he started Pre-K at age five done at six. He’s one of the oldest in the class, he’s very confident he’s the leader.”

Jen  23:59

Being a leader is obviously an important component of masculinity as we currently define it, and in addition, these parents wanted their sons to be more popular, mature, independent, and potentially have better future success in dating and better decision making skills related to things like drugs and sex when they were older.

Jen  24:16

The parents who were interviewed had a universally negative perspective on having their son skip a grade because of any potential upside of being seen as highly intelligent would be counteracted by being younger, smaller and less masculine. The researcher concludes that, “My data suggests that parents are consciously if uncomfortably motivated, at least in part by their concerns and anxieties over their son’s ability to successfully accomplish a dominant form of masculinity.” Which is expressed in increasingly narrow ways; through being in a dominant position, and not necessarily being academically or physically challenged. Parents weren’t necessarily trying to make sure their child was the tallest in the room, but rather to prevent their son from being one of the smallest or shortest boys in the class. And in doing that they made sure that role would be filled by somebody else’s son. They ignore their son’s racial,  class, gender and non disabled privileges, and focused on rectifying the perceived competitive disadvantage that they saw.

Jen  25:16

Finally, besides redshirting to give the child additional time to mature and redshirting to give the child age and size advantages over appears, the third main reason parents might redshirt is to give them what researchers call holdout year experiences, which is to say experiences that will contribute to their success in school, but not all children are able to access. Although I found very few mentions of this in the literature, and researchers studying in North Carolina cutoff date shift found that this was an unlikely cause of redshirting in most cases, and the other two causes were far more prevalent and important.

Jen  25:48

I also want to observe that the view that most articles on redshirting in the popular press take is they assume each parent is out for their own child’s success and don’t consider that this individualistic view of success might create a disadvantage for another child. An article about redshirting in the New York Times from 2010 began, “After all those attentive early childhood rituals, the Flashcards, the Come on Dora the Explorer, the morning spent in cutting edge playgrounds, who wouldn’t want to give their children a head start when it’s finally time to set off for school? Suzanne Collier for one rather than send her five year old son John to kindergarten this year, the 36 year old mother from Bray, California enrolled him in a transitional kindergarten without all the rigor. He’s an active child. Ms. Collier said not quite ready to focus on a full day of classroom work. Citing a study from Malcolm Gladwell, his book, The Outliers, about Canadian hockey players, which found the strongest players with the oldest she said, if he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the best.” So, it’s not Ms. Collier doesn’t want to give her child a head start because she does, it’s just that she’s chosen to do it by holding her child back so he won’t be threatened by competition with his children his own age.

Jen  26:55

Just like Ms. Collier read Malcolm Gladwell book and decided to redshirt, other parents are reading this New York Times article and thinking, “Well, if Ms. Collier has read this book, that cites a study showing redshirting has a benefit, then perhaps I should consider it too.” This attitude of individuality sometimes creeps into academic writing as well. One academic paper I read started out, “What parent does not want their child to excel at school and in life – to be at the top of their class, popular with peers, the star athlete?” Once again, we see a very White-centric view of success. In fact, not all parents want their child to be the best at everything. Parents in some cultures have raised their children with a much more community-oriented view of success with everyone contributing to a whole. As I discussed in the podcast episode on socialization a few months ago, our focus on individualized achievement ends up costing children who are raised in more cooperative cultures in an academic environment, because the gamified way that we teach skills like reading doesn’t incentivize them and actively works against the cultural values they grew up with.

Jen  27:58

Alright, so now we’re pretty much done with the easy stuff. So let’s move on to the harder stuff. What are the benefits of redshirting and who realizes those benefits? At this point, we have to start making some judgments about what are benefits. In the studies we’ve looked at, improved scores on standardized tests are benefits and that logic works as long as you believe standardized test scores actually measure learning. When if there’s anything we know about standardized testing is that there are two things they measure most accurately: a child’s socioeconomic status and their ability to take a standardized test.

Jen  28:30

Graduating high school is considered a benefit. Attending college for as many years as possible is considered a benefit which ignores the fact that not everyone wants to or should attend college, and there are many more avenues of finding success in life than going to college. One study looked at completing a PhD as a benefit. And of course, wages are considered a benefit and higher wages are always considered a better benefit.

Jen  28:53

So what we can see here is the papers on red shirting have the norms of a capitalist culture fairly explicitly baked into them, as well as the idea that there’s a single model of success and the more children we can get to follow that model of success, the better off our children will be. So let’s accept for the sake of argument that improved scores on standardized tests improve rates of high school graduation and college attendance and lifetime earnings are adequate measures of the benefits we want our children to have. Does redshirting help children to achieve these?

Jen  29:24

Well, the evidence here seems decidedly mixed and I’ll give you the punchline first. “While, some studies do find a long term benefit, it mostly seems to wash out by about third grade, and effects seem to be pretty insignificant for girls.”

Jen  29:38

Okay, now let’s get into the details. Let’s take a look at test scores first. One study found that an additional year of age of school entry is associated with a 0.87 standard deviation in math test performance increase at a 0.16 standard deviation increase in reading test performance in the spring of the child’s kindergarten year. While a study of the impacts of the shift in North Carolina’s kindergarten cutoff date found that waiting a full year is associated with an increase in test scores on math of reading of about 0.3 standard deviations. Although the actual observed gain was less than this because not all children had a full year to wait.

Jen  30:15

A study of the National Early Childhood Longitudinal Program data found that children’s test scores at kindergarten in their entry were significantly higher when children started a year older, and their academic growth trajectory was steeper as well into third grade. Now this is a big finding, because in many other studies, the academic growth trajectory for redshirted children is not steeper, which means that while the redshirted children’s test scores are higher than the child who wasn’t redshirted, it’s because the redshirted child is older and not because being older made them able to learn more effectively.

Jen  30:48

But then another study use the same data set and extended the analysis into fifth grade and found the difference in scores between the two groups was essentially zero. Another national level study found essentially the same result extending the analysis to the eighth grade and finding only a tiny fraction of the difference seen in kindergarten. The difference in kindergarten test scores between older and younger students are on the order of one third for reading to one half for math the size of difference in scores between the richest and poorest children. So if your family can afford to redshirt, your child is already likely ahead of families who can’t. But beyond first grade, data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study kindergarten class of 1988-99 cohort indicates that test scores converge from first to third, third to fifth and fifth to eighth grade being older entry is associated with slower growth in reading and math test scores. This finding is in line with other work on the effects of test scores from participating in head start, or attending small classes and kindergarten, which have positive effects in the short term that fade as children age.

Jen  31:53

The research has assessed whether there is relatively more convergence between older and younger entrance within schools then across them, as there might be if teachers did something like focusing more attention on younger students. But the evidence indicated this wasn’t the case. And the convergence might be due to things parents were doing, or maybe a natural ageing process in which skills acquired earlier in life are less relevant for later achievement.

Jen  32:16

A study that examined the changes in children’s outcomes after North Carolina moved its kindergarten entry cutoff found that children born after the cutoff had higher end of grade test scores in middle school were less likely to be retained in grade between ages 11 to 15, and had lower rates of delinquency between the ages of 13 and 15.

Jen  32:35

But other studies have found no benefit of redshirting even at the youngest ages. One of the match redshirted students with students who entered on time by preschool demographics and other readiness variables, and found the two groups performed essentially the same, which does beg the question that if a year of playing in preschool essentially has the same impact on test scores as a year of academic learning, what are the benefits of academic learning? A summary of the literature between 1980 and 2000 reported that “The weight of the evidence suggests that older children may have a very modest advantage on academic assessments in the early grades of school, if at all, but their advantage is not sustained.”

Jen  33:13

A study from Australia where 20-25% of all students, not just the youngest ones enter school after they are first eligible in the five states that allow this found that delayed entry does not have a larger lasting effect on reading and numeracy test results. The authors of a study from England observed that the combined age of starting school length of schooling and relative age effects do not have a significant effect on cognitive development, and the age at the day the test is taken is the most important factor driving the difference between the oldest and youngest children in a cohort. If test results were normalized in the early years to account for the child’s age, then test performance can be eliminated as a source of desire to redshirt. This could also adjust children’s perceptions of their own competence. When younger children learn they actually do quite well when compared early to children their own age.

Jen  34:02

While middle class White parents are more likely to redshirt their children, children and families of lower socioeconomic status are more likely to enter school on time and then be held back a year. As a result of these two sets of actions, by the time the children get to third grade, the proportion of children who are below grade for age is roughly equal across the two groups. The authors of a study on this comment that there’s no socio economic status gradient in the September-August difference in third grade scores, which mean that both redshirting and retention seem to be if equally effective strategies, since children coming from different socio economic backgrounds and at roughly the same educational levels at the time of testing, regardless of their affluence.

Jen  34:40

Now, I’m sort of in two minds about these conclusions. I have to say, firstly, the fact that you could either sit out an entire year of school or attend an extra year of school and basically end up in the same place isn’t really a ringing endorsement for the effectiveness of what happens in school. But secondly, if middle class White children who are redshirted, and presumably spend an extra year in a potentially expensive private preschool, and still don’t enter school any better prepared to learn than a child who might not have had any preschool experience and just repeated a year of school for free, it makes me wonder whether that money spent on the expensive preschool was wasted, at least if the primary goal is to improve test scores.

Jen  35:19

Okay, let’s move on to learning disability diagnosis. Children who are older when they start kindergarten are less likely to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD, and other psychiatric diagnoses. A number of studies have shown that children born on August 31 in a district with a September 1 cut off who would be the youngest in their class are much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than children born on September 1 who were the oldest in their class. The researchers say that “Because ADHD incidents should not discontinuously change around the school entry birth date cutoff. These findings imply significant misdiagnosis of ADHD caused by relative maturity.

Jen  36:00

Worryingly, ADHD diagnoses are often made by comparing an individual’s child’s behavior with that of their classmates, rather than to an absolute standard. So when the average age of children in a class increases, ADHD diagnoses also increase but not uniformly. Younger children’s age appropriate behavior now looks abnormal. And a redshirted child who is older and might actually have ADHD may not receive a diagnosis because they’re still coping better than the younger classmates. A National-level study estimated that moving the kindergarten cutoff date from December 1 to September 1 increases ADHD and ADD diagnoses by about 25% in the children who weren’t affected by the date shift because these children are younger relative to their classmates.

Jen  36:45

In a large study of children who have ADHD, academic redshirting did not have a substantially meaningful impact on math or reading achievement, suggesting that the gift of time does not appear to translate into a benefit for children with ADHD who are redshirted compared to children with ADHD who were not redshirted. One weakness of the study is that participants just reported that they were either taking or not taking medication, with no information on what they were taking or for how long or whether they were compliant or if the medication seemed to be controlling symptoms or not, or when the child had been diagnosed, whether they’ve been receiving any kind of special services either before or during school.

Jen  37:23

In a way, the finding is perhaps not surprising though, given that specialized services are available in school to support children with ADHD. It might be somewhat surprising if an untrained parent were able to improve their child’s standardized test results scores more than trained therapists. I do want to be clear, I’m not indicating here that parents are not capable of supporting their ADHD diagnosed children’s learning, because in many cases, they can do this more effectively than happens in school. But when the measure of performance is the standardized test, it would surprise me if the findings showed that an extra year out of school was a benefit.

Jen  37:56

Another study of children in North Carolina over a three year period found that of children with cognitive disabilities, those who redshirted scored about a third of a standard deviation lower on math and reading scores compared with students with cognitive disabilities who entered school on time. Overall, the research has concluded the year spent outside of school reduces the likelihood they will receive timely identifications of learning difficulties and support for these and that parental efforts might be better spent earning to pay for the extra support the child will need rather than staying out of the workforce when free kindergarten is available. Once again, I do want to emphasize this is the case when results on standardized tests are used as the measure of success.

Jen  38:35

On the flip side, students with speech language impairments who redshirted actually had stronger math and reading achievement in one study compared with on time entry students with speech language impairments, and these students may actually benefit from an extra year before school starts to develop foundational language and literacy skills.

Jen  38:52

Moving on to social skills. Opponents of redshirting argue that older children may be treated as if they’re less capable than younger students in the same grade by teachers or classmates. And the oldest students may feel awkward about reaching puberty before their classmates. Although some researchers argue this is only an issue for girls who might draw “unwanted attention for reaching puberty before their classmates.” Presumably boys reaching puberty before classmates is less of a problem since puberty solidifies their masculinity and thus their advantage in the classroom.

Jen  39:22

A study using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 which tracks a cohort of eighth graders through young adulthood, in which the researchers selected for its rich selection of outcomes during that timeframe because there is no longitudinal data that tracks students from kindergarten to adulthood, found there were no differences in behavioral outcomes for redshirted students. These authors cited another paper that used a more complex measure of parents perception of behavior problems and reported that redshirted students have more behavioral problems in high school, which might be because they’re older than their classmates and they’re bored.

Jen  39:55

When we look at high school completion, a study of over 50,000 people who took the National Survey of income and Program Participation found that starting school a year later decreases the likelihood that a male completes High School and has roughly no impact on female educational attainment. The higher rates of school dropout were also found in a study that looked at the changes occurring after North Carolina shifted its kindergarten cutoff date, and it found that children born just after the cutoff date were also more likely to commit a felony events by age 19. And these outcomes are possibly due to the fact that children born after the cutoff date have a longer exposure to the legal possibility of dropping out. In other words, they passed the age at which they could legally dropout earlier, which means they have to suddenly want to be in school rather than being compelled to be there.

Jen  40:42

Looking at university attendance, children born in August maybe about 1.5% less likely to continue into higher education at age 18, or 19. But if they attend university, those younger children born in September, are about two and a half percentage points more likely to complete their degree. So Dr. Dewey, who’s quoted in Outliers, as describing the difference in rate at which younger children attend college is probably correct, but that’s only half the story. Joining the ranks of the middle class isn’t more likely if you get into college, you actually have to complete your degree as well. One set of researchers who found a similar outcome hypothesize that younger students are slower to develop social skills like self esteem and leadership, which leads to lower returns to effort in social activities for younger students, who then instead focus more attention on studying and perform better at university.

Jen  41:33

Consistent with this finding, the authors cite a study on first year university students in Italy, which found the youngest students are those with the least active social lives, particularly regarding romantic relationships.  And in a study on the results on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA test, that youngest students spent more time on homework. Of course, it’s also possible these students are studying more because they find the work more difficult because they have fewer months of development. We can’t know that they’re studying at a higher level just because they’re studying more. And of course, all of this rests on the idea that a college education is essential to a successful life.

Jen  42:07

Now looking at earnings, the study of 50,000 people who took a survey of Income and Program Participation found that males who were redshirted may have higher monthly earnings, although they said their estimate was imprecise. Remember, though, that this study was the one that found that redshirted males were less likely to complete high school. Given that normally completing high school is associated with higher earnings, we would expect to see the opposite finding and the researchers don’t explain the discrepancy. We do know that delaying kindergarten entry results in delaying earnings by a year although to the extent that delaying entry improves educational outcomes, the delay may be offset by higher wages for the fewer years the adult works.

Jen  42:47

A couple of other studies using census data as well as one using data from the National educational longitudinal study of 1988 found the opposite, that adults who started school or younger age have higher wages later in life, possibly because they’re likely to gain more years of education before they can legally drop out. Or because on time school entry exposes children to formal learning for more years, which results in superior cognitive skills and from there to higher wages. These authors found that students with some of birthdates have higher average earnings later in life than students with winter birthdates.

Jen  43:19

One study looked at the National Science Foundation survey of earned doctorates, which is an annual survey of new PhD holders in the US. And I was amused to see that 93% of the people who received the survey responded, these folks certainly understand the value of a representative dataset. The authors found that after they controlled for discipline specific variation, there was no evidence of the impact of relative age of people earning the PhD and no influence on their immediate postgraduate salary. But they also estimated a relative salary loss of over $138,000 in lifetime earnings for Red Shirted individuals who earned the PhD assuming the income increases at a rate of 3% annually, because they missed that first year of earning early in their career which compounds over a 30 year period.

Jen  44:06

The same authors note the Gladwell his reliance on draft selection as the outcome variable is incomplete and misleading because it’s actually the youngest Canadian hockey players who have relatively longer careers in the NHL, and participate disproportionately in elite levels of competition like all star games and Olympic teams.

Jen  44:23

So you can pick a certain variable outcome like draft selection, or kindergarten test score achievement and think that you found the answer. And if your goal is to get drafted, which would be a pretty great goal for a lot of people, or to do well on his kindergarten, standardized test, then you’re doing the right thing by red shirting. But if your goals are different, then you can’t assume that the benefits that you saw at one level will still be there at another level.

Jen  44:47

Moving on to health. The study of 50,000 people who took the survey of income and program participation found that males who are redshirted were less likely to report that they were in fair to poor health and more likely to report They were in excellent or very good health. Although we should say self reported data on health isn’t the most accurate way to get this information. No differences were found for females. The researchers weren’t sure how red shirting affects health, they hypothesized it could be through increased earnings. But again this result is inconsistent with the finding that Red Shirted males were less likely to complete school. The research was pointed to a study in Denmark, which found that red shirting improves mental health outcomes at age seven and that effect persisted to age 11. This could be a potential driver. they assess the relationship between ADHD treatment and self reported health in a different data source, and estimated that ADHD could explain as much as 46% of the benefit of red shirting on improved health impacts in their study. Although they acknowledged this was a correlational estimate only and could be overestimated. Even so this points to a massive problem of Miss diagnosing normal attentional problems as a disease that needs to be treated. If we start Miss diagnosing ADHD then any potential health advantage associated with redshirting would be much smaller.

Jen  46:04

Taking a quick look at impacts on differences in scores by socioeconomic status. and national levels study found that children from higher socioeconomic status are more likely to perform well in tests on kindergarten not a big surprise there, especially when they’re older at time of entry, which may mean that increases in overall entrance age have the professor effect of exacerbating socio economic differences in school performance.

Jen  46:27

Looking at impacts on differences in scores by race, one of the studies of children in North Carolina found that Black girls who had to wait after the kindergarten cutoff date moved increase their scores on both reading and math. And the gap in scores between Black and White children fell substantially for boys, probably due to the fact that before the cutoff shift, White boys were the demographic group most likely to redshirt, so White boys lost their aged advantage relative to other groups under the new policy. However, another one of the North Carolina studies found that red shirting contributes to what the research has called achievement gaps between so called minority and non minority students in third grade by as much as eight to 11% for girls and 28 to 30% for boys.

Jen  47:09

Honestly, I’m not sure how to reconcile these conflicting results with the National Assessment of Educational Progress his testing results for North Carolina, which still clearly show that Black students test scores substantially lag those of Whites, it’s possible that the relatively low number of red shares his data was obscured in the broader state level data. But I want to be clear, we’re not suddenly looking at some massive shift that equalizes test results between those two groups of children.

Jen  47:36

Okay, so that’s kind of a summary of where we are with the benefits and the picture is decidedly mixed. So when we think about benefits, another thing we need to think about is who is on the other end of the stick and misses out. Strangely, increasing the average age of a particular child’s classmates actually can positively influence that child’s test results, while simultaneously increasing the likelihood that a student repeats a grade in school or receives a learning disability diagnosis. The researchers hypothesized that the older peers positively influenced this student’s achievement but the teachers and parents group decisions about grade retention and referrals to behavior professionals are mostly based on the child’s performance relative to classmates.

Jen  48:19

It’s also possible that it isn’t the extra year maturity that’s actually helping the child but the way the teacher sees the child, there’s a fairly strong line of research on labelling theory, which is the idea that if the teacher calls the child smart, and even just thinks of them as smart, they actually end up doing better in school by the end of the year and will do better in school than a child who the teacher thinks is stupid. Even a child’s physical attractiveness has had a strong association with the teacher’s reactions to the child. So it’s possible that part of any positive effects that we do see related to redshirting are because the teacher looks at the older child and thinks smart child, and then the child who is younger but entered school on time as not so smart, which impacts the Red Shirted child positively. And the child who entered on time negatively, the smart child gets tracked into the gifted and talented program and may stay on that track for the rest of their school career, getting extra resources and attention and support along the way, which compounds our success.

Jen  49:16

One potential concern with red shirting is that a child who’s a year older than the rest of their classmates might end up significantly ahead of their peers, which could cause them to get bored and drop out of school. This has a couple of effects that are important to consider. Firstly, parents often identify resources in advance that they can access if this ends up being an issue. One mother in an interview reported that she picked a school that had a gifted and talented program so that if her Red Shirted child wasn’t being challenged enough in his regular class, that he could be pulled out for special attention.

Jen  49:46

Middle class White parents as a group have quite a lot of political clout at school. And it’s not uncommon for a group of parents to get together at the school bus stop or in a social media platform, where they share information about programs that might benefit them. Then campaign to get access to them. I’m going to quote for an extended passage from one study, quote, it was through informal information sources that a group of parents got wind of the differences in the four kindergarten programs available at school. They organized a mini revolt against what they saw as an unchallenging kindergarten program in the afternoon classes. A number of mothers got together and discuss the differences in the kindergarten activities and how the kids weren’t learning too much in the afternoon kindergartens. wanting the afternoon program to be more like the morning program, they first went to the principal and then to the superintendent to complain. School officials pressed the afternoon kindergarten teachers to incorporate more academic activities within the curriculum. The afternoon teachers responded to parental dissatisfaction through a weekend reading program, in which they sent reading books home for children and parents to work on together. They found it necessary to highlight the academic skills embedded in the activities they were already doing with their students. informally, they told me they were changing how they taught to keep the peace there described feeling bruised and embattled by the confrontation, and that they felt a strain between the morning and afternoon staffs and quote,

Jen  51:05

This is an example of what researchers call opportunity hoarding, because this diversion of resources toward children who would have been appropriately challenged if they’d entered school on time, and away from children whose parents did what the school district told them was best and who are chronically shortchanged in the first place. If you’re interested in learning more about this, I did an episode A while ago now on how White privilege is perpetuated in schools that goes into more depth on it.

Jen  51:28

Even if gifted and talented programs aren’t available, teachers are now teaching a group of five-year-olds who might be in a school-like environment for the first time, alongside another set of children who are up to six years three months old, who come from affluent homes, have three years of Montessori preschool experience, and parents who know how to exert their power over the system to get access to resources for their children.  This can have the effect of causing teachers to teach to the higher end of classroom abilities, even though it would be more developmentally appropriate to teach toward the children who entered kindergarten on time.

Jen  52:01

There has been a general lamenting over the years about how ‘kindergarten is now the new first grade,’ so some researchers looked at whether this actually the case.  They looked at data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Program, which covered between 18,000 and 21,000 children between 2,500 and 2,700 kindergarten teachers, as well as 3,350-3,850 1st grade teachers over the 12 year span between 1998 and 2010.  This huge dataset allowed the researchers to explore the changes to public school kindergarten classrooms across five dimensions; teachers’ beliefs about school readiness, curricular focus and time use, classroom materials, pedagogical approach, and assessment practices. And the results of this study were extensive, but I’ll just give you the highlights, and there are quite a lot of these because I think it’s really important to understand how this impacts the issue of redshirting.

Jen  52:53

The percentage of kindergarten teachers who reported that knowing the letters of the alphabet was very important or essential more than doubled from 19% in 1998 to 48% in 2010. The percentage of teachers who indicated color and shape identification and counting skills were important rose by 28 and 22 percentage points, respectively.  In 1998, just over a third of kindergarten teachers reported daily music instruction. This figure dropped by 18 percentage points in 2010, and a similar pattern is evident for art instruction, where the percentage of teachers reporting daily instruction dropped from 27% to 11%.  18% of teachers reported never doing theater activities with their kindergarteners in 1998, in 2010 that figure rose to 50%. In 1998 only 11% of teachers reported never teaching dance to their students compared with 37% in 2010.

Jen  53:44

In 1998, 44% of kindergarten teachers reported that they never taught “conventional spelling,” because it was covered in a later grade. This figure plummeted to 17% in 2010. Relatedly, the percentage of teachers who reported teaching conventional spelling on a daily basis rose sharply from 45% to 76%. The same general patterns hold for the other topics like composing and writing complete sentences; composing stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end; place value; writing math equations; and probability.  Daily use of textbooks in kindergarten more than doubled for both reading and math. For instance, only 11% of teachers in 1998 reported using a basal reader daily, compared with 26% of teachers in 2010. Substantial increases in daily use of worksheets were also seen, up 17 percentage points for reading and 15 for math.

Jen  54:32

One particularly important finding was that kindergarten classrooms in the later period devote considerably more time to standardized tests than first-grade teachers did 11 years earlier.   In 2010, roughly 30% of public school kindergarten teachers reported using standardized tests at least once a month. This is 2.6 times more often than the rate reported by first-grade teachers in 1999.

Jen  54:57

Overall, the researchers concluded that relative to their counterparts in 1998, public school kindergarten teachers in 2010 are far more likely to believe that academic instruction should begin prior to kindergarten entry. They are also more than twice as likely to expect that most children will leave their classrooms knowing to read. We observe a corresponding increase in literacy and math content instruction in kindergarten classrooms, with particularly large increases in time spent on “challenging” topics previously considered outside the scope of kindergarten.

Jen  55:27

Now, this study didn’t look specifically at redshirting, but when we go back to that topic we can see the impact that redshirting has on the first-grading of kindergarten – when you have more children from affluent families showing up for kindergarten, whose parents want them to be academically challenged, it becomes easier for teachers to just go with the flow of pressure from the school district to increase test scores, and pressure from parents to challenge their children.  They bring more of traditionally first grade practices into the kindergarten classroom, and parents of the next cohort of August-born children become even more worried that their children aren’t ready for school, so they redshirt, and the cycle keeps feeding itself.

Jen  56:06

Early childhood educators have advocated for the use of Developmentally Appropriate Practice, which is defined as “teaching decisions that vary with and adapt to the age, experience, interests, and abilities of individual children within a given age range.”  Proponents of DAP stress that deciding whether an instructional move is developmentally appropriate depends upon knowing the student, not a standard, and that “Standards-based approaches represent backward movement, designed to force early childhood programs into molds that don’t work with older students and are downright harmful for young children.”

Jen  56:42

Other authors have said that high-stakes testing beginning as early as preschool has pushed early childhood educators to instruct in ways that have nothing to do with the way children learn and what they’re interested in.  Rather than only considering their cognitive development, we also need to individualize their instruction in ethnically, culturally, and developmentally diverse ways.  Unfortunately, researchers have yet to identify any “culturally and linguistically responsive, standards-based curriculum that meets the social, emotional, and cognitive needs of all children.”  Is it possible for such a unicorn to exist?  I’m not really sure.  I think it probably depends on how you define “standards-based.”  If this means that the subjects and learning outcomes are determined outside of the classroom and school, then no, I don’t think you can have a curriculum that is responsive to local circumstances AND standards-based.  The two are mutually exclusive.

Jen  57:35

So where do we land with all this information? Almost everyone agrees that retention; holding children back to re-do a year of school, has negative effects on children, in terms of attitudes about school, self-esteem, and increased probability of dropping out, but these effects are independent of age.  Redshirting is not a guarantee that a child will repeat a grade.  When students are matched based on their probability of repeating a grade, younger students perform as well as older ones.

Jen  58:03

A big part of the problem here is that despite decades of research, educators and policymakers have no clear idea of what makes a student ready for kindergarten.  Age doesn’t seem to be an adequate predictor, and while there are a number of tests available they have poor levels of validity (which means they don’t measure what they’re supposed to measure) and reliability (which means your child could get tested today, and again next week, and receive dramatically different scores).  These tests aren’t being used for their intended purpose anyway – Kindergarten Entry and Readiness Assessments were meant to inform policymakers and stakeholders about the supports and services young children need prior to kindergarten and to maximize learning opportunities, not as a screening or diagnostic tool, or a tool to evaluate kindergarten readiness programs.  As with all standardized tests, success on these tests is highly correlated with socioeconomic status, favoring children from economically advantaged homes.

Jen  58:55

Malcolm Gladwell points out that people who are successful are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.  “It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks.  It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention.  And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice.  Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.” The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers. And that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turn leads to another opportunity, which makes the initially small difference bigger still – and on and on until the hockey player is a genuine outlier. But he didn’t start out an outlier. He started out just a little bit better.

Jen  59:37

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play – and by “we” I mean society – in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.”

Jen  01:00:07

Gladwell’s proposed solution is to homogenize – to run three classes in each grade so each student is taught with other students who are exactly their age.  But of course, Gladwell doesn’t have any children and doesn’t seem to have spent much time around children either.  Anyone who has will know that different children can be at dramatically different developmental stages even if their birthdays are only three months apart from each other, so what good would this serve?  And what about the extra preparation that the children from affluent families would have had, which would essentially make the tight age clustering irrelevant?

Jen  01:00:36

Just supposing we were able to somehow separate children into three groups each year so they were really tightly clustered around a tight band of ability, we might be able to teach them to pass a standardized test more effectively.  But we already know how to do this; it’s called ‘tracking,’ ‘gifted and talented programs,’ and it separates children based on the socioeconomic status of their families and diverts more resources to the children who already started with more.   In my mind, the solution is not to homogenize.  We know that we all benefit from true diversity – of backgrounds, of ages, and of ideas.  Children learn very effectively in mixed-age classrooms that are taught in ways that leverage the knowledge of children who are ahead on a particular topic.  These children get to consolidate their learning as they work with children who haven’t yet learned the material.  We could teach in ways that don’t create arbitrary rewards like gold stars and pizza parties for doing things like learning to read, which alienate children from families where cooperation and community are valued.  Teachers know how to do this, but very often they have little say in the expensive reading programs that their entire district purchases.

Jen  01:01:39

The problem arises when we try to teach everyone in the same way, and expect them to all pass the standardized test at the same time, as if they were all exactly the same.   Parents often ask me whether there’s a critical period to start reading and doing more traditional school learning, and they worry that their children will be missing out if they redshirt.  There are two parts to this answer: firstly, there is no critical period to learn reading.  Research indicates that by fifth grade, children who learn to read as late as third grade will read just as fluently as children who learned to read earlier.  The problem is that reading is treated in school as if it’s the only way to learn, so a child who can’t read will miss out on the material that’s being covered as well as the skill of reading itself, when most of the time this material could be presented in other ways but isn’t.  You might find that an older child is better able to control any impulse they might have to sit still in their seat when they’re told to, which could offset the lack of experience in having done this at an earlier age.

Jen  01:02:32

So, to summarize where we’ve been, redshirting may help your child to look like they’re ahead of other children in academic learning early in their school career, but this seems to mostly wash out in a few years.  Redshirting does not guarantee that your child won’t repeat a year later on either.  If your child has a learning disability, the increased time away from school may result in their issue not being discovered, or being discovered later, delaying the time until they get extra support.  Being older in high school may lead to a child being more mature and making better decisions, or it might lead to them being bored and acting out, and dropping out early.  They’ll probably have an advantage in sports, and we learned in our episode on how playing sports impacts children that future employers do use positions on sporting teams as a signal of the child’s skills as well as a sense of clubbiness – that if the hiring manager also played sports then they could see that the potential employee was likely to fit in with the culture of the division and the company.  To the extent that redshirting gives an advantage even at collegiate-level sports, this may confer an advantage – and while I couldn’t find research on this specifically, there’s plenty of anecdata on parents redshirting specifically to gain this advantage, and even transferring to private school for a year in 8th grade to improve academic grades and gain some size and strength, which could potentially increase their chances at college admission and scholarships for those few children who enter college through this route.

Jen  01:03:56

The effects of redshirting on other children in the class, who are younger, and perhaps haven’t attended as many years of preschool, seem decidedly mixed.  Redshirting your child somewhat increases the likelihood that the children in your child’s class who entered school ‘on time’ will be diagnosed with ADHD.  While parents might explain their decision to redshirt in terms of rectifying a disadvantage for their son, the actual effect is to generate and sustain an advantage.  It’s really sad to me that middle class White parents redshirt their younger, smaller boys because they don’t want their children to get bullied in school.  The assumption is that everyone else’s child will bully mine, but my redshirted child of course wouldn’t use their size advantage against any other children when they do enter school.  It also represents an enormous loss of resources when the only way boys can express masculinity is through being the biggest, strongest leader in the classroom, and that academic work, or teamwork (which might be misconstrued by adults as ‘following’ rather than ‘leading’) or caring for others are not viable paths for boys.  To me, asking the question ‘should I redshirt my child’ is asking the wrong question.  Instead, we should be asking ‘why do conditions exist that are making me consider redshirting, and how can I work with my child and other children to make these conditions not exist anymore?”

Jen  01:05:12

I imagine this episode didn’t give you the clear answer you were hoping for if you are thinking of redshirting your child, but I hope it does give you an idea of what the body of evidence says on this topic, and how it can impact your decision.  You can find references for the more than 35 papers I referenced for this show at yourparentingmojo.com/redshirting

Jen  01:05:33

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

References:

Albanesi, H.P. (2019). Tilting the playing field: ‘Redshirting’ kindergarten boys in the US and the competition for hegemonic masculinity. Gender and Education 31(2), 240-257.

Albanesi, H.P. (n.d.). ‘Redshirting’ of kindergarteners and the reproduction of class privilege. Manuscript in preparation.

Arnold, G., & Depew, B. (2018). School starting age and long-run health in the United States. Health Economics 27, 1904-1920.

Barnard-Brak, L., Stevens, T., & Albright, E. (2017). Academic redshirting and academic achievement among students with ADHD. Contemporary Educational Psychology 50, 4-12.

Bassok, D., & Reardon, S.F. (2013). “Academic Redshirting” in kindergarten: Prevalence, patterns, and implications. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 35(3), 283-297.

Bassok, D. Latham, S., & Rorem, A. (2016). Is kindergarten the new first grade? AERA Open 1(4), 1-31.

Cook, P.J., & Kang, S. (2013, February). Birthdays, schooling, and crime: New evidence on the dropout-crime nexus. NBER Working Paper Series. Working Paper 18791. National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18791

Cook, P.J., & Kang, S. (2018, April). The school-entry-age rule affects redshirting patterns and resulting disparities in achievement. NBER Working Paper Series, Working Paper 24492. National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from: http://www.nber.org/papers/w24492

Crawford, C., Dearden, l., & Greaves, E. (2014). The drivers of month-of-birth differences in children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 177(4), 829-860

Elder, T.E., & Lubotsky, D.H. (2009). Kindergarten entrance age and children’s achievement: Impacts of state policies, family background, and peers. The Journal of Human Resources 44(3), 641-683.

Fortner, C.K., & Jenkins, J.M. (2018). Is delayed school entry harmful for children with disabilities? Early Childhood Research Quarterly 44, 170-180.

General Assembly of North Carolina (2007). Session Law 2007-173 House Bill 150. Author. Retrieved from: https://www.ncleg.gov/EnactedLegislation/SessionLaws/PDF/2007-2008/SL2007-173.pdf

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Hover, A. (2018). Making informed decisions about academic redshirting and retention through school and community partnerships. International Journal of Whole Schooling 14(2), 53-62.

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Jenkins, J.M., & Fortner, C.K. (2019). Forced to redshirt: Quasi-Experimental impacts of delayed kindergarten entry. (EdWorkingPaper: 19-120). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai19-120

Jones, L. D., & Sutherland, H. (1981). Academic redshirting: A positive approach to grade retention. Education, 102, 173–175.

Kaplan, R.M., Chambers, D.A., & Glasgow, R.E. (2014). Big data and large sample size: A cautionary note on the potential for bias. Clinical and Translational Science 7(4), 342-346.

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Jen Lumanlan  00:01

Hello, everybody! I am recording live in our Facebook group. And I’m also recording this separately on the camera and on audio only as a way to share this information more broadly across a variety of platforms. I thought it was actually sharing in the group a minute ago, and I am not sure that it was working so I’m just trying to give this another go around. And I think actually, I just got the same message pop up saying that I was not sharing and now I am sharing, so hopefully this is going through to everywhere that it’s supposed to be going. So the content of what I want to talk about today is about what has happened at the US Capitol. And it’s been a couple of days, it’s Friday, today, January 8, and two days after the events happened at the Capitol. And I wasn’t really sure what to say and so I didn’t want to say anything, I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. And I went out for a bike ride this morning and it sort of clarified for me what it was that I wanted to say. And so that’s why if you’re watching this on video, you’re probably seeing a bit of a stripe across my forehead and I’m freshly showered because I kind of came back and was on fire about what it was that I wanted to say. And so you’re sort of hearing my relatively raw unedited thoughts. And I’m a little nervous about sharing those with you which is why you probably hear this in my voice. So I want to start with talking with our children about the events that have happened at the Capitol, because I’m hearing questions in Facebook groups and other places online if parents want to have these kinds of conversations with their children, but they don’t know how to do it or they’re thinking, okay, maybe my children are too young to understand what’s going on and I don’t want to scare them, and I’m not sure if I’m going to have a conversation with them at all.

Jen Lumanlan  01:57

And so, I have published resources on this before I actually have a post on how to talk with your child about Black Lives Matter. And I think that a lot of the principles that are discussed in there are very similar. And we want to do it in an age-appropriate way, we want to lead with their questions, and so I think ideally, this will come from them being out in the world, and they’ll see things that they’re curious about, and they’ll ask about them, and that will lead into a conversation on these topics. But if we are not out so much lately, as many of us are not and maybe we don’t have the news on all the time, and so their exposure to it may be much less than it otherwise would have been. And so well, what can we do when that’s the case? And we’re not sure how to bring the conversation up? Well, I would say the first thing we can do is to talk about it with a spouse or significant other or another adult over dinner, or over some other period of time where it’s natural for you to have a conversation. And to just talk about what’s on your mind—what’s been in the news today? how is today’s developments casting new light on? what we’re thinking about what happened at the US Capitol? And pretty soon your child is probably going to say, “What are you talking about?” Or something that indicates that they’re interested in this topic and I think that that can be a jumping-off point for you to try and give some background and ideally, that this won’t be the first conversation that you will have had on current events like this, and you’ll be able to talk about in context, Donald Trump and the policies that he has been enacting, and the ways that he talks to people, and whom he talks to. And so, that will provide you with the context that you need to then describe what has happened.

Jen Lumanlan  03:46

When they have questions, we can answer their questions clearly and directly. And also not be afraid to say when we don’t know, because there’s a lot that we don’t know. And we don’t have to put across the impression that we do know everything to our children all the time. I think it’s also fine to share how we feel about the events with our children. It’s important for them to see that our words and what we’re saying match our demeanor, if we are clearly afraid about something, but we’re sort of saying, “Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s fine,” then what they’re learning from that is well, “I can see that my parent is not fine, but they’re telling me fine. They’re telling me everything’s fine. Something really important is going on here,” or they may see, “Well, I just don’t trust my own ability to judge how other people are reacting because I’m getting these mixed messages and I don’t understand which one to prioritize. It must be what my parent is saying. And so I must not be capable of judging how their nonverbal reactions are supporting that message.” And so, I think behind a lot of these questions around what should I talk to my child, what should I say to my child, there’s this big issue of privilege and of having the luxury to make that decision and to decide what we’re going to say and to be able to make a decision to choose to say things that don’t scare our children. And not all parents have the luxury to do this. So, if you’re coming at these conversations for the first time, then welcome. There are resources that I’ve published available to help you there, a number of them are collected at yourparenting mojo.com/race. There’s actually one on how to talk with your child about Black Lives Matter and I think that a number of the principles that are discussed in that post are also very applicable here. And the kind of script that you can use to build on their questions will also be helpful as you’re navigating this kind of conversation.

Jen Lumanlan  05:50

So, that’s the issue of talking with our children about this topic, but I think that there’s a broader issue that I want to make sure isn’t neglected. Because I think it’s really critical to examine what is our role in this system, in the system that has made it feel to some people like Donald Trump is the best option who’s available to me, and what he says is what I’m going to do. Because I think that it’s really easy to point to those people and say, “Well, those people are racist, and I’m not like them, and it’s all their fault, their problem,” and instead, I think that we all need to examine our role in the system that has created these events and to take action related to that. And so what does that mean? Well, I worked for a consulting company for a long time. And I worked in sustainability consulting for a number of years, which I really enjoyed, but it became apparent that there was a point in time where it was obvious people, companies were not willing to pay the premiums that my company wanted to sell this work for. And so, I was on the verge of getting laid off and an executive that I’d worked with previously, who appreciated my work said, “You should come to work on my team,” and I said, “Sure.” And so, we were in a portion of the business where we were selling outsourcing services and other things as well, technology implementation, but we were also selling outsourcing services. And so what I was essentially doing was supporting proposal development work, and so directly involved in selling the company’s services related to outsourcing in countries like India and the Philippines, which would take jobs away from American citizens and outsource them to those companies where it’s cheaper to operate.

Jen Lumanlan  07:59

And I remember reading in the news several years ago now that my company would force the American workers to train their new replacements on their jobs as a condition of receiving severance pay. And so, you know, I don’t want to point to you and say, “You are the problem, you listeners, you watchers are the problem,” because we are all part of this problem. I was selling work that was taking jobs away from people who are many of them now are supporting Donald Trump, and sending that to other countries. And of course, there’s a lot of complexity involved here, maybe I was involved in lifting the standard of living for somebody who was in those countries. It’s not cut and dry. But I am not uninvolved in this system and neither are you. No matter where you sit in life, you have a role to play in this system. So maybe you’re a teacher, and you participate in systems that involve awarding points for children who are reading books, and so that they can collect points and win rewards for reading books, as they’re learning how to read. Well, what does that do? It pits children against each other, and it directly undermines the kind of cooperative systems that children from many other cultures learn at home and says that the way of being that you’ve learned in your culture is not valued here, competition is valued here. And if you want to do well, if you want to get ahead, then you need to get on board with that competitive approach. If you are teaching at any level at all, have you evaluated your curriculum through an anti-racist lens? You know, even if you’re at the university level, are you looking at the contributions that Black people have made in your field? And are you teaching that alongside all of the contributions that the much better-known White inventors, scientists, and whoever has made in that field? If you’re in government, how are the policies that you are creating, helping to perpetuate the system? Or how are they helping to break those systems down? If you’re in business, does your business incorporate anti-racist principles? Are you actively working to lift up all people? I will say that I have been searching for a number of months now for a consulting company to help me look at embedding anti-racist principles into my business.

Jen Lumanlan  10:33

So, if you’re watching this, and you work for somebody who does this, or you know of a company that does this, I know there are many companies that do it for multinational businesses. I am not aware of anyone who is yet doing it on a very small scale. I’m very interested in piloting something around that if somebody wants to develop an offering that can be taken to many small businesses. So this work needs to continue, even though I’m no longer working at the consulting company, it still needs to continue within my own business. If you don’t work outside of the home, if your work involves raising children, then you still play a role. If your child is in daycare, or school, or preschool, where whatever situation they’re in how do you advocate for resources for your child? Do you look at policies at your preschool daycare school? And look at those through the lens of well, “How does this benefit me? And how does this withhold benefits from other people?” Does this level the playing field? Does it help to lift up a group that has historically not been able to access resources as well as the group that I’m a member of has been able to? Does your child come home after the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, holiday? And I think that well, he made a speech about having a dream and there was this woman called Rosa Parks, and she sat on a bus and now we’re good. Racism isn’t a problem anymore. If your child is coming home with that kind of message, then there’s some work to do here.

Jen Lumanlan  12:06

And I would say if you’re listening to this and thinking, “Well, that sounds exhausting to look at everything I do through that lens,” then I would say, “Yeah, maybe it can seem like some extra effort.” But it’s not as much effort as being on the other end of these principles that are actively working against your existence, your right to exist in this world. And it is our responsibility as parents who have more privilege to examine our role in this system and to take steps to, break that system down to the extent that we can within our particular role in it. And so, I also want to link this idea to patriarchy, because I think that it’s all connected. It’s all connected because patriarchy does three things. Firstly, it creates scarcity, it creates a scarcity of jobs, it creates a scarcity of money of resources, and then it pits people against each other to vie for those resources. So I think a lot of parents who listen to the show feel a lot of pressure to give their children the skills they need to get ahead in life and to put them in the best daycare situation, and the best school situation so that they can get a job and place it in an elite university, and get a job from there at a White collar consulting company that I used to work for, or an investment banking firm or something along those lines. And that when we’re doing those things, we are contributing to the perpetuation of this system that we’re not seeing that this scarcity is in many ways artificially created as a way to keep us working against each other instead of working with each other. And that’s sort of a separate, the second thing that patriarchy does creating separation, it makes us say, “Well, we’re different from them and I want those resources, I need my child to go to an elite university so that they can get ahead and have a better life than I had. And there isn’t enough stuff for me and my family to have it and for them and their family to have it and I need to make sure that my family has it, so I’m going to do everything I can for my child to get that and for their child to not get that.”

Jen Lumanlan  12:06

And we may sort of have this veneer of well, everything’s equal and everybody’s the same, but at the end of the day, if we are advocating for resources that benefit our child in the way that they do not benefit all other children, then we are part of this system that is perpetuating this problem. And then finally patriarchy creates powerlessness. And I think this is sort of a hypothesis of mine, but we see that people who are supporting Donald Trump are angry. And anger is always something that conceals other things underneath it, anger is never the only thing that’s going on. And very often what anger conceals is a sense of fear, and maybe a sense of shame. And that the people who are angry are scared underneath all of this, they’re scared that they won’t be able to feed their family or whatever it is that’s going on for them. And because we have these other elements of patriarchy we’re being pitted against each other, they are seeing well, if those people are being lifted up, then by default, I am not being lifted up and I need more, and we can’t both have more. SoI think that, for some parents who are listening to this, they may be thinking, well, you know, all of this is politics. It’s all stuff that’s going out in the on out there in the world and this is not really connected to parenting, and that somebody who’s talking about parenting doesn’t have any business talking about politics. When I am coming to a certain place to get information about parenting, I want to just be able to get information about parenting and not have to deal with all the political stuff.

Jen Lumanlan  16:25

And to do those parents, I would say, “Okay, there’s plenty of places where you can get that,” and increasingly, that is not going to be here in the Your Parenting Mojo community because this is directly connected to parenting. Adults use force to resolve conflicts that they’re having because they learn this from their parents. And if you’re thinking, “Well, I don’t use force, I don’t spank my kid. I’m not doing those things,” then I would say, okay, then we need to take a closer look at what’s going on. And again, I’m not pointing fingers at you here, I’m saying this is all of us. This is me included. You know, sometimes we will sugarcoat our force, popular parenting advice says, “If your child is being difficult, and can’t choose between what they’re getting, you know, on the suite of options of what they’re going to wear in the morning, then you give them two choices that you can live with both of them and that’s what they get to choose between, or you have to brush your teeth, but we can use the pink toothbrush or the blue toothbrush. And at the end of the day, we’re still applying force here, we’re still saying, you’re going to do this, you are getting dressed. And I’m going to make it seem like you have some choice by allowing you to pick between these two options and I think that’s a really key idea here, that if you are allowing the child to pick, then that’s not really choices. The same as in school, where you’re allowed to pick between two assignments, the teacher is determined are acceptable, but you don’t actually get a choice in terms of what you’re learning. And we do this all the time, and I think it was in a conversation I had with Hannah and Kelsey on the upbringing podcast, where they were talking about having attended a Black Lives Matter protest, and you know, everybody there is saying, fight the power, fight the power and then they’re getting home, and it’s time for the kids to go to bed and saying, “Well, you’re gonna brush your teeth now,” and so if you’re sort of in public having this fight the power message, but at home, you’re then forcing your child to do things against their will, then we are still perpetuating this same approach, we’re still saying, “I don’t care about how you how you feel about this.”

Jen Lumanlan  18:51

We may even be early in the stage of working through sort of a more peaceful parenting approach. And we know that we’re supposed to hear our children and we’re supposed to validate their feelings. And then so often, what I see is the parents will then jump to a solution and say, “Well, this is what we’re going to do. I hear that you’re frustrated and this is how we’re going to do it,” and so then they wonder, well, a lot of times questions will come up around, well, my child won’t engage in problem-solving with me, and they just walk away or they just say on and on and on I’m not listening or I just don’t care or something like that. And the child has learned that they have no power in this interaction, that it’s going to seem like they have some power, but actually, they have no power. So I think sort of the bigger thing that I want to convey here is that we’re going to be exploring these ideas more and more here on the podcast and in other places that I’m active. We’re not leaving the research behind, we’re still going to be taking a very research-based approach to understanding what’s going on with our children, but increasingly, we’re going to be questioning the system that the research sets with it, and saying, “Well, how do we know that this is even the right question to ask? How do we situate this?” And what would happen if we instead of asking this question about this particular aspect of child development within the framework of patriarchy, can we step outside that for a minute, and looked out and say, “Well, what if actually, we didn’t think of children as needing to separate from their parents at a certain age? How would that affect how we see the child’s development?” And so, we’re increasingly going to be looking at those things.

Jen Lumanlan  18:51

And so, if this isn’t for you. If you’re not on board with this, and you want straight parenting advice and unbiased research, which we’ll have a conversation about that coming up in a few months, then you’re probably going to want to start getting your parenting advice elsewhere. If you are interested in participating in this work with me, then welcome. I’m so glad that you’re here. And what can you do where you may be thinking, “Well, what can I do? Well, I have an article, a blog post, that is on 39 actions that our parents can take on issues related to racial justice that’s again linked to yourparenting mojo.com/race. Another thing you can do is my local chapter, the barrier chapter of showing up for racial justice is an organization that has action hours. I think they happen there in January, they’re certainly doing it twice a month, where you show up for an hour, and you’re in a group with about 800 or so people depending on how many people are there in that particular call, you do small breakout groups of three or four people just to introduce yourself and say why you’re here and get a flavor for the kinds of people who are on the phone. And then for the rest of the time, the moderators have already decided what action is going to be taken in that period, and you are writing emails, signing petitions, it’s all done for you, all you have to do is doing the thing, you don’t have to think about, “What do I need to do? Where do I find the resources?” Everything that you need is provided and you spend the rest of the hour with those other 800 people participating in doing real meaningful action from your couch, or your desk, or wherever you happen to be. And you can spend an hour doing that, and actually start taking steps to work on dismantling these systems.

Jen Lumanlan  22:27

And so that’s kind of the key thing here is, yes, we need to be talking with our children, we need to be having these conversations with our children. And also, we need to be understanding our role within this system, and then taking action based on our understanding of that role using the platforms that we have like I’m here on this forum talking to you right now to take action on this. And so, kind of other ways that you can participate. If you want to sort of continue the conversation on this, I would invite you to join the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do want to say, I am not an expert on this. Patriarchy says that if you are going to speak up about something, you’d better be an expert, you mustn’t show emotion, you’re supposed to present things in a logical, factual based way. And I’m going to tell you straight up, I’m afraid right now, I am afraid. I’ve put out a lot of episodes on issues related to race and I lose subscribers after I put them out, I get emails after I put them out. People who are not happy with the way that I have chosen to engage in this. I do not have all the answers on this. If I did this wouldn’t be a problem anymore because we would just fix this situation. But nobody has all the answers. I don’t have them all, you don’t have them all. But I want to be in a community with people who are working to figure it out as well. And so, if you want to be in the community with me, then please come and join us. I really kind of feel as though I’m taking a bit of a risk here by publishing this fairly broadly because I am a conflict-avoider. I have taken the StrengthsFinder assessment and four of my top five strengths are related to learning which is why I enjoy spending so much time on research. And my fifth strength as it were, is harmony, which basically means that I am happy to engage in a constructive and deep conversation about these issues, but if I feel attacked, that is extremely scary for me. And so, I’m so I am putting myself out there and I am saying you know what, I am afraid, I am afraid of what could happen based on printing this out. And I’m going to do it anyway because the implications of not doing it are not something that I want to live with, I would rather put this out there and be afraid than sit on it and have something to say and not say anything.

Jen Lumanlan  25:09

So, if you want to get in touch with me, the Facebook group is the best way to do that because it allows conversation to happen and I will moderate that. And I will be in that conversation to the extent that I can, if you email me, I’m sorry, I will probably not have time to respond. If you want to email me with messages of support, I would say first, spend some time doing some anti-racist action. If you still have some time left over after that, and you want to email me with a message of support, then thank you, please know that I read them all. And I’m grateful for them. And I may not have time to acknowledge it or respond. I do also receive messages of people who strongly disagree with my approach and who are shall we say not constructive in the way that they present their opinion. And if you email me with something that denigrates me in some way, or is not constructive in terms of contributing to the conversation, then I will do two things. Firstly, I will donate $5 in your name to the NAACP, which is an organization that promotes the well-being of colored people as it says in the acronym, but Black people, people of color. And the second thing I will do is I will publish the comment that you send to me, I will screenshot it and publish it, so that is as a way of saying, “Please don’t say something to me in private that you wouldn’t say to me in a public setting.” So if you are interested in being in community with me in this work, I am extending my open arms to you to say please come along, join the free Facebook group, if you’re not in already, if you’re watching this in the group, then I’m so glad you’re here. And I’m looking forward to talking with you. And let’s move onward. Let’s talk with our children. Let’s assess where we are, what our role is in this. And let’s take action because there’s so much work to do and I’m so glad to be here with you and doing it with you. Thank you so much.

Jen 00:03

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

Jen 01:00

Hello, everyone. Before we get into the topic of today’s new episode, I wanted to let you know about my special Black Friday promotion that I have running now through midnight, Pacific time on Friday, November 27th. For this limited time, I’m offering access to my parenting membership for only $25 a month, and to my supporting your child’s learning membership for only $35 a month. Now those of you who know me, and the show might be kind of surprised to hear me running a Black Friday promotion. After all, I get complaints about my left-leaning, anti-capitalist stance all the time. And I thought it would be doubly amusing to talk about this before an episode on technoference, which is when technology like our smartphones interferes with our relationships, because I imagine a number of you are planning technology related purchases for the holidays.

Jen 01:43

But I decided to do this for two reasons. Firstly, I know these memberships can help you. I’ve seen so many parents transform their approach to parenting and get confident in supporting their child’s love of learning through the memberships. And secondly, we’re in a year when people are looking for holiday gifts that just don’t involve bringing more stuff into our homes, and that also can’t involve going out to museums and other places that may well be closed. And the parenting membership can really help you go from just hanging on to actually thriving in parenting. And the learning membership will help you make the best use of your time that you’re already spending with your children to support their intrinsic love of learning. And third, things are completely aligned with my values. If you miss the Black Friday promotion, they will still be time to enroll at the regular rate starting on December 1st and we’ll dive into the content as a group on January 1st. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com to learn more and enroll today.

Jen 02:42

Now, whether you take advantage of the Black Friday promotion, or you enroll in December, I believe in helping as many families as possible, and I’ve tried to make even the regular rates accessible to everyone. I’m confident that anyone who joins and learns the material that I’ll make easily accessible for you will support learning and development in their children, find parenting easier, and lay the groundwork for transformational change at home. I want to read you a bit of a message that member Catherine wrote to me about her experience in the parenting membership. So, Catherine says, “the membership has really allowed me to hone in on the doing the concrete actions I want to take and move from the endless swirl of ideas to actually implementing the ones that are based on my values. It’s allowed me to stop waiting for perfection when I figured out how to do it all and focus instead on progress. It just really hits the nail on the head of what I need to know. The most recent module we covered on our sense of ourselves as parents has allowed me to perceive so much differently in my day to day life and take in what I’m learning elsewhere in a different way. I’ve gained so much clarity even in the last week, and noticed a palpable difference in my sense of calm and in my acceptance of my children, my husband, and others with whom I interact in relation to my children.”

Jen 04:01

So, in my parenting membership, you’ll lean on a research-based approach to support your child’s development, while making parenting easier. This membership is for children aged around 18 months through the end of elementary school, regardless of where you are in your parenting journey: from the parent who’s just trying to survive to the parent who’s looking to the future. Your first year in the parenting membership is now only $25 a month through Black Friday, November 27th. In my supporting your child’s learning membership, you’ll learn how to best support your child’s intrinsic love of learning. Most of us want this for our children, but we don’t know how and even more how we interact with our children often actually works against this goal. This membership is for parents with children old enough to ask questions through the end of elementary school and who want to set the stage for a lifetime love of learning.

Jen 04:52

Ginelle joined the membership because she wanted to support her children’s love of learning, but the only way she knew how to do that was to do what school does. To teach them stuff they needed to know. Through the membership Ginelle has learned that she doesn’t have to teach for her child to learn. In fact, some of the most powerful learning happens when we just model for our child. Ginelle found that one simple mindset shift has really made a huge difference in her ability to support her child’s learning. She says, “Most notably, I find I’m answering my children’s questions in a more open way. Sometimes this is with another question. Other times, it might just be a more vague, open-ended answer. It’s a change that sounds so basic and common sense when I think about it now, but I needed that extra bump from the membership to actually make me realize it and apply it.”

Jen 05:41

Special Black Friday pricing for my supporting your child’s learning membership is now only $35 a month through midnight Pacific on Black Friday, which is November 27th, and we get started on January 1st. Both of the memberships include all of the information that you need, and none of the fluff that you don’t to achieve the easy joy-filled family life that you worked so hard for, but which may seem so out of reach right now. And both memberships include support and community so you can make that next tiny step that you need to take to help you reach your goals. Go to YourParentingMojo.com today to take advantage of these special Black Friday offers the parenting membership for only $25 a month, and the supporting your child’s learning membership for only $35 a month. Support your child’s learning and development while making parenting easier, perhaps the best gift you could give to your family this holiday season. Thanks again for listening. I hope the rest of your year is filled with joy and activities that are truly meaningful in your life.

Jen 06:42

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I’ve had our topic today on my mind for a while and over the last few months I think it’s become more relevant than it ever has been before. And the topic we’re going to talk about today is technoference and that’s the idea that technology, and specifically mobile phones, interferes with relationships that we have with other people. It can interfere with relationships of all kinds and your might first rest on your partner, and how you perceive your partner’s phone use interfering with your relationship, and we’ll certainly touch on that. But our primary focus for today will be on how our phones interfere with our relationships with our children. We’ll learn how concerned we should really be about this and what we should try and do to balance our own needs for connectedness with others and our children’s need for connectedness with us.

Jen 07:33

And so here to discuss this today with us is Dr. Jenny Radesky. Dr. Radesky is a developmental behavioral pediatrician and assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School. Dr. Radesky obtained her MD from Harvard Medical School. Conducted her pediatrics residency at the University of Washington, and then a fellowship in developmental behavioral pediatrics at Boston University. She’s board certified in pediatrics and developmental behavioral pediatrics. Her research interests include the use of mobile technology by parents and young children, and how this relates to child self-regulation and parent child interaction. She was the lead author of the 2016 American Academy of pediatrics policy statement on digital media use in early childhood.

Jen 08:15

Welcome, Dr. Radesky.

Dr. Radesky 08:16

Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Jen 08:19

Okay, so let’s start kind of where we often do when we’re coming to a topic like this, which is with some definitions and terminology. And I actually learned a new word while I was researching this episode, which is fubbing. So, I’m wondering, can you help us understand what is technoference? What is fubbing? Is it the same thing? Or is it different?

Dr. Radesky 08:38

It’s pretty similar. I mean, the term fubbing was in the research literature first, as I was starting to try to research how parents phone use influences family dynamics. It was like 2010-2011, and I was in my fellowship, and I was scouring the literature for any prior research on parents and kids and technology. And there wasn’t much there was really just this fubbing phenomenon, which was how a mobile phone inserts itself into an interpersonal space and the, you know, the person who is doing the fubbing kind of gets a little bit transported to, you know, another virtual space where they’re interacting with someone else, or with other content. And then the fubbee gets, you know, often the research is showing they’re frustrated. And this term started even when mobile phones were just little dumb phones, you know, with texting capabilities. And the mobile communications research was really just interested in, now we could take these devices everywhere, you know, they were focused on using technology on mass transit, or at mealtimes, or during other times that normally had a bit of a boundary around it when it came to technologies.

Dr. Radesky 09:53

So technoference was a term developed by my co-author and collaborator Brandon McDaniel. He’s a psychologist Who’s that Parkview Research Center in Indiana. So, he gets the credit for that term. But he coined that term in trying to capture a research measure that’s not just about how much is the parent using technology or how much is the child using technology, but what’s happening with the relationship? And so, it became a questionnaire asking parents about on a typical day, you know, how many devices are you using when you’re interacting with your child?

Jen 10:27

Yeah. And so, what I found was myself, it was kind of thinking about technoference in terms of the relationship. And then I just wanted to find fubbing, it’s this portmanteau of phone and snubbing stuck together. But I found the idea of the fubber and the fubbee to be useful to distinguish who’s on which end of that relationship as well.

Dr. Radesky 10:49

Yeah, and I think there’s been some interesting ethnographic research where people have interviewed families to talk about how it feels when your spouse or partner is doing the fubbing, especially when it’s just a high stress time in your household, or, you know, someone has to change a diaper, and all of a sudden your partner is absorbed in their phone. And so that, you know, negative connotation that comes with the term snubbing has even more layers, when it comes to parents who are taking care of a young child, which is just such, you know, has many different sources of stress in it to begin. Many different issues around co-parenting and role overload. And I’m interested in early childhood, mostly because it’s such a time of building resilience. When kids are facing adversity, or stressful times, like a pandemic, secure relationships are a huge buffer to that stress, or are a way that kids make meaning of stressful times build emotion regulation, you know, so that’s why I kind of put my interest in technology that started when I was in Seattle, you know, I was in Seattle in like 2007-2011, which is like, just the time that the iPhone and all these devices were coming out. And I was like, this is fascinating, you know, dynamics are changing so much in our hospital in our offices.

Dr. Radesky 12:07

So, I took that with my interest in early childhood relationships. And that’s where my first study in the fast-food restaurants came from because I was like, I just want to observe what’s happening here. I don’t want to come in with preconceived hypotheses or notions about this is bad, this is good. I want to observe, take field notes, like I’m an anthropologist, and just see the patterns of what’s happening. And that study wound up getting so much press attention, because there was already this societal kind of concern. Like, every time there’s new technologies introduced, the society gets a bit anxious, they feel uncomfortable, they feel disrupted. This has happened extremely rapidly, you know, the way that we’ve adopted these new technologies is so much faster than the way radio or telephones were adopted. So I was a fellow at the time and getting interviewed, you know, by like The Today Show or Al Jazeera America, and I was like, wow, people are really concerned about this, I need to be aware of the fact that this is a hot topic that’s going to polarize that’s going to kind of have some implicit judgement in it, too. And that’s where my research, you know, on this topic started.

Jen 13:16

Okay. So I wonder if we can go into that a little bit, then because I think a lot of the research that had been conducted to that point on fubbing, as it was known until then, was sort of done by asking people, how much do you use your phone? And then the fubbee, how much does it annoy you when somebody uses your phone, when they use their phone in front of you? And your methodology, it was the first time I’d seen it in the literature in this, you know, to be used in this way. And it’s been replicated a whole bunch of times in different environments since then. So, can you tell us what did you do? And then what did you see when you’re sitting in these restaurants?

Dr. Radesky 13:50

Yeah. And it took me a while to land on this study design, actually. So, we thought about creating a survey. And that’s what a lot of the fubbing research had been on but I was really worried that a survey would have too much what we call social desirability bias in research, and I also knew that the way that we interact with phones is more intermittent or immersive. I knew there was that cultural overlay of judgement of parents about it. So, I didn’t want to, you know, create a survey that could possibly be biased, I wanted objective data. So, objective meaning you can kind of observe it and count it and see what’s happening without the parent being self-conscious that they’re being judged.

Dr. Radesky 14:35

So, we decided on public observations, this has been done to look at how parents discipline their kids in public. It’s been done to look at how, you know, people interact with public spaces. And it’s considered ethical because we didn’t collect any identifiable data. We didn’t write down any child names, but the participants didn’t know we were watching. It’s you know, it’s called nonparticipant observation because you go and you blend in with the surroundings. So myself and two research assistants just went to all these fast-food restaurants in Boston, in the spring and summer of 2013. I was like pregnant as can be with my second son. And we were taking field notes. So, we would bring a laptop and some books and act like we were just, you know, drinking an iced coffee and taking field notes.

Dr. Radesky 15:24

We tried to go to sampled around different neighborhoods in Boston that had higher income, lower income, you know, Panera to Chipotle a to McDonald’s. And we just took these long winded, continuous notes of like, ‘Mom picks up phone, it’s held about 10 inches from her face, you know, child is eating French fry.’ So boring. But when we read these field notes over and over, we were just seeing patterns and themes of behavior that emerged. The biggest theme was absorption, we called it, which is a term that’s been used before, but it was really this idea that the parents gaze and attention and it looked like a lot of their cognitive energy was on the phone, not on the child. We were looking a lot, not just for the negative, we were looking for times when parents and kids were sharing media and laughing over it, we saw that like four times, out of 55 families. We saw, you know, about a third of families who used phones were had this absorption where there was very little conversation. Kids would sometimes act up to get their attention. You know, we saw one child who tried to pull his mom’s face up from her iPad, and she yelled at him and pushed him away, or another mom that kind of, you know, nudged her or kicked her kids under the table when they were, you know, acting up and trying to get her attention.

Dr. Radesky 16:42

And none of this, we really didn’t want to describe it in a way that made the parents sound like they’re being bad parents, it was really like, this is a new phenomenon. Parents have never had their attentions, you know, spread in so many different directions. And I saw it as like, a hypothesis generating study, like, what’s going on here? How do we measure this? What is going on the phone that drags our attention in so much? You know, are there other underlying relationship variables or parent mental health variables that could be affecting the phone use, right? So, I did not imply that this was causative, you know, that phone use was causing this sort of parenting reaction. And then so I decided to do some follow up studies to really get at some of the mechanisms of what’s going on here.

Jen 17:30

Okay. And I just want to sort of conclude with the point that this has been replicated a whole bunch of times since then, often in playgrounds. So, we see somebody typing on a computer on a plane.

Dr. Radesky 17:44

Yeah, so we actually chose not to do playgrounds, because I kind of felt like, well you know, let kids have some risky play and let them run off and let parents talk to each other or zone out a little bit. But playgrounds are just another easy public observation space. So it is a valid way to collect data, we chose mealtimes because we thought there should usually be some face to face interaction, not 100% of the meal, but you know, for some of the meal, but fast food restaurant meals, we also, you know, made sure to say don’t mean that this is what’s happening at home during mealtimes either, right? I was just one brief way to look at this.

Jen 18:22

Yeah. And in some of the other studies that I found that that happened to be about playgrounds, it varied from kind of three quarters of the people who were observed were using their phones for a good chunk of the time to in one study only it said two thirds of observed parents spent less than 5% of their time using different parts. So, there’s a really wide spread. Forty-one percent of those people didn’t use a phone at all. I can’t say that I’ve ever observed that.

Dr. Radesky 18:51

I know

Jen 18:52

Exactly. If that results surprise me. But there’s definitely a very broad spread of different observed behavior in different places.

Dr. Radesky 18:59

Right. And as a scientist, I’m thinking, Okay, we care about duration, right? So there, that’s one variable. There’s also the not only the total amount of, say, seconds or minutes, but it’s also the number of initiations notifications, you know, is it initiated by the mom or the or the dad? Is it initiated by the notification on the phone? And then the content of what’s going on the phone really made me curious too. Is it a social media ping? Is it a game? Is it email? Because all of those things have different effects on our emotions and our cognitions. And then so I did some interview research with parents next because I really wanted to hear what their experiences were like. And, you know, how they described multitasking between kids and kind of their to do list on their phones. How intrusive it felt sometimes, like one mom said, it’s like the whole world is in your lap and I didn’t need it to be it just is now and I can’t resist checking. Other moms saying, you know, these games have a hook, they just keep pulling me in. I don’t, like, I heard a lot of ambivalence from parents about.. I feel drawn to this, but I don’t always feel like I love it. But I do love it. Sometimes I remember one mom saying, when I’m cooking, and I’ve been at home all day, I love these little human contacts that I get with other adults and I get news from the adult world. But then sometimes it’s exhausting too because the news is not good, or there’s like too many texts or notifications to respond to. So, she described it as like, there’s a little nuggets of excitement, and then a ton of exhaustion in her relationship with her phone. And, you know, I really started to focus on tech design at that point, like, how are our phones drawing us in unnecessarily? Because it really felt like in some cases, it was undermining parents own balance and relationship with their phone, and that sometimes they felt like, this isn’t actually what I needed at this time. But, you know, I went to check one thing, and I was on for half an hour. And now I’m grumpy, you know, there’s so many different levels of measurement, that we need to get right in the science to give better guidance to parents, because we can’t just say, turn your phone’s off.

Jen 21:16

Right?

Dr. Radesky 21:17

This is how we connect with the world and our social lives. But we can recognize that some aspects of the use are not supporting us as parents. They’re not as helpful as they could be.

Jen 21:27

Yeah, yeah, I definitely saw that theme in the literature here as well, the idea that, especially if we’re in a nuclear family, and the other parent is at work somewhere, maybe even out of the house all day, or happens to be shut up in another room for the bulk of the day working, and you’re with the kids, pretty much by yourself for most of the day, then it can get lonely, it can get boring, and that the technology can provide an escape from that. On the flip side of that there was also me research on what happens when we interact with Facebook and we seem to have this misattribution error, where we think that if we go to Facebook, and we’re going and looking for an experience is going to leave us feeling better when we come out, and what actually tends to happen is we come out of that experience feeling worse than we went in.

Dr. Radesky 22:12

I think that, you know, I see that as a design problem because Facebook could be this oasis for parents, right? It could be this place where you find your people, your support your ideas, you like get ideas for a new dentist or you know, new fall activities to go do with your kids, right, those, that’s what I hear from parents are the helpful bits of Facebook, but then they’re navigating all the garbage at the same time. And the garbage is there, because of the business model that Facebook has in terms of letting there be, you know, lots of ads that are trying to kind of target you and your specific psychological approach to the world. You know, parents are encountering a lot of like polarized parenting information that’s really like this is the best way to do this. And that, you know, inherent judgement that they’re feeling from clickbait type of parenting information or, or the way that the stuff that gets shared the most is usually the most outrageous, or the most arousing, I think is where it’s not suiting our needs. So, it may be idealistic, and not gonna happen anytime soon. But I really supported the idea of like, could there be a PBS for social media, right? Like a public broadcasting system, where we’re not, you know, our data and our, it’s not all built on us getting the perfect ads. Right, you can get some ads, absolutely. ads can support like, you know, good websites and media but it doesn’t have to be this whole kind of underground, like we don’t even know as much about it. There’s this really great but thick book called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff where if you want to dig into this, this sort of topic about this whole what she calls like, the shadow text of like, underlying all of these web platforms, and social media sites is data collection, profiling, figuring out who we are as parents what our vulnerabilities are, and then, you know, auctioning off ads to us. And, like, if hearing me say that I’m like, that doesn’t sound parent-centered at all, who needs that? And when you have designed that’s really meant to engage us more and make us click more things and make us share more of our information so that the advertisers know us better, it all kind of sounds ridiculous when you have a fussy baby at home, or you’re arguing with your spouse and you just need a break and want to connect with your friends.

Jen 24:39

Yeah.

Dr. Radesky 24:41

So, there. There’s my little rant about, you know, family-centered design. You don’t have to feel so hard, but this is weird tech design, you know, currently is there’s a lot of pushback against it for sure. But I’d love for parents to have, feel the right to have some pushback against it as well.

Jen 25:00

I do wonder if we made it so amazing people would then want to use it more.

Dr. Radesky 25:04

Oh well, that’s true.

Jen 25:07

How does that impact and I think this is the bulk of where we, that where the research is and where a parent’s interest lies is where, what happens to our child, to the fubbee, as it were, and by extension, you know, what’s happening in our relationship with our child when we’re doing this, when this is going on.

Dr. Radesky 25:25

And the ways that I see the research on this is that it went from kind of cruder measurements of what’s happening with the child, like my fast food study was, you know, some children just don’t talk to their parents, don’t try to get their attention. Other children tend to act up, appear to try to do silly things or, you know, ways to grab their parent’s attention or get them to put the phone down. And certainly, my kids have done that, to me as well. But you know, those are like really broad strokes of descriptions of children. We then did a study where we had videotapes of parents and kids eating together. During the structured task, it was done as part of another study that was looking at obesity and eating styles. And they did this 15-minute task where they introduced some new foods, some familiar foods, and they were coding how much the parents and children interacted about eating. It was kind of a boring task. So that’s a natural stimulus or bringing out your phone, which a quarter of the moms did, and that it was this naturalistic kind of capture, of real phone use, we didn’t manipulate it, it just happened. So, we coded, you know, the moms who were using their phone more talk to their kids less both in encouraging ways or nonverbal ways to. The moms didn’t differ: the phone using moms from non-phone using moms didn’t differ in terms of their depression levels, their parenting style, their income, or their race or… So, I thought that was a good sign that like, this isn’t just a marker of a parent who is different somehow or stress somehow, there’s some perturbation happening here. But it’s not just phone leads to negative child behavior, right? Because in child development theory, it’s always transactional, bidirectional.

Dr. Radesky 27:11

So, we did a follow up study from that and in this study, moms had gone through this interview called the working model of the child interview. I love this interview, because you’re basically just saying to moms, like, tell me about your kid, give me three words, or five words that describe them. Give me an example of what made you choose that word. And the interview is coded for how sensitive or reflective the parents are about their child, or how emotionally distant they might be, or critical or see their child is difficult. And a lot of those things trended with phone use. So moms who use their phones more, had more of these perceptions of their child is like this abstract difficult, like not really getting in their child’s mind, of what’s driving your behavior, you know, they weren’t as reflective about how their behavior impacts their child, or what drives their child’s behavior.

Dr. Radesky 28:06

So that was a sign to me like this either could be a lot of phone use during parent-child times could be displacing these times where you learn to read your kid, you know, and you don’t have to be perfect at this right? research shows, we can just be good enough and you know, and mess up sometimes and you’re fine but it helps you as a parent to know “How are you ticking, like, what is driving that crazy behavior,” because if you can address the underlying issue, and help your child express that emotion in a different way, or meet that impulse, in a slightly, you know, with a replacement behavior, you’re teaching while you’re disciplining. You’re not just reacting and punishing or reacting and thinking you’re crazy. Why are you doing this to me?

Jen 28:55

Yeah, your speaking language we understand here: behavior being an expression of a need.

Dr. Radesky 28:59

Right. And so right behavior is seeing behavior as communication rather than as a parent getting flooded by your child’s affect. It’s also possible though, that, let’s say you’re a parent who’s had some trauma or you have other reasons why it’s hard for you to be reflective about your child’s emotional state. Maybe those parents use technology more around families, because number one, it helps give you this buffer from your child’s affect and helps you feel like I need a little break from you, or they don’t realize the impact it’s having on their child in that moment. Right. So again, like we’re diving beyond the, you know, parent user’s phone child x bad into what’s the mechanism here, and I’d like this mechanism, because it’s not about blaming parents for like, you know, don’t use your phone, it makes your kids act bad. It’s maybe using the phone a ton is an escape mechanism for you and being aware of how much that’s happening, you’re just diving into your phone when life at home is too stressful because your phone is this frictionless personalized space, or maybe the flip of that is also that, the more you are able to think about what’s driving your child’s behavior, how they are responding to you, how they’re just how they’re wired, you know, what’s their personality and their temperament, like, and what are the things they need to get their energy out? That stuff makes parenting easier once you know those things about your child. So, and not in this precious way of like that you need to perfectly know your child, you just have to wonder and have a hunch, like, what’s going on with this? And, you know, that’s, I think, one of the messages I hope comes off as less judgmental to parents when it comes to this whole discussion of phone use, because it’s something that parents can so easily just blame themselves about. And rather, it’s something they could empower themselves about to be like, hmm, you know, maybe I need to set aside some time where I’m just single tasking, so that it actually feels easier to parent.

Jen 31:09

Mm hmm. Okay. So, we talked a good deal about the relationship and what’s happening in the relationship between the two people. And I’m also curious about it from the child’s perspective. And I know that’s really hard to get to when we’re talking about young children. And I’ve seen some research on adults. And when researchers ask adults, how do you feel and they talked about communication being of lower quality and decreased trust, and it feels like the other person is empathizing. And they even especially this, this was fascinating. I study in that had people two people at a restaurant who hadn’t met before and observed how much they use their phones during a conversation and the research is less than half. And just having a phone on the table, decreased the amount of trust that the other person felt in that person, even if they didn’t look at their phone or do anything with their phones. I thought, Oh, my goodness, it would have been so easy to go experimental with that you can have the researcher be oppressive, who either has the phone on the table or not. Actually, manipulate it and you’re one step further, but they didn’t, unfortunately. And so, what do we know if anything about how young children are perceiving us when we are using our phones around them?

Dr. Radesky 32:19

Yeah, the first bit of child interview data that I saw that wasn’t a published study, but it was in Catherine Steiner-Adair, as a psychologist in Boston and wrote a book called The Big Disconnect. And I think it came out in like, 2013, or something, but it she interviewed children who were like school age to teenagers about media use in their family. And they said things like, I just hate it when she’s on her phone, because it seems like she’s more interested in the phone than me. Or, you know, when they use it. While we’re playing together. It feels like they’re going away from me, I these aren’t exact quotes, but it was that general idea. And I’ll ask I tell parents to ask their own kids, because every child is different and is going to…

Jen 33:07

That would be scary isn’t it?

Dr. Radesky 33:08

Right? Because sometimes, I’ve asked my kids and like, my older child is like, Yeah, I don’t like it when your laptop’s out because you just seem serious. And you’re working hard, you’re focusing on stuff. And my little one was, I remember asking him once, and he was like, Oh, I like it when you use your phone, because I know that I can go, you know, find an iPad or do something, you’re distracted, right? So, he’s got a little more social thinking that he’s doing to manipulate the moment. But it’s worth asking, right? It’s worth talking about these fubbing dynamics, because we’re living in them, we’re immersed in them, and kids are gonna have to be aware of how they’re doing that to other people, or how it feels.

Dr. Radesky 33:53

You know, I love this PSA, that Common Sense Media put out a few years ago with Will Ferrell ignoring his kids at the dinner table.

Jen 34:01

I didn’t see that.

Dr. Radesky 34:02

I mean, he’s just being ridiculous and doing like a cat filter, while he’s kids are trying to talk to him. And, you know, so when you can call out the things we’re all doing, but we’re not talking about I just think it helps kind of clear the air and lets us talk about them more realistically. And lets us say to each other, like, hold on, I really need to talk to you about this, put your phone down. So, it doesn’t sound you know, judgy it’s just like, I know your attention is split…

Jen 34:31

Right.

Dr. Radesky 34:31

…if you’re looking at your phone while we’re talking. Another study that’s worth mentioning about how do children receive the interruption was done by some psychologists and language researchers. I think it was Temple or University of Delaware.

Jen 34:48

Yeah. And Dr. Golikoff was involved in that…

Dr. Radesky 34:50

Exactly.

Jen 34:51

and he’s been on the show before.

Dr. Radesky 34:53

Yeah. So I love their lab and they just did a very creative simple experiment of a parent and a young child came into the lab and did a like a language teaching task, which is a usual standard task to see, you know, how a parent could teach a child usually a nonsense word, something new. And then they randomize the families to get interrupted with a I end up can’t remember who’s a text or a phone call, but then call

Jen 35:19

Yeah,

Dr. Radesky 35:20

..but it was brief. And even though they all the families completed the language teaching task, children in the interrupted condition, didn’t remember the word or didn’t learn it, as well as the children in the uninterrupted condition. And so that was really fascinating that this little break in our joint attention with each other, or a loss of the kind of flow of a reciprocal interaction can impact the quality of our interactions. And young children depend on this the most, because they’re watching us for where are we looking? What are we paying attention to when we are, you know, have some good reciprocity? Where we’re having a serve and return conversation, we’re building off of their ideas, they’re building off of ours, that’s where kids are picking up the most knowledge and words. And so, when that gets disrupted, or made a little more shallow, that can perhaps impact language development.

Dr. Radesky 36:21

And that’s been shown, like with background TV…

Dr. Radesky 36:24

Yeah.

Dr. Radesky 36:24

Is that when the background TV is on and parents are using less rich words during play, then children in one study had toddlers had lowered language development. I think, as a developmental behavioral pediatrician, I test kids for autism, also, you know, on a weekly basis, so I’m looking for that reciprocity, as a way that we’re maintaining an interaction and building off of each other. It’s a really important part of social development. And that’s where it could also be disrupted, you know, so that kids are learning some pretty deep things from us, even in everyday moments, like, how do I feel? What does this mean, you know, it’s not just words and ABCs, and colors, it’s, you know, the kind of meaning systems that help children understand ourselves, and what’s happening in the world. And so, you know, that’s where the disruptions we really could use some more research looking not just at behavior, or language, but at kids’, you know, emotion regulation or their sense of self.

Jen 37:26

Yeah, I think the key thing that I got out of that word learning task study was the idea that we might think of, you know, we get a text message, we look away, and we check it, we come back, or we get a phone call, we come back, we pick up the task where we left off, we might think of that as a pause. But our children seem to perceive it in a very different way. So, it’s sort of like a disruption to them. It’s not just, you know, there was a break where something irrelevant to me happened that I didn’t need to pay attention to and now I’m going to pick up right where I left off, there’s some sort of disruption there. That’s meaning that they weren’t learning that word as effectively as they did with the parent was not interrupted.

Dr. Radesky 38:03

And I think one of the interesting potential mechanisms there is what parents described to me in my interviews of, there’s kind of a shadow cast by what you just did on your phone. So, if it’s your ex-boyfriend, who was violent with you in the past, and now they How did they get, you know, why are they accessing me right now? What do they want? If it is views of the world, that’s really stressful, right now, it kind of contaminates that time, or cast this shadow that may affect your emotional state, or your ability to focus and kind of pick right back up where you left off.

Dr. Radesky 38:45

And that’s where, you know, I think the ability to turn off notifications, or have your phone in a different space in the room or in your bag or something else, where you just have physical distance from it can help it be less of something just on your mind. You know, like that study, you mentioned that even just the presence of the phone, on the table is taking up part, you know, part of your attention, and doesn’t really need to be, you know, these devices have been crafted to have us depend on them and be inseparable from them, just to reuse them all the time. Isn’t that a great product if you make someone really dependent on it and want it all the time and need it for everything, but we don’t, you know, I mean, a lot of the time, we can be away from it for, you know, for a certain amount of time, depending on if you’re on call or you have a sick parent or something like that, of course those are times where you do need to really be attached to communication technologies.

Jen 39:45

Okay. And then just as sort of wrapping up this, you know, what are the impacts on the child? I think two things that I’d like to get to is, firstly, as children get older and are more able to start reporting, you know what happens and secondly, study from Australia that we were discussing before we started the recorded conversation. And that sort of seemed to cast a little more nuance on this than it always being bad. So maybe we can first off talk about teenagers because we’re going to get there sooner than we might think. And quite a number of studies have found links to links between fubbing behavior and disconnection in the relationships, which is linked to depression, externalizing problems and all kinds of things, and obviously, it’s not experimental evidence so we can’t say that one causes the other. But what kinds of trends here are you seeing as children are getting older related to their behavior, their relationships with their parents?

Dr. Radesky 40:38

You know, it depends, right. So, I’ve definitely have seen that children who just have more sources of resilience, either strong mental health or strong preexisting relationships, that they may be more resilient to some of the potential impacts of having more in person disconnection from their families. So, there’s that bi-directionality, right? So if you have a family that stresses you out, and you kind of want to withdraw from them into your peer group, or into a virtual space, that you where you can be yourself, it’s actually you know, there’s plenty of positives of being able to find your people through virtual means. But it’s when it is displacing the time you maybe need to heal or connect with people that you’re not getting along well with is where I think we need more research. So like I’m, I’m very interested in families with struggling with adversity or mental health issues, or trauma, where technology may be used as an avoidance tactic or an emotional distancing tactic or a, you know, regulating the child’s behaviors so that they don’t stress the parent out as much. Those are displacing important moments of the parent understanding their child’s emotional state, and then the child learning about themselves and about how to self-regulate through those everyday interactions that with enough displacement, are just not going to happen as much.

Dr. Radesky 42:08

So, the two studies that I think support this are the one you mentioned from Australia, where they, you know, had surveyed over 3,000 families. And it was really just when there was a lot of family displacement, where technoference was problematic in terms of having more negative outcomes associated with it. But when you just had a little bit of technoference, without much displacement that was actually associated with better parenting outcomes, because the parents were getting a break. And this couldn’t be more relevant than during the pandemic, when we’re just around each other all the time, and I’ve heard parents say, like, I need my own space from the kids, and we need time where we’re doing our own things and not just breathing it down each other’s neck. So, I like that there’s, you know, we need to maybe categorize this a little bit better as the extremes. Or when there’s, you know, clearly an avoidance or an emotional distancing function to the phone use.

Dr. Radesky 43:05

I also think, as kids get older, they’re learning from us informally through our role modelling and through observing us. So the more they see us using phones as an emotion regulation tool, the more they may see that as a norm, or a way that they just Well, you know, it’s okay to just withdraw into my device when we’ve just had a conflict instead of calming down and talking to each other. And it’s that repair after a conflict that really matters for relationship quality. So the study in infants where they did like a modified still face, having the mom look at her smartphone, instead of doing the still face and then how did the repair look, that time when the child has just been a bit dysregulated and upset, but you kind of calm down, and this is thought to be a paradigm for we have disruptions with our kids all the time we misunderstand them, we yell at them but it’s the repair where we’re able to either say we’re sorry, or debrief about what happened and come up with some problem solving strategies for later. Parents who used their phones a lot around their kids, so this kind of heavier displacement, had trouble with the repair phase where it just, they didn’t click as much they weren’t able to calm a fussy infant, or maybe they didn’t have as much confidence in their ability to figure out and many of us know that feeling when you have an infant that won’t calm down and you’re like, I stink at this. I don’t, like I’m the worst parent ever. Why can’t I do this? Moms should be able to do this. And that feeling of like I just can’t handle my kid is so alienating and demoralizing. And so, you know, that’s why I don’t think it’s as easy as well turn your phone off and your relationship with your child will improve. I think in many cases you may need, you know, a home visitor or an infant mental health therapist or a family therapist, who can just help you do more of the repair and more of the emotional communication in your family.

Jen 44:59

Yeah, I think that’s a really helpful way to understand it that it’s, and I guess, to summarize, I think what I had read in one of your papers was that the effect sizes here are fairly small, we’re not talking about if you’re experiencing technoference 10 times a day versus one times a day that the 10 times a day person is going to have some kind of dramatically different outcome with their child. But that when it’s compounded over many, many, many interactions over many, many years, and there are these other things that are going on in the relationship, but that’s when we need to look at it holistically, we can’t just look at technoference in isolation and say, shutting your phone off is going to fix all your problems. And it’s damaging your child.

Dr. Radesky 45:40

Right, I hate the word damage, you know, I kind of want there maybe to be this, maybe a feeling of like, well, in these younger years, I’m just going to invest in what’s harder, but I’m going to invest in some of these more difficult interactions or trying to, you know, sacrifice some of our own pleasure. That sounded horrible. But I like, you know, being able to invest in your child, and you kind of building these competencies, social and emotional competence together, which will make, hopefully make the school years and adolescence much easier for both of you. And so rather, rather than it seems like Oh, you’ve done irreparable damage to your child during these early years, I want it to be more seen as a time of really important investment of parent growth, right? We do so much growth as humans, by understanding our kids and why they trigger us or why our spouse acts a certain way or why the fact that like my son, reminding me of, you know, my mother makes me feel a certain way all that is really important insight to just grapple with and not avoid. And of course, I’m this is my bias because I’m a pediatrician, and someone who really thinks about mental health and emotional health a lot, but I think when parents have that self-efficacy to be like, I’m just gonna dig into this and we’re going to figure out what we can do, it’s just better for everyone compared to the demoralization or distancing that happens when you just feel like it’s all too much.

Jen 47:18

Yeah. Okay. So, let’s just say I’m a parent, and I, I’m slightly concerned about this. I’m not, you know, super, super concerned about it. But I think it’s something I might want to do something about. But we’re in this kind of really weird world right now, where we’re all around each other all the time. And my daughter is starting to pick up on the fact that she has limits on her screen time, which I’m going to write a blog post about this, at some point, we did an unlimited screen time for a month experiment, see how there we go. And we had her requests coming back to limited screen time. But she sees that her screen time is limited, and my time is not. And you know, the reality is I’m spending 10 hours a day on the computer. And I always used to do that. But she was in preschool before. And she didn’t see that. And now she sees me on the computer all the time. And I did find a study that said that mothers on average of these people who were studied spent 6.1 hours a day on their smartphones. So, I’m not alone in this. And you know, right now I can enforce limits on her screen time. But there’s going to come a time when that’s not the case. So how can we kind of convey this idea that, you know, I am here for you, and I want to have this relationship with you. And also, there are times when I’m going to be behind the screen, and we just can’t do it right now?

Dr. Radesky 48:32

Well, there’s a couple things I’m thinking about. One is, as parents, we can try to be a little bit more conscious about our own daily screen use habits and not have it just be this automatic, habit driven experience. Right? So step one is just trying to raise it from your subconscious to your conscious where you’re like, what am I doing, like look at your screen time on your phone or whatever, see how much time you’re spending on different apps. This in itself isn’t going to, you know, make you change your behavior. But at least we need the awareness and the time to reflect upon what we’re doing on technology. And then at that point, you can also decide like, wow, I spend that much time on Facebook or on Twitter or on email. How much of that is necessary, which ones of these apps when I look at their icons, I think like, Oh, this is like, this really helps me and other ones that are like, I feel this ambivalence with it. So, I’ve had some parents say they’ve like, tried a two week uninstallation of the apps that don’t fulfil them as much. You know, always just looking at Facebook on a browser, just setting a few new rules or boundaries for themselves and then using it as an experiment. Did it help did it not? Did you miss it? Or didn’t you? Did you feel like you had a clearer head? You know, this is all such an individual experience. There’s no one size fits all prescription to give but it’s worth experimenting and examining your own reactions to changes in your technologies. When we can’t get off our laptop because we have to work at least you can show children what you’re doing.

Jen 50:12

Hey, this is boring you can do if you want.

Dr. Radesky 50:14

Yeah, I know. Like, do you want to hear what I’m doing

Jen 50:17

I’m reading papers about technoference?

Dr. Radesky 50:19

I’m yeah, I’m messaging parents on the medical record, you know, I’m not sitting here playing Minecraft, you know, I’m so… So if you explain the purpose, and how you’re using technology to like meet the greater good, I guess, or just to your job, or to make some money, like, you have to give kids that larger context of how you’re using media, and maybe even talk about your own multitasking, like, you know, I, please, during virtual learning, my seven year old just is constantly wanting to leave the Zoom calls and go into YouTube, or he’s like, just wants to explore Google Drive, and like, make new documents. And it’s all just that he’s, you know, loves to explore and is inattentive right now. So, I think we should talk about our own inattention, or our own multitasking, or like, how many browser windows do you have up? Why do we need so many up? How do you keep track of, you know, whether the news you’ve read today is real or fake? Or, you know, what is this person trying to sell you when an ad pops up? Why is this cookies notification coming up? Sure. So, there’s, you can do some of that, like natural teaching, if they’re curious about what you’re doing.

Dr. Radesky 51:31

I have done family meetings where my kids say, you know, you’re just on your phone a ton, and I will, will make some behavior change, I’ll do some behavior change. And so, will they, you know, it’ll be kind of everyone has new behavior goals. And that’s, you know, parents could maybe get some insight from their kids of like, okay, what’s the time of day when you really want me the most. And I’ll try to carve out that time to be off tech. It stinks because a lot of us as parents are now doing more media use in the evenings after kids on bed to catch up.

Jen 52:04

Yeah, it was fascinating to look back through all the literature on how to navigate working from home and it’s all talking about having separation between, you know, having a separate room and having rituals that you go through before you go to that place. And, and I’m just looking at it laughing and I was typing the questions for this episode, while my daughter sitting next to me on Kids YouTube, because we don’t let her use that unsupervised, and you know, there’s no separation whatsoever.

Dr. Radesky 52:31

Right. And there’s, it’s really hard to have this kind of intentional, you know, teaching moments, like I just described with your kids, when our heads are so full of all the different demands on parents. So, right now, parents have been asked to do like an impossible number of tasks and roles. And so maybe the most we can come out of this time, where we’re using a lot of tech our kids are using a lot of tech is, at least it will maybe make us more enlightened about our relationships with technology and what feels good about some of the things we do and what feels overloading. You know, like your daughter asked to peel back on time and I’ve heard kids on my son’s Zoom call, say, like, I need a screen break and need to go move my body. You know, what isn’t tech doing for us right now? In the ways that we what do we miss so much that we can’t get through technology? And maybe that will help us be more reflective about the boundaries we want to set after, you know, all the kind of lockdowns or social distancing changes are done.

Dr. Radesky 53:37

But I think another way to think about screen time limits for kids, is that the more we’re teaching them, well, how are you using media? Is it something like fun and creative? Are you making movie trailers? Are you designing something new? Or are you watching unboxing videos for two hours straight, you know, there’s a difference between the consumptive and kind of just being zone not zoned out. I don’t like using the words that like because we don’t know what kids are really experiencing in their inner selves, as they’re watching an unboxing video. But there’s something a little bit escapist in a lot of the say, like YouTube content for kids or slime videos, or other things that are just satisfying. But they’re not necessarily challenging our brains in new ways.

Dr. Radesky 54:25

So one thing we can do early on is expect, help kids expect that media use is not just going to be sitting there and being satisfied that it’s going to be you taking control and you finding cool stuff or you making cool stuff. And that to help kids also know how to turn it off themselves, rather than you as the parent always having to grab it out of their hands. So, some degree of their own self-awareness and self-regulation around technology I think is really important to start talking about or you know in early childhood.

Jen 54:59

Yeah. Okay. And then the elephant in the room kind of popped his head up in my mind as we as we were thinking about that, which is, you know, what, if it’s not me, what if it’s my partner? You know, I see this going on, maybe I’m trying to do, so I’m trying to take steps to do the things we’ve talked about today, but my partner is oblivious. And I see my child’s attempts to connect with my partner and I see them falling flat. You don’t have to speak from direct experience if that’s not applicable to you. But…

Dr. Radesky 55:29

You know, it’s actually funny because my husband had a flip phone for a long time, and just got his first smartphone like…

Jen 55:35

And now he’s stuck with it the whole time.

Dr. Radesky 55:37

…three years ago, or, you know, two or three years ago, so he has his first little iPhone 5s, or, you know, tiny little thing, and all of a sudden, I’d see him just on it, you know, just hanging out by the kitchen sink, looking at something. And I was like, “Ha-ha, you, you’ve made fun of me all this time for looking so absorbed in, you know, this little computer that I’m carrying around, and it was pretty interesting to watch his own reaction to all that was available now in this but, and I have finally had to start being like, we just need to put this down while we’re talking to each other because we have such limited amounts of time where we can think clearly and negotiate what our day is going to be like, and I don’t want to be competing with whatever’s coming through that device. But again, I do this for a living. So, I am pretty straightforward about these topics and my family and I guess I would just encourage other families to be pretty straightforward about it, like this is a thing. It is going on around us, we should talk about it. And we should talk about… Whenever you’re talking about a problem in your family, you can’t come in and accuse or tell someone what they’re doing wrong, have a family meeting where you’re doing some collaborative problem solving, and you say I’m seeing this as a problem. What are you seeing as a problem? Well, how do you feel about this? What are some solutions you can think of, and you have the kids involved too, so they can speak up about what they think about the spouse or partner? And you may be set some ground rules that it’s not about telling other people that they’re bad, but it’s about expressing, you know, and finding a shared solution. So, I really like the collaborative problem-solving approach that Ross Greene…

Dr. Radesky 56:09

We did an episode too.

Dr. Radesky 57:12

…An Explosive Child because it’s trying to have everyone’s buy in, in something that’s going to be hard for, for some members of the family. And my husband did try to shut off the Wi-Fi to my phone during mealtimes once we got a new Wi-Fi provider, that was really, that was really annoying. And I was like, I don’t need a policeman, I need maybe more internal motivation to not be using it around dinnertime. So I wasn’t using at the table, it was more just, I’d pick it up whenever and maybe not help so much as I could have been with preparing, you know, and wrangling the kids and stuff like that. So, you know, yeah, that’s my advice. I think the conversation about your partner using technology is going to be interwoven with all your other dynamics, about what your avoidance tactics are, or your different emotional communication styles, the role balance in your family. So just know it’s got to go deeper than just who’s using a phone, but it’s one modifiable behavior, though, like that’s why it’s worth talking about because it is something you can put down and extricate yourself from and it’ll be fine.

Jen 58:34

It will! Thank you, for reassuring us for what’s worth worrying about and for reassuring us. I’m so grateful for you spending your time with us today.

Dr. Radesky 58:44

Yeah, this was a really great conversation. Thank you.

Jen 58:47

And so, listeners can find all of the references to the more than 30 studies that we talked about today at YourParentingMojo.com/Technoference.

Jen 58:57

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

Dr. Opree  00:00

Basically, if you want to reduce materialism, you need to make sure that’s those human connections. And those other values such as generosity, that they are amplified. And so I think what works best if Why do you see young kids to invest in their self-esteem a little bit as well also for adolescence, but I think also teaching young people to be grateful to be grateful ourselves as well for all the things that we have. And really just focus on making those connections. And the tricky thing is that sometimes possessions enable these connections. But I think if we’re more focused on what’s intrinsic to us, what makes us happy, outside of possessions that then basically the emphasis will shift.

Jen  00:52

Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE  Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you’ll join us Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. And today’s episode we’re going to bring our series on the intersection of children and money to a conclusion we started out so long ago by talking with New York Times money columnist Ron Lieber about his book The Opposite of Spoiled. More recently we heard from Dr. Brad Klontz, about how we pass on money scripts to our children. And then we talked with Dr. Allison Pugh about the meaning children make out of the messages they receive about material goods. And then Dr. Esther Rozendaal on how children’s brains process advertising.  And in between we looked at what research there is on how to set up a playroom, which has of course many links with the items that we buy and use. And so finally, we’re here today with Dr. Suzanna Opree to bring the discussion up to a level that kind of draws all this together as we try and understand what materialism is, and how we pass it on to our children and what we can do if we don’t want our children to be very materialistic. Dr. Opree is Senior Assistant Professor of quantitative methods in the department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the effect of advertising and commercial media on use, materialism, and well-being. Welcome Dr. Opree!

Dr. Opree  03:00

Thank you for having me.

Jen  03:01

Okay, so I wonder if we could start with something that seems as though it should be kind of simple. And then it turned out that it wasn’t. Can you define materialism for us? Because I would, as I was reading through the literature, I found at least six different definitions of it.

Dr. Opree  03:15

Yeah, there are indeed many definitions. Luckily, though, some scholars have already tried to make sense of all those different definitions. And so I myself always go by the work of Richins and Dawson, and they say that materialism is basically three things. So first, it’s finding possessions important and just wanting to collect as many possessions as you can. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that you actually think that these possessions will make you happier, and not only in the short term, but also in the long run. And so that’s basically one of the motivators for actually collecting possessions. And then the third one has to do more with impression management, so to say. So it’s that you want to have possessions for adults to basically impress all the others around you. So think of having a big house, having a big car. As for children, and it’s that, so getting items that will make you popular among your peers, but also just the belonging and fitting in, which I know you talked about earlier in the podcast series as well. That’s important for children as well.

According to Richins and Dawson, materialism is basically three things. (1) Finding possessions important and wanting to collect as much as you can, (2) thinking possessions will make you happier, (3) having possessions to basically impress others around you.

Jen  04:27

Yeah, yeah, that definitely came out in our episode with Dr. Pugh. So, um, so I’m glad that you are using one of the definitions that I had found instead of springing a new one on me. And so I’m curious as to how you landed on that one instead of some of the others that I mean, one of them says that materialism is a personality trait. Other people think it’s a feature of people’s identities or a set of attitudes about money and wealth. What is it about this particular definition that speaks to you more than some of the others?

Dr. Opree  04:53

Well, I think it also captures the first two that you’re referring to. So when we talk about it as a personality traits I do think materialism is something that’s inherent or characters and all of us are materialistic to some extent or another. However, in that research, it’s often combined with other character traits. So they talk that materialism is paired with possessiveness, for instance, and non-generosity, envy. And I don’t think all naturalistic kids or people actually have these personality traits, but we use possessions as part of our identity. So I do think that part is true, especially in a consumer culture that we have today. Basically, anything you own is a choice. So back in the day, like to my students I always compare it to buying a car. A couple of decades ago, there was one car that you could buy like the Model-T Ford was the only one made available and it had just one color and that was it. Whereas if you go buy a car today, there are so many different each brand has so many different models and so many different colors or color combinations. And that whatever you choose then becomes a signaling of your identity, so to say.

Jen  06:08

Yeah, and I think that’s particularly, it’s interesting that you brought up the example of cars. I was just talking about this the other day, about how so many cars are essentially the same car with the same chassis, the same engine with a different, you know, wrapper on the outside. Yes, designed to appeal to some particular aspect of our taste. So yeah, and so I’m always trying to look back to previous episodes, and we did one recently on the topic of patriarchy and I was really interested to draw a connection between some research on that and something that I pulled out of the literature on materialism because one of the authors I was reading had argued that materialism and consumerism have feminizing effects on men. And I’m going to quote this by setting up a narrative linking identity or sorry, linking masculinity, rebellion and integrity on one side and femininity, conformity, domestication and commercialization on the other. Production is active while consumption is passive. The consumer is deceived by advertising into purchasing things she doesn’t really need, and this femininity is contagious. So men might also find themselves subject to the hypnoidal trance. I mean, what do you make of that? I am trying to square that with the research that says that men are actually slightly more materialistic than women I think.

Dr. Opree  07:25

They are. Yeah, yeah. For me, it was a very interesting point of view, actually a new one for me. So if I actually look at the literature. So Tim Kasser, for instance, has a yeah has worked on the topic of materialism for many years, as well. And he also studies, he linked it to capitalism, basically. And he, I believe, last year also released a book called Hyper-Capitalism, which is great. It’s actually a comic book telling you everything about materialism or what you need to know. But what he also explains there, is that he links it to capitalism, but he’s saying so materialism often has is occurring in capitalist societies where there’s also a huge emphasis on a succession of our success and ambition, of status, wealth. And that’s actually if we look at intercultural research, those kinds of societies are actually classified as being more masculine. So there is more emphasis on being the best, so to say then taking care of each other. And so we also see that in countries where actually there is less capitalism and less materialism, that there is, for instance, yeah, more emphasis on values such as harmony and equality, social justice, so this part about how materialism could be. Yeah. How did you call it? Feminizing?

Jen  08:50

Right. Yes.

Dr. Opree  08:52

To me, that’s an interesting point of view that I will definitely explore further, but that I wasn’t familiar with.

Jen  09:00

Yeah, it almost seems as though the men are looking to the, I mean, it’s sort of a cycle that men are advertising to the women who of course most advertising agencies are mostly run by men and are predominantly populated by men, and so they’re creating these advertisements for women and saying, well, you’re listening to this stuff and, and you’re being hypnotized by it and your feminizing us. There was some kind of strange circular logic in it to me as well. So, okay, that brings us to the question of why do we care about materialism? Why does it matter? So let’s start with how materialism is linked to well-being what do you see there?

Dr. Opree  09:32

Yeah, so there’s actually an interesting link. So in my research has always distinguished well-being from life satisfaction, which are two different things. So well-being are basically all the conditions that needs to be met in order for you to become a happy individual. And what we see in research among adults is that adults who are more materialistic, they become less satisfied with their lives over time and it also works the other way around. So if as an adult, you’re less satisfied, then you’ll also grow to become more materialistic, as a sort of coping mechanism. And we observe this coping mechanism in children as well. So we see that if children are unhappy that then they are more materialistic. They’re also more susceptible to the effects of advertising, but not the other way around. So if they’re materialistic, as kids, they will not become less satisfied.

Jen  10:30

All right. So let’s dig into that a little bit. Then. What specifically do you find, I guess I’m not sure if this research has been done on children, but are there links between I guess its well-being as you’re defining it rather than life satisfaction and materialism? Do we see a lot of negative impacts there? Or are there some positive ones as well, maybe?

Dr. Opree  10:49

Well, actually, that’s still partly to be explored. So we aren’t too sure yet how that works together. But we do see that that link between materialism and life satisfaction.

Jen  11:00

Yeah, I was thinking about research on things like depression, and anxiety, and narcissism, and substance abuse.

Dr. Opree  11:07

Well, there’s research on that. Yeah. Okay, that’s and a very specific form of people’s mental well-being basically. That if you look at research on self-esteem, for instance, then we do see that youth or adults with less self-esteem, they become more materialistic as well. Similarly, in my own research, I also found that children who experience a big life events, so this could be moving to a new town, but it could also be experiencing someone getting sick in their families, for instance, and then they become more materialistic as well. So for kids, as somehow these possessions seem like a way out in order to feel better.

Jen  11:53

Yeah, and just thinking about the literature on divorce on that as well because I know there’s research on divorce and materialism. I’m not sure the extent to which the parents drive this by seeing that the child’s unhappy and buying them things as a tool to kind of express, you know, I still love you even though we’re not together. And do you think that there is an element of the parents are driving this or it does it come from the children who are looking to possessions where they feel as though something is missing from other aspects of their life? Or is it kind of a circular process again, there?

Dr. Opree  12:26

Yeah, well, so one of those life events is also divorce. So we also included that in our research, and then again, we did see that the children whose parents were divorced, that indeed, they would become more materialistic as well. Part of it is compensation. I think, also because if you’re spending less time with your kids, sometimes that is the outcome of divorce as well. You may want to compensate a little bit for your absence. And to a certain extent, like I wouldn’t say that that’s all that. I just think you need to be aware of the kind of message that you’re giving out and also the kind of message you give out while doing so. So it’s okay for instance, if you want to create a new bedroom in your house, if you want your kids to feel safe and secure in a new home, then yeah, I don’t see the harm in getting them new possessions.

Jen  13:20

Okay. And then sort of heading back up to the broader theme, I was really interested to see that materialistic values are associated with making more anti-social and self-centered decisions. And some people had done some fascinating studies on things like changing price tags on merchandising, I think this was a survey where they asked people if they’d ever done this or knowingly used an expired coupon which gosh, I’ve done behaving in less pro social and more selfish ways. What links do you see there?

Dr. Opree  13:50

Yeah, with that type of research, I always wonder myself, is it then materialism or maybe a personality trait that is related to materialism. So in my own research within adolescence, we saw that adolescent kids who are more materialistic, tend to be more narcissistic and entitled as well. And so, especially imagine that something like entitlement would perhaps make a bigger difference there than materialism. So if you change the price tag, if you want to get it cheaper, it’s probably because you feel like that’s the price that’s right for you or that you’re sort of justifying it maybe in that way. So I think it’s it has to do with something linked to materialism rather than materialism itself.

Jen  14:39

Yeah. And of course, that gets to the point of correlation rather than causation, doesn’t it? The research shows that and I had written down materialistic values are associated with making more of these decisions. And because if we if we just sort of do a survey, we’re finding that these two things vary together, but we can’t say that it’s the materialism that’s causing the unethical behavior, and it could, in fact be other things that the researchers weren’t even looking at. So, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that’s sort of a fair bit on the personal stuff. And of course, there are other reasons as well related to the environment. And the amount of waste that it produces, which we don’t ever really see, you know, when we throw our device away, or whatever, I think is a way we’re throwing away a small fraction of the complete amount of waste that was created in the lifecycle of the product. What do you see about how people who have materialistic values view nature and see these circumstances?

Dr. Opree  15:37

Yeah, well, I think this partly has to do with consumer culture as well. So in a sense that if we look at the way our countries have changed over the years, and also how production processes have changed, so I myself, for instance, I grew up in a small town, and we had a big agricultural sector and there was a lot of these greenhouses as well. So there was actually produce being grown nearby. But if you go there now it’s all suburbs like all these fields are gone. And so even though we grew up, like seeing what’s happening, really knowing where produce come from, I can imagine the same like if you grow up near farms if you see animals being raised, and then the connection to nature is, of course, closer than if you live somewhere where you never observe it. And the tricky thing with the waste is that of course, we ourselves we create waste. Unfortunately, in our homes, not all foods get eaten, or indeed, we get rid of machines as well, that may be could’ve still been fixed, but it’s easier just to replace it with something new that will work immediately, so to say. On the one hand is actually also part of the production process. So as I said, we’re further away from it. But with all the produce for instance, we don’t see the process before the store and so we’re creating waste ourselves but actually the industry is also creating waste. So we have certain standards for what fruit and vegetables should look like, for instance, and anything that doesn’t meet the criteria and will be cut from the process and will not make it to the stores. And so there’s also ways in different parts of the process that I think can be handled as well. So that’s one thing. And then on a more individual level. Yeah, it’s tricky that we tend to replace things sooner than we used to.

Jen  17:37

Mm hmm. Yeah. And I had read the individuals who are focused on more materialistic values really have more of a negative attitude towards the environment. Do you think that it’s just that they don’t think about it as much or they think about it and they don’t care or what do you think’s driving that?

Dr. Opree  17:52

Maybe a little bit convenience, but they prioritize their own goals over the common ones. So we do see that in materialistic societies, there’s more emphasis on the individual. So you want to drive your car and not think about the emissions that it’s causing, or you want to book that flight or so that could be one thing. I think it’s more a societal problem than an individual problem, though.

Jen  18:18

Okay. All right. And so children, when they’re born, tend not to have so much desire for products. So I’m curious about how this develops, you know, how does children’s understanding of these issues shift as they get older?

Dr. Opree  18:32

Yeah, well, the good thing is, is also with the environmental issues, like you can still teach children a lot of things. If we just teach the current generation, well, then maybe they’ll behave better than we are doing right now. Kids do yeah, of course, when they’re very little like they can even be entertained with very little, doesn’t have to be the most impressive toy ever as long as they can play with it. Touch it. Maybe smell it or like then, then it’s fine. But the more again, older they become, the more choice they get, of course. And there’s also this part where they at one point start to realize all the things that they can ask for their birthdays. So the first birthday, like they’re completely unaware that it is their birthday. But then the older they get, it really becomes this big event that they’re living towards. And the same thing with Christmas, like it suddenly becomes this big thing.

Jen  19:28

Gosh, do you have young children by any chance?

Dr. Opree  19:31

No, I do have to small…

Jen  19:34

It sounds as though you’ve lived this many times.

Dr. Opree  19:37

No, I see it a little bit through my own family.

Jen  19:40

Yeah, I can imagine and they start to recognize brands as well, right?

Dr. Opree  19:44

Yeah, very early. So most four-year olds would already know McDonald’s for instance, they just need to see the big yellow M and then they already know what time it is basically.

Jen  19:58

Yeah, my daughter’s actually confused between McDonald’s and In-N-Out, I think because they’re both yellow, which was possibly a tactical mistake on somebody’s part. But yeah, she isn’t quite got the shape yet, but she knows the yellow. And so this is sort of very young children and then over time it moves from recognition of brands to the realization that some brands are cool and other brands are not cool. And how does that happen?

Dr. Opree  20:23

Yeah, that doesn’t happen like somewhere during primary school. So I think part of it is already in younger children as well. So I must say my niece who’s four years old, and she already has clear preferences as well which articles are really dictated by the kind of shows she’s watching on television. So here Paw Patrol, for instance, is a big thing. And so then she wants all things from Paw Patrol or and before this, it was Frozen. There is this and all the kids around her are having the same things as well. So we do already see that even at that age like they have common preferences so to say, but it’s more driven still by with what they find fun themselves. And it isn’t until later. So actually, in the literature, It’s often said around the age of eight where children start to realize that brands or products cannot only have a function for them personally, but that they can also signal something else to the others. And so this sense of belonging as well that you need to have these things in order to fit in, starts to develop around that same age.

Jen  21:35

And Gosh, where did that come from? I mean, I’m just thinking back 100 years, 200 years, where did this idea that you have to have a certain logo on your shoes to fit in come from?

Dr. Opree  21:47

And yeah, good question. Maybe a little bit consumer culture as well, but it’s become more important because you have again, this potential to differentiation so that it is easier to recognize an in group and out group and that you want to be part of the in group. That because brands have become more important over time, that probably is the same for kids that then it became a bigger thing for them as well.

Jen  22:13

So as products get more differentiated, they become more used as a signal of who’s in and who’s out. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And so we spent a whole episode talking about advertising. And we talked a little bit about brands here. But these values are related to materialism are also passed on from parents to children as well. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Dr. Opree  22:32

Yeah. So actually, I think that’s good news, especially after I listened to your previous podcast that you and parents still have the biggest influence. So yes, the media has an influence as well, advertising has an influence. But if and this is something that I would do in my studies as well, so if I look at what predicts children’s materialism, if possible, if I have access to the parents, I can also ask them for their level of materialism. And we see that that The biggest predictor. So it’s really the kind of values you have yourself. That’s what you’re passing on. So if you’re worried that your children might become too materialistic, then then try to think of, yeah, really the kind of values that you find important that are less focused on possessions or products or brands, and try to reinforce those more.

Parents have the biggest influence in children being materialistic. It’s the kind of values parents have for themselves and what they are passing on.

Jen  23:23

Yeah. And it was I was actually doing some thinking on this over the weekend, as well, and how values are defined. And even the way that somebody who says that they’re family oriented is one of their primary values. And that can be expressed in different ways, too. I mean, what we could do is if we’re saying family is most important to me, that could mean I’m going to spend as much time as possible with my kids. Or it could also mean I’m going to give my children every advantage that I can and that means I need to work really hard and I’m going to buy them a lot of stuff and make sure they get into the best schools and so on. So even though we might say family is our most important value, there are so many different ways that that that can actually be expressed in the children’s experience of it. That could go more or less materialistic.

Dr. Opree  24:05

Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Jen  24:07

Yeah. And so I think has also been linked to parenting styles as well, isn’t there? Wasn’t there some research about mothers who were cold and controlling and children focusing on sort of attaining a sense of security through external sources like financial success?

Dr. Opree  24:24

Yeah, there’s several studies similar to that one out there. And I think what mainly we need to take from these studies because they’re awfully specific, but that’s basically children thrive best under a nurturing environment, they do want to experience the warmth. And that’s also way more predictable their life satisfaction than materialism. So the fact that we did not find this effect of materialism on children’s life satisfaction, is also we’ve explained that by the fact that a lot of children thankfully, have a buffer basically they are from nice families they have a warm home to go to. And that in the end is what determines their happiness most.

Jen  25:06

Okay, all right, that’s really helpful. And then just to dig a little further into a couple of things related to that there was a study that looked at providing conditional and unconditional material rewards even when the children were young. And so this is the idea of, you know, if you do this, you can have a candy or I also use them as punishments. If you don’t do this, I’m going to take your toy away, tended to value goods as an indicator of success when they were adults. So there again, this is a correlational result only not we can’t say that one causes the other. But that has a lot of links to work that we’ve looked at on rewards and whether rewards are effective at motivating people. And yes, they can indeed be very effective for changing short term behavior, but even beyond the idea of changing short term behavior seems as though they have much broader reaching implications than we might ever have thought.

Dr. Opree  25:54

Yeah, I’m not saying an issue with it kind of research, even though I think there is some merit to it, but I think we should be careful interpreting retrospective research. So if we ask adults today what they remember about their childhoods, because if you are materialistic as an adult, then if you think about your past, then you’re probably more trying to think about possessions as well and the things you did or didn’t have when growing up. Whereas if you’re less focused on possessions, then you’re less likely to call those out first. So that could be something that really people reflect on their lives based on the values they have today. But then still, yeah, we do see that possessions are used as rewards. We also suggest with good report cards, for instance, that you get a little bit of money from your grandparents or, and again, it’s the same with materialism itself. I think, like we’re all materialistic to some extent, and it’s not necessarily bad because it does make us strive for certain goals and trying to set and reach them. And so I also think it’s okay to give little rewards every now and then to say that you’re proud as long as it’s kept within certain limits. And that you’re really praising the child, for instance, for their perseverance at it, you’re really labelling the positive aspect that you want to reward versus just getting something. So reading again, the message, and taking things away is always tricky, because that’s what we see. Also in research when it comes to children and media, as soon as you’re saying that they cannot watch something, it becomes this forbidden fruit, which they then become obsessed with. And so that’s the same if you take one of their favorite toys away or their video console or like, then they will get obsessed with that, because that’s on their mind. That’s the thing that they want to get back.

Jen  27:45

Uh huh. Yeah. And that also fits so well with the research on children’s eating habits. And if you make vegetables into what researchers call, sort of a gateway food to getting the food that they really want, like a dessert then it doesn’t make them like vegetables any more, and it just makes them want the dessert more. Which is probably of the opposite of what the parent was trying to do.

Dr. Opree  28:08

Even though if you get them to eat their vegetables often enough, they will start to like some of them.

Jen  28:14

Yes, potentially. And it’s that if you can get them to eat them often enough part that is the hard part, isn’t it when they don’t like them. Yeah. And you also pointed out some research to me on parents who allow children a say and family purchase decisions. Can you tell us about that?

Dr. Opree  28:22

Yeah! Yeah. So it’s got to do with basically, I think, Esther, in our with you on a way that children deal with advertising and that your parents, as a parent, you can influence that as well by the kind of conversations you have at it. She also gave the example for teacher that if you as a teacher, just say don’t listen to advertising because it’s bad for business, not using average children don’t really think beyond that. And so we see the same thing when it comes to consumer-related conversations. That is, if parents just simply say, like for instance, when they’re out shopping or when your child want something like no, because I know best or we’re going to buy this for this and that reason, and always just making the decision by themselves, then children don’t really learn to reflect on consumer related matters either. Whereas if you have a conversation with them, so if you discuss certain family purchases, I must say some findings in the literature are ridiculous. So there is parents who will consult their children on what kind of car to buy. At that sort of thing to me seems a little bit far fetched. But you can imagine that, for instance, when it comes to cereals, for instance, as a parent, you would consult with your child because if you buy the wrong brand, they’re not going to use.

Jen  29:49

And then you’re in trouble.

Dr. Opree  29:51

So and it doesn’t always mean like sometimes you need to restrict the choice options, so that you’re not saying you can choose between anything between just like, which one do you prefer this one or that one. And basically, they’re learning then to reflect on the qualities of both products, but also to develop their own sense of agency. Because that’s the tricky thing as a parent, if you’re being strict and saying we’re doing it my way, and then children start to look for decision makers outside of themselves. So they are also, parents with that sort of parenting style, run the risk that their children, once they start, stop listening to them as teenagers for instance, that they then turn to their friends and wants to find their opinion on everything. Whereas you really want your child to be able to gain autonomy and make decisions for themselves.

Jen  30:45

Mm hmm. Okay, so that segues nicely into the contribution that peers make to children’s materialism then and I think we had seen in our interview with Dr. Pugh that peers are quite influential over children’s sort of view of brands and the way that They consume brands. How do you see the link here between the contribution that peers make specifically to children’s materialism?

Dr. Opree  31:07

Yeah. So the peers, actually have an influence in two different ways. So we have something that we call informational peer pressure, where children will actually sort of talk with their friends about their preferences, not only their own, but also wanting to find out what the other child likes, and for what reason. And so to sort of get an idea about anything that’s out there and basically just collect different opinions. And then they can sort of use that information in two ways. So there will be kids who sort of take that in, but don’t follow it to a tee. Other people, other children’s preferences, but there’s also children who are more susceptible to something we call normative peer pressure. And so that’s when you’re not only using this information to determine your own likes and dislikes, but where are you actually copying the other’s behavior. And that’s of course, especially when it comes to materialism, that’s the thing where you get into this, I want to have this particular toy, because all the other kids in my class have it as well.

Jen  32:12

Mm hmm. And so yeah, I saw one study in which children in an experimental group were more likely to choose a playmate who had a new toy that they’d seen advertised. So it seems as though there’s a big sort of curiosity, but also coolness factor involved there.

Dr. Opree  32:29

Yeah, a little bit of both. I would say I think the curiosity factor is also a big thing, which we also now see online. So you’ll have these ad channels where really children are unboxing toys, and other children love watching these, even though they cannot play with the toys themselves because they’re just watching the video. But they are still curious to the toys and what they can do. And so yes, this other kid might be cool for having this cool toy, but then I think it would depend on whether the kid actually likes the toy themselves. If they would want to have it yes or no.

Should parents buy a toy for their child for the sake of fitting in?

Jen  33:08

So do you think parents should cave in if they feel, you know, they don’t really want to buy a toy for their child, but the child really wants to because they really want to fit in in school. What do you think?

Dr. Opree  33:19

Yeah, I think you should always check to which extent the story is accurate. Because sometimes kids can also say, but everyone has it. And it’s actually not true. So they are especially the older they get, the more aware they are of what kind of arguments work and don’t work. And this one is one that typically works well. So if you’re saying like I won’t fit in otherwise, then, of course, no parent will want their child to be the misfit in class and they all want them to have friends. And so it’s a compelling argument. Yeah, so check the story, but also think of what it is that they’re asking for and also if this is a product that you would actually be comfortable providing yourself as well. So sometimes these the things they can ask for are very small things. For instance, here in the Netherlands at one point, there was this crazy button certain type of pen sets, which was really just pens that they could draw and write with and that’s it which is of course, even though they are more expensive than the nonbranded ones, but which is different than asking for a PlayStation for instance because that’s way more expensive. So I think also, within as a parent, you should also determine for yourself sort of what kind of praises you want to Yeah, go buy if you think Okay, so this is justified yes or no. And sometimes you can also just make children wait so you can say, okay, you can have that PlayStation, if you can afford it, but you’ll have to wait for it until your birthday or until Christmas. Might ask it from Santa, and to actually at least teach them that they cannot have everything right there and then.

Jen  35:09

Yeah. Okay. And so I want to look a little more at advertising. And I know that you’re familiar with Dr. Esther Rozendaal’s work. I think you actually were colleagues together. Is that right?

Dr. Opree  35:19

Yes. And we actually also did research together.

Jen  35:22

Yeah. Okay, awesome. So we also have a bit of a basic understanding that she’s walked us through about how advertising kind of shapes the way children think about products. And so you looked you did a study looking at whether and how advertising exposure leads to materialism. So can you tell us what you found there, please?

Dr. Opree  35:41

Yeah, so what we actually see with that advertising exposure and materialism, is that the thing advertising does first and foremost, that’s why it’s being created is that it actually makes children long for the products they see in these advertisements. So they’re very flashy like we often see In advertisements. And I think Esther actually mentioned this as well, so how you actually sell a toy, it’s actually by showing that that cool kid has the toy and then all the other kids around him so that if you get that toy, you will actually be the one always the one everyone wants to play with, for instance. So advertising in that sense, often uses certain techniques to draw, get children’s attention, but also to draw them in. And there’s also lots of songs for instance, so if your children may have recalled some songs from advertising where you felt like a hole, please don’t sing it again. So it is very likely, yes, advertisers are successful in getting brand names and branded products into children’s minds and to actually sell them. And so this is what we see is that children who are exposed to a lot of advertising or at least the more they are exposed to advertising, the more they will actually long for heavily advertised products. And then and that sort of thing. transcends beyond that at some stage, because then they’re thinking of all these things that they’ve seen in the advertisements. But of course, life is not just all advertising, they do play with other kids, they also see what kind of toys and brands they have. And then they sort of start to as soon as they start longing for possessions, they will gradually also expand their scope of the kind of possessions they want, which goes beyond the ones that they see in advertising. The advertising that gets them started on other brand and possessions, but then it moves bigger than that.

Jen  37:37

Okay. And just to be clear, here, this was a causal result that you found, right? This was not a correlation, where what two things are linked? This was a causal result.

Dr. Opree  37:44

This was a causal result. Yes.

Jen  37:46

Okay. And so you were looking at 8to 11 year old children. Do you think the same holds true for younger children?

Dr. Opree  37:53

Yeah, so I’ve actually, we’ve also done a study with six to eight-year olds. To see If they’re materialism and advertising exposure, we’re related as well. And then we did find that actually four to six to eight-year olds, the effects of advertising isn’t as strong yet.

Jen  38:13

Okay. All right. Well, that’s some consolation, I guess. And then I read a bunch of your papers in preparation for this episode and was struck by some things that seemed to me to not quite fit together and I was hoping to get your help sorting it out. So there was a paper in 2013, and I’m going to quote a sentence from it, “Young Children may not recognize product symbolism and therefore unlikely to believe that products bring happiness and success. However, this does not mean that possessions can’t take a central place in their lives.” And then there was a later study where you were testing a scale that you developed to measure materialism in children, and it seemed like you’re reaching the opposite conclusion. You said, “Our study showed that material possessions do not only take a central place in young children’s lives, but are also associated with happiness and success.” And then an even more recent paper, you found that, “Advertising exposure did not predict positive relationships with others.” Which included peers actually. So what sense Can we make of all of this, please?

Dr. Opree  39:07

Can we start with the first group and you certainly recap it for me.

Jen  39:11

Yes, so earliest one not recognizing product symbolism and likely to believe that products bring happiness and success, but they can still take a central place in their lives. And then the second one, that material possessions do take a central place and are also associated with happiness and success.

Dr. Opree  39:25

Yeah, so this was actually the real reason to do the study among the six in the eight-year olds. Because if you look at the literature, and it’s actually the same literature I quoted earlier, as well, so the idea in is that children start to recognize product symbolism around the age of eight. And so that’s when they realize that they can use possessions also to become happier in the long run, and to belong and become more popular. But that was sort of the cutoff point that was used in the literature and while we’ve discussed it as well that the media landscape has changed or society left And so we thought let’s replicates previous research, do it among slightly younger group to sort of see are indeed is this true? Is it that it’s Yeah, that the product symbolism is only at the age of eight? Or is it also true that those younger kids don’t only want to collect things because that’s what actually this finding is also partly based that’s young children, if they, and Esther also talked about freebies, for instance, and so here we are in the Netherlands, we also had a big grocery store, who at Christmas time, give children the opportunity to go out collect houses for a small Christmas Village. And so they just want as many as they can get. So they don’t necessarily care if they have every single unique individual one, as long as they have many, whereas the older children, of course, they want to have all those houses as well, but they also want all the additional more unique ones. And so the idea was always that, okay, so young children want to collect stuff, but they don’t necessarily think beyond that, and what our research has actually shown. So we looked at how do you measure materialism among six to eight year olds? And really just testing like, do they have this notion of their products can bring happiness and that they can help you belong? And actually, they showed signs of that. So that’s how to work on fixing is that the old study didn’t, then we didn’t have these insights then which we do have today. But we actually know that all three facets of materialism can be present in older children as well.

Jen  41:41

Okay. And so just to draw this to a conclusion then, what do you think is the most important influence on children’s development in materialism? Is it still parents after we’ve explored peers and advertising and everything else?

Dr. Opree  41:51

I think so.

Jen  41:52

Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s some consolation. Okay, so I would like to look a little bit about kind of what the next generation is going to be like as they grow up and what implications that has for our society and, and I was seeing some dissonance in the literature because on one side, more than half of nine to 14 year olds agreed who were surveyed, when you grow up, the more money you have, the happier you are, and over 60% agree that the only kind of job I want when I grow up is one that gets me a lot of money. You know, the best and brightest of today’s students today want to go into investment banking, consulting, where you can make the most money. And yet we’re also seeing these trends away from purchases of things and more towards renting and purchasing experiences. And so I’m trying to understand whether you think young people today are more materialistic than ever before or not?

Dr. Opree  42:45

Yeah, so I think those are two different questions. There is a very specific research which has been done at the University of Tilburg, which I think is amazing because they are the first one they have this big longitudinal data sets. So they could actually, because they had thousands of individuals in it between and young ages up until all the way up into a pensioners. And so they were able to track these people over time and to actually see so what is predicting people’s materialism at that point of time? Is it their age? Is it the sense of the times? So also with for instance, also part of their data set also covered the economic crisis? So they really saw an increase in people’s materialistic values, because then what if you have nothing, then you become even more obsessed with getting it all back? Or whether it’s a gold horse effect? So whether it’s really that we are raised on different parenting styles, for instance, and it’s a very complicated study, but it does lead to very clear results and what they have found is that yes, younger people are more materialistic, and that is simply due to their age.

Jen  43:58

Okay, and why specific their age, what about their age?

Dr. Opree  44:02

So they still mainly look at yeah, so 18 years and up, but we do see with younger children. So there’s also research that has looked at basically what’s going on between the ages of nine to 17, I believe. And there we see also that the actually it takes with get a change from middle childhood, so that’s typically eight to 12, to adolescence, so 12 and up, which has to do with the fact that there is a lot of like, children, there’s a lot changing in their lives. So at least in the Netherlands, and this differs per country. But for instance, here at age 12, they make the transition from primary school to secondary school. And so they have to they are losing all the kids they used to play with. They’re entering a new school with all these kids in their classroom that they don’t know yet. And so that’s a part that makes them insecure. Will I be able to get new friends? And that’s also when they sort of yeah, again seek this assurance or security in brands that is as long as they have the right things they might be more likely to fit in. So that’s partly what drives it. So it’s transitions they experience. But of course, it’s not only transitions in the type of high school, but also in their own body. So we know that teenagers are very insecure, because their bodies are changing, they have to get used to this. Suddenly the kind of relationships they have to their peers are changing as well. And so it’s a very insecure time. And yeah, then possessions can provide a sense of security.

Jen  45:41

Yeah. And I’m just also thinking back to what you said about you know, if you have nothing then you will do what you can to get it all back and of course, getting it back as soon as you had it in the first place. And yeah, reminds me of the links between materialism and poverty and teens living in poverty tend to be more materialistic than those from more affluent households. And I think some researchers have pointed out that maybe low self-esteem as a possible mediator here, and then others have asked adolescence, in juvenile detention to write about their dreams. And notice that many of them are dreaming about money and possessions. And yet they’re released from detention with few skills to achieve these. And so what how do you get money in possessions if you don’t have sort of employable skills increases the likelihood of reoffending? And so I think, yeah, there are really profound links there between the inequalities that we see in our society as well.

Dr. Opree  46:29

Yeah, for sure, yeah. And that has to do with the fact that if you don’t have all the same things our kids have, of course, there can be quite confrontational as well. And so because of that, the discrepancy, the perceived discrepancies are also big and makes kids more materialistic, because they want to achieve that same goal. And it oftentimes also has to do with the parents who really want to do well for their children. So if they particularly want their children to do better and to fit in and to make sure they have all the right things. So that’s another thing and what we, for instance, also see. So I’ve actually also done, research myself on this together with a colleague, Agnes Nairn. And we’ve actually looked at these groups as well. So this work is still to be published. But we, for instance, are as well a difference in for instance, advertising exposure. So kids from less affluent families, they are not necessarily more susceptible to advertising, but they are exposed to a greater deal because they watch more media to begin with. So they are watching more television, they’re using the computer more, because sometimes they’re home alone. And that’s, yeah, the thing they turn to or when the affluent kids are going to all their different sports clubs, for instance, if your parents can’t afford that, then what do you do you sit at home and you try to entertain yourself there..

Jen  47:52

Yep. Yeah. And that really counters the sort of more common narrative of you know, it’s the poor children who don’t know what to think about these things and needs to be protected. And yeah, so it speaks much more to the inequality than any kind of other discrepancy that might commonly sort of be floated around. And just as we sort of move towards the idea of potentially reducing materialism, you would introduce me to the idea of post-materialism. And so I went and found a paper it was a super interesting paper from 1971. On this guy, Engelhart, who I think was one of the earliest researchers on it, and I was vastly amused to see his analysis. So he had this table in one of his papers, and it was about Britain’s declining relative economic position in the last century, which of course hits close to home for me. And so from 1900 to 1940, the US and Britain had the highest Gross National Product per capita, US first and Britain second by 1950, Sweden’s number two by 1970. The US is still number one, but eight other European countries are outranking Britain and then he goes on to describe his research that shows that the youngest cohort in each of these countries is more likely to endorse values that are post materialistic. And so, you know, non-acquisitive, and that the percentage of people who have post materialist values are highest in the countries with the highest gross national product per capita. And then I’m thinking, but that itself is a measure of how much people are buying. So how can we say that the people in these countries hold more post materialist values, if we’re also seeing them buying more stuff, because the GNP is going up?

Dr. Opree  49:32

Yeah, I think there’s many things to make of this. And I’m not sure what the explanation is. But if I think of it, yeah, several things come to mind. So one thing could be I don’t think that’s it, but it could be that it’s sort of rebellion against the status quo. So we do see that in yeah, societies where there’s high level of materialism and consumerism, where people will rebel against it so that they sort of feel like that this is not what we’re supposed to do. Another thing could be is that it seems to be a false. They never know how to pronounce that word, but like, it’s not necessarily one or the other. So you could imagine that, yes, you want to buy things, but you also, yeah, or cherishing other values as well, which are more post materialistic. So actually the example you gave of parents and how you can express that you really value family, like I think that’s an example of it. So in a materialistic point of view, you could emphasize that by spending a lot of money on your kids and on your home and on presence for each other, etc. But if you take a more post materialistic approach, then it’s more about the nurturing and spending time together, for instance, that you actually placed that first. So even though then you’re still in this capitalistic society where a lot of spending is going on you as an individual can still make a different choice as well. And I think there’s also a difference between really materialism simply because you want to own more things and because you really want to signal your status, or because and this is still part of materialism as well, because you just really cherish those possessions you have. So yes, you’re spending a lot of money and buying expensive things, but you do cherish them and the things they provide for you. And so you’re maybe spending your money in different ways as well. But it’s yeah, I think that could be something to do with it as well, if you’re appreciative, more of the things that you have, and also the fact that having money also can enable you to spend more time with your family, for instance, that’s part of it as well. So maybe I’m getting a bit off track. But what we plan to see in the Netherlands is that we have of course, more dual incomes. So we’re both the father and mother or or both parents are working. And so this is often seen as something which is characteristics of capitalist society as well. But because they are both working, they can also sacrifice a little bit of their income. So both this is popular in the Netherlands for both mothers but also fathers to say instead of working five days per week and going to work four days a week or three, so that I can actually be home with my child and so for mothers, it might mean that they are home less than they used to be two decades ago. But actually for two fathers, it means that their home more often. And that’s also a sign of post materialism, where are they actually value that more than creating the additional income?

Jen  52:44

Mm hmm. Okay. And so as we wrap up here, a lot of researchers have proposed a lot of ideas about how we could potentially reduce materialism. And so if we sort of take the premise that materialism is something that you want to reduce, what are some of the things that you think might be more effective and others I know taxes are one that’s commonly talked about if you tax things more then people won’t be able to buy as much. But then sort of a counter argument to that is people seem to feel as though well, if I can afford it, I’m going to buy it and then I sort of have this moral license to engage in this behavior, because I’ve paid for the privilege. And so there can be so many unintended consequences with a lot of these ideas and policies. So maybe can you walk us through some of the ones that you think might be most successful?

Dr. Opree  53:27

Yeah, most people don’t like their governments who tell them what to do and to pay more taxes, but what we do see so for me, it also has to do with the fact so Kasser is the one talks about that capitalistic societies are more materialistic and that the more materialistic they are, the less emphasis there is on the common goal. But also what we see on then a more individual level is that individuals sort of, again, put the ambition and a success in wealth first, over the connections with others and taking care, and just doing other stuff that can provide happiness as well. And he says that basically, if you want to reduce materialism, you need to make sure that’s those human connections and those other values such as generosity, that they are amplified. And so I think what we’re best if well at least in young kids to invest in their self-esteem a little bit as well, also for adolescents, but I think also teaching young people to be grateful, to be grateful ourselves as well for all the things that we have, and really just focus on making those connections. And the tricky thing is that sometimes possessions enable these connections. But I think if we’re more focused on what’s intrinsic to us, what makes us happy, outside of possessions that then basically the emphasis will shift.

If we want to reduce materialism, we need to make sure that human connections and other values such as generosity are amplified.

Jen  54:55

Okay. All right. So that’s super helpful overview and I want to look specifically at maybe sort of giving things and giving money and things like charitable giving, it’s pretty common that when you give money to some kind of cause online that you can have your name attached to it. And so everybody can see how much you gave. And of course, I’m sure the idea is to pressure you into giving more. But there’s sort of a status thing there, isn’t it? And so that to me, it almost seems as though that’s increasing materialistic values, even though I’m giving something away rather than buying something.

Dr. Opree  55:31

Yeah, it’s a new way to display your wealth. Because barely you don’t need the money as much like you can give it away. You have so much of it, and that’s fine.

Jen  55:40

Yeah. Okay. And then on gifts. I struggle with this so much, particularly at Christmas. Because listeners know I’m an atheist, but somehow we somehow we still celebrate Christmas in our family. And my five year old has requested that next year, she only received candy and money for Christmas so that she can buy more candy. And so there was this awesome study that I read the analyzed children’s letters written to Santa. And it defined a gift as I’ll quote, “Any provision of good or service without guarantee of return with a view to creating nourishing or recreating social bonds between people.” And so I’m thinking, Okay, why do we need gifts to nourish social bonds? And then secondly, are Christmas gifts, really an example of social bonding? Because the letters that were studied in that research, were talking about, you know, oh, I’ve been so good this year, and I really deserve whatever toy it is that I’m asking you to give me. And so it seems so transactional and not related to social bonds at all. What do you think about that?

Dr. Opree  56:40

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think first of all, presence can have like, can create or signal social bonds between people. So sometimes you will see that people will go out of their way to find the perfect gift to demonstrate their love, so to say So in those cases, if they can be used to signal, like the strength of a friendship, for instance, or a family connection or a love connection. So the potential is there. But then again depends on the way that the gift is actually presented. So the kind of gift it is, but also the message it is presented with. So Christmas gifts have the potential to nourish social bonds. But if it’s indeed just like a wishlist, and a generic explanation of why they deserve this, then the potential is less there, I would say but then still, yeah. Then if you think of all those retrospective studies of people, as parents or adults looking back on their childhoods, they will recall getting certain things for Christmas as well, but wants to take from that kind of research, I think as well is that if people look back, they might not always mention the most expensive toy. So sometimes, the things children are happy with the most are the things least expected and that probably didn’t cost the most money?

Jen  58:04

Yes, yeah. I’m thinking about the collections of cardboard boxes and empty yoghurt containers, that have been keeping my daughter engaged for weeks. Yeah. And what about you had mentioned sort of teaching values and I’m just thinking about some of the research that’s talked about things like gratitude journals and encouraging people to reflect on their values and mindfulness and, and those kinds of things. Do you see a lot of value in those?

Dr. Opree  58:27

Yeah, to some extent. So I think these kind of methods work, at least if you say to look for adults, and probably the same thing goes for kids, especially if you talk about keeping a daily journal. Like at one point, I did a study asking kids to mark in a television guide, every program they’ve seen, they will do a tremendous job on day one and two, but like after a couple of days, they sort of lose focus. And I think we you run the same risk with a gratitude journal. So if you want to reinforce this, then maybe it should be dinner table conversation instead. Yeah, to ensure that it’s happening, but there’s definitely potential. Yes.

Jen  59:08

Okay, so the basic thing we want to leave with here is there is hope.

Dr. Opree  59:12

There. Yeah, most certainly. So yes, definitely.

Jen  59:15

Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time and your voluminous research with us.

Dr. Opree  59:22

Well, you’re welcome.

Jen  59:23

So listeners can find all of the references and there are many for today’s episode, and other things that we’ve discussed as well at yourparentingmojo.com/materialism.

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

References:

Batinga, G.L., de Rezende Pinto, M., Resende, S.P. (2017). Christmas, consumption, and materialism: Discourse analysis of children’s Christmas letters. Revista Brasileira de Gestão de Negócios-RBGN 19(66), 557-573.

Burroughs, J.E., Chaplin, L.N., Pandelaere, M., Norton, M.K., Ordabayeva, N., Gunz, A., & Dinauer, L. (2013). Using motivation theory to develop a transformative consumer research agenda for reducing materialism in society. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 32(1), 18-31.

Chaplin, L.N., & John, D.R. (2007). Growing up in a material world: Age differences in materialism in children and adolescents. Journal of Consumer Research 34(4), 480-493.

Chaplin, L.N., & John, D.R. (2010). Interpersonal influences on adolescent materialism: A new look at the role of parents and peers. Journal of Consumer Psychology 20, 176-184.

Chaplin, L.N., Hill, R.P., & John, D.R. (2014). Poverty and materialism: A look at impoverished versus affluent children. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 33(1), 78-92.

Chaplin, L.N., John, D.R., Rindfleisch, A., & Froh, J.J. (2018). The impact of gratitude on adolescent materialism and generosity. The Journal of Positive Psychology 14(4), 502-511.

Gentina, E., Shrum, L.J., Lowrey, T.M., Vitell, S.J., & Rose, G.M. (2018). An integrative model of the influence of parental and peer support on consumer ethical beliefs: The mediating role of self-esteem, power, and materialism. Journal of Business Ethics 150, 1173-1186.

Goldberg, M.E., Gorn, G.J., Peracchio, L.A., & Barmossy, G. (2003). Understanding materialism among youth. Journal of Consumer Psychology 13, 278-288.

John, D.R. (1999). Consumer socialization of children: A retrospective look at twenty-five years of research. Journal of Consumer Research 26(3), 183-213.

Kassert, T. (2018). Materialism and living well. In E. Diener, S. Oishi, & L. Tay (Eds.), Handbook of Well-being. Salt Lake City, UT: DEF Publishers

Kasser, T. (2002). The high price of materialism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kasser, T., Ryan, R.M., Zax, M., & Sameroff, A.J. (1995). The relations of maternal and social environments to late adolescents’ materialistic and prosocial values. Developmental Psychology 31(6), 907-914.

King, R.B. (2018). Materialism is detrimental to academic engagement: Evidence from self-report surveys and linguistic analysis. Current Psychology 1-8.

Lyonski, S., Durvasala, S., & Rayner, R. (2017). The processing of advertising: Does a consumer’s level of materialism make a difference? Innovative Marketing 13(1), 11-23.

Opree, S.J., Buijzen, M., & van Reijmersdal, E.A. (2016). The impact of advertising on children’s psychological wellbeing and life satisfaction. European Journal of Marketing 50(11), 1975-1992.

Opree, S.J., Buijzen, M., van Reijmersdal, E.A., & Valkenburg, P.M. (2013). Children’s advertising exposure, advertised product desire, and materialism: A longitudinal study. Communication Research 41(5) (2014): 717-735.

Opree, S.J., Buijzen, M., & Valkenburg, P.M. (2012). Lower life satisfaction related to materialism in children frequently exposed to advertising. Pediatrics 130(3), e486-e491.

Richins, M.L., & Chaplin, L.N. (2015). Material parenting: How the use of goods in parenting fosters materialism in the net generation. Journal of Consumer Research 41, 1333-1357.

Richins, M.L. (2017). Materialism pathways: The processes that create and perpetuate materialism. Journal of Consumer Psychology 27(4), 480-499.

Roberts, J.A., & Clement, A. (2007). Materialism and satisfaction with over-all quality of life and eight life domains. Social Indicators Research 82, 79-92.

Robinson, S. (2018). Authenticity Guaranteed: Masculinity and the rhetoric of anti-consumerism in American culture. Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Saunders, S., & Munro, D. (2000). The construction and validation of a consumer orientation questionnaire (SCOI) designed to measure Fromm’s (1955) “marketing character” in Australia. Social Behavior and Personality 28, 219-240.

van der Goot, M.J., Rozendaal, E., Opree, S.J. Ketelaar, P.E., & Smit, E.G. (2018). Media generations and their advertising attitudes and avoidance: A six-country comparison. International Journal of Advertising 37(2), 289-308.

van der Meulen, H., Kuhne, R., & Opree, S.J. (2017). Validating the material values scale for children (MVS-c) for use in early childhood. Child Indicators Research 11(4), 1201-1216.

Vanderpyl, T. (2019). “I want to have the American Dream”: Messages of materialism as a driving force in juvenile recidivism. Criminal Justice and Behavior 46(5), 718-731.

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.

Today’s podcast episode is on the topic of socialization, because one of the questions I’m seeing most often in parenting forums these days runs along the lines of “I’m worried about my child’s socialization now that it looks like daycares, preschools and schools have been closed for several months and will likely remain closed for several more months. Can someone please tell me if I really do need to worry about what the complete lack of socialization with other children will do to my only child?”  So that’s the main topic for our conversation today.

But I also wanted to let you know about some other resources I’ve been putting together for parents who are struggling to cope right now, and this episode is related to those as well.

You might have already seen that I have a course called The Confident Homeschooler, which gives you all the information you need to decide whether homeschooling could be right for your child and your family.  It’s based on scientific research, as everything I do is, but it’s not huge and indigestible.  It’s a series of short videos that you could binge-watch in an evening or two, and it gives you everything you need to make a decision about whether homeschooling can really work for you

• whether you’ll need a curriculum, and if so, how to choose one;
• how to use your child’s interests to develop their intrinsic love of learning,
• the social and emotional learning that will enable your child’s success when they return to school,
• overcoming problems like working with children of different ages,
• and ways to assess your children’s learning so you can feel confident they are keeping up with academic standards, if you decide that’s important to you.

If you want to find out more about The Confident Homeschooler you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com/confidenthomeschooler.

But with many districts announcing that they are moving to remote-only learning for at least the first part of the fall semester, many parents are no longer in a position where they’re choosing whether homeschooling is right for them, they’re doing some form of it whether they want to or not.  And parents are panicking.  They’re panicking about their children’s learning, and whether their children are somehow going to ‘fall behind’ if they can’t make attending school two days a week work, or if they already know from what happened in Spring that their child just isn’t going to be able to sit in front of Zoom calls for even an hour each day.

Parents who are in this position are starting to form what are being called Pandemic Pods, and if you haven’t heard of these yet then you will most likely be hearing more about them soon.  They pretty much exploded over social media just last weekend here in the Bay Area, and I expect they’ll move outward from there to other places where schools are closed.  So a Pandemic Pod is a small group of families that are getting together to support their child’s development and learning in some way.  Exactly how that will be done depends on the age of the children; for younger children this might essentially be a nanny share arrangement.  For older ones there would be some aspect of supporting the children’s learning, and this can vary from learning about things the children are interested in to making sure the children complete every assignment sent home by the school district and ensuring readiness for the next grade of learning when school reopens.

On the first day people were talking about Pandemic Pods there was a huge rush to form them.  And then the very next day, it seemed like people realized the social justice considerations of what are essentially networks of affluent parents, who are often but not always White, either withdrawing their child from school or providing this extra tutoring to ensure their child stays on track with the school-provided learning objectives.  And there are other considerations like how many families you’ll work with, and whether each family is comfortable really socially isolating so the pod’s potential for exposure is minimized, and whether the children will wear masks all day every day, and whether the caregiver or tutor will wear a mask inside your house all day every day.

But I do believe there are ways to set pods up that address many of these logistical issues, as well as the social justice considerations, for two reasons.  I think there can be a bit of a reflexive cry of “public schools are the most equitable arrangement possible, and Pandemic Pods reek of White privilege.”  We’ll get to the public schools issue in a bit, so let’s take the privilege aspect first.  If White people are using their networks to identify resources that not everyone can access then that’s a classic case of what’s called Opportunity Hoarding, which we discussed in depth in the episode on White privilege in schools.  If White people are forming pods and then reaching out to parents of non-dominant cultures and inviting them in to ‘sprinkle a little diversity on top’ primarily for the benefit of our own child then we’re basically just perpetuating White supremacy.

(And if this is the first time you’re hearing this phrase ‘people of non-dominant cultures,’ then it’s a term I use to avoid centering Whiteness, and to recognize the power imbalance inherent in systemic racism.)

But there are ways to form these pods that don’t do that.  A Pandemic Pod doesn’t inherently perpetuate White supremacy.  The way the pod is formed CAN do that, or can NOT do that.  So if a White parent reaches out to people of non-dominant cultures, maybe parents of other children at the White family’s school, or maybe through a local church and asks what resources parents need access to, then you can open a conversation.  What you may well find is that while you are feeling overwhelmed and panicked because this is the first time our social systems have really completely failed us, that families of non-dominant cultures have robust support systems that have thus far flown under the radar.  So if you ask them what they need, a group of families might already have a long-standing support system and ask you to purchase wifi access for them, and then encourage you not to engage further with them, thank you very much.  They might be deeply suspicious of your motives, as, frankly, I probably would be too if I were them.  But it’s possible that by starting a conversation about what they’re seeing and what are their needs, and what you’re seeing and what are your needs, that you’ll be able to open up a space that is truly inclusive, not just tokenistically inclusive.

By making the needs of others at least as important as your own needs, and even centering their needs above yours, you’re doing the real work of dismantling White supremacy here.  This is really it.  You’re listening to the needs of people of non-dominant cultures, and you’re acting on them not out of a sense of duty and obligation and White saviorism, but because your survival and your child’s survival are wrapped up in their survival and their child’s survival.  You will sink or swim together.  This is the work Black people are asking us to do to dismantle the systems that have given us so much power and privilege for so many years.

So if you’d like more information on how to form a pandemic pod, from whether you should start one in the first place, to way more of these social justice considerations, to the kinds of questions you’ll want to ask the other families participating, how to identify a caregiver or tutor and what to ask them in an interview, to what the children should be learning and how to know if they are learning, to minimizing costs, then my new Pandemic Pod ‘in a box’ course is for you.  You can learn more and sign up today at yourparentingmojo.com/pandemicpods.

Now I do want to come back to this issue of public schools being the most equitable arrangement possible for children, and the idea that if we aren’t supporting public schools then we aren’t doing anti-racist work because it’s intimately connected to the idea of socialization.

I think when many parents are thinking of the issue of socialization they’re thinking about it at one level, as I was as well before I started looking into it, so we’ll start there before we go deeper.  We’re thinking about the interactions our children are missing out on with other children, and whether that’s a big deal to their development.  And fortunately for us, that’s actually a relatively easy question to answer.  So maybe this will be a super short episode and we’ll call it done?  But come on; I know you know me better than that!

So when we think about this issue of socialization with other children, and whether not being able to be around other children for a long time is problematic, we can say that in many cases the answer here is ‘no.’  I’m thinking back to our episode on the concept of Self-Reg®, which is the term that Dr. Stuart Shanker coined, and which is ““a powerful method for understanding stress and managing tension and energy, which are key to enhancing self-regulation in children, youth and adults of all ages.  Decades of research have shown that optimal self-regulation is the foundation for healthy human development, adaptive coping skills, positive parenting, learning, safe and caring schools, and vibrant communities.”

In that episode we looked at a lot of research on childhood stressors, and specifically at some definitions published by the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University, which distinguishes between three types of stress:

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

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

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

While we can see that daycares and schools being closed for a long period of time doesn’t exactly fit the time-limited criteria of the positive stress response, if our child is at home with at least one loving parent, then the stress of not being able to see their friends is not likely to be harmful to the child.  Of course, this may not be the case if being at home exposes the child to things like domestic violence or caregivers who regularly humiliate the child, or other types of situations that we know are traumatic, and remove children from the sources of support they may have had in school.

The other side of this high-level question is that even when the child seems happy and reasonably well adjusted, are they missing out on some kind of skill building that they can only get by being around other children in daycare or school.  I do wish I could remember where I read it, but I do recall seeing someone somewhere explain what a strange idea it is that we put all the people in our ‘village’ who are the same age, and who lack social skills, and we put them all together with the smallest possible number of adults we can and expect the children to learn social skills.

We do know that children can effectively learn skills like manners and sharing from their parents and caregivers, so just because your child isn’t around other children doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to learn these skills.  And there’s no research indicating that children who aren’t around big groups of other children for extended periods come to some kind of developmental harm because we just wouldn’t have made it as a species if we needed this.  All children enjoy play and create opportunities to play when they can, even when it isn’t culturally sanctioned.  But they don’t have to have large groups of friends to learn how to play.  They can learn with siblings, or with parents spending a bit of time with them each day, and by themselves, and with one or two other children occasionally if you’re able to do that.

That said, if your child is extroverted and gets energy from a lot of social contact with others, and especially if you’re an introvert and need more quiet time, or if your child has a condition like autism that makes social contact with others important and that person simply cannot be you 100% of the time, then absolutely you can look for a friend or a small group of friends to co-isolate with to slightly expand your social bubble and give yourself a break.  But it’s possible that it isn’t contact with people their own age is actually the critical factor, and rather it’s just contact with other people that’s the important ingredient, and so having a teen or another adult or even a grandparent spend time with the child could also be beneficial.

But let’s dig a little deeper into this, and ask ourselves what we *really* mean by socialization.  And we can start to get at this tangentially by asking why it matter so much that our children have the experience of being around others.  What are we trying to do by doing this?  We’re trying to give them experiences with other children, and also with other adults – the teachers, with a goal of giving them skills to succeed in the world.  And what kinds of skills do they need to learn to succeed in the world?  Basically, they need to learn the skills to understand what it means to move around in a world that is dominated by White norms.

Now I need to give a hat tip here to early childhood education consultant Ijumaa Jordan, whom I heard interviewed on the Pre-K Teach & Play podcast which is hosted by Dr. Kristie Pretti-Frontczak.  I already had a bit of background knowledge on how Whiteness is the assumed norm in most situations in the world – we can see this when a news reporter refers to a White man as a ‘man,’ and a Black man as a ‘Black man’ – because Whiteness is the assumed norm, the reporter didn’t need to mention the White man’s race.  That’s just one tiny example, but it shows how when a group of White people are together, it’s a space that is assumed to be neutral.  Race isn’t an issue.  Race only becomes an issue when someone of another race comes into the space, or when a White person finds themselves in a room full of people of other races.

In this podcast episode, Ijumaa Jordan talks about how dominant White culture shows up in preschool classrooms.  One way this happens is through time; where you show up at a certain time (which is called ‘being on time’), and then things happen in a linear sequence that functions as a schedule.  In other places, and Jordan gives the Caribbean as an example, that time is more circular and based on relationships, and things don’t happen until the right people get there.  In our classrooms we might start at 9am, and 10:00 is group time, and 11:00 is outside time, and at 11:25 we start transitioning to washing hands, and at noon everyone has to sit down and eat their lunch.  There’s no space for anyone who doesn’t feel like going outside that day, or isn’t hungry at noon, to do anything different.  And when we’re talking about children of non-dominant cultures, the teacher will then sometimes say “they come from such chaotic homes…” and frame it up as preschool training the child to do something the parents have failed to do, which is to accept a view of time that is used by White culture.  Some things do run on time, and we need to be ready for them.  But this is my interjection here; the majority of the schedules we thrust on our children we do because it makes our lives easier.  We might tell ourselves that our children ‘do better’ when they are on a schedule, and by that we usually mean that they are more compliant, and that the behavior they show when they’re on a schedule might be easier for us to cope with.  But maybe it’s possible that another schedule would work better for them than the one we arbitrarily impose, or maybe they really don’t need as much of a schedule as we think they do.

This idea of scheduling becomes problematic in a couple of ways.  Firstly if we’re looking at federally or state-funded programs like Head Start then those programs tend to require that parents show up with their children by a certain time, and if you’re regularly late then you get written up and you could potentially lose access to the services that you rely on to take care of your child while you work.  So there’s not much flexibility there to account for whatever reality you’re facing with getting your kids out the door that morning.  And you might say ‘well, if there were really mostly White kids in the school, does it even matter if we use this highly scheduled approach?’  and Ijumaa Jordan says yes it does, because we’re teaching our children the dominant narrative, that the White way of viewing time is the right way to view time.

Another way White norms show up is around being quiet.  There’s a pretty clear White cultural norm around being quiet.  I haven’t been to church in a long time, but I used to go when I was young and you sit quietly in your pew and listen unless it’s time to sing, in which case you sing but not too loudly, and you’re always singing along with the other people in church following the same melody which really sounds more like a dirge.  And I’ve seen videos of Black people in church and they’re calling out during the sermon to say they agree with what the pastor is saying, and they’re singing joyfully and making real music, not just this simple little melody that you hear in the White church.  And this idea carries through to school as well.  We reward children who can sit crisscross applesauce and keep their hands to themselves and be quiet and wait their turn, and anyone who calls out or sings the song in a different way is most definitely not rewarded.  We don’t ever ask why we reward sitting quietly and being still and waiting your turn; we just do it without questioning it.  And why do we do it?  Well, we do it because it makes life easier for the preschool teachers today, and we do it because it gets children ready for school.  Kindergarten teachers tell us that they actually don’t care if our children can read and write when they get to kindergarten, as long as they can sit still and pay attention.  So because we have this one way of teaching children when they get to kindergarten which relies on the child being able to sit still and pay attention in a specific way, before their bodies are mostly ready to do it, we have to start training them to do it in preschool.  And instead of questioning whether the way children learn in school is the right way – which, I would argue, we have a lot of room to improve on – we push this dominant cultural norm down the pipe instead.

So this interview with Ijumaa Jordan got me thinking – what else is there like this?  What other kinds of issues do we think of as socialization, and which are actually socialization of White dominant cultural norms?

Language is one obvious way that this happens.  I read one fascinating paper by Dr. Liz Hollingworth at the University of Iowa, who did a series of classroom observations and interviews with a teacher and her students after one of her Black students called the teacher racist.  The teacher decided to change the way she taught by adding multicultural children’s books that brought race to the foreground, but as I think often happens in these kinds of situations, the actual discussions around the books themselves still normalized Whiteness.  The teacher normalized Whiteness by describing “the way you and I talk,” and when she said “you,” she meant all of the members of her class, even the ones who have self-identified as a race other than White.  The teacher used “they” to mean the Black characters in the book they are reading who speak in a dialect that is not like the teacher’s, but is actually one that is used by the Black and some of the multiracial students in class on the playground.  Even though this teacher’s stated purpose is to increase tolerance of racial differences in her community, she sees school as a place where race is neutral, and Whiteness is normalized.

The teacher verbally reinforces this idea in subtle ways that I think the students probably do perceive and respond to.  So when the Black student says that the characters in the story might speak in a certain way because they haven’t been to school, the teacher repeats what he says with no additional comment.  Then she calls on another student and repeats his comment, and adds to it to indicate that he was more on the ‘right track’ than the Black student.  This process silences the child who presents an argument that is at odds with the teacher’s interpretation, and yet does so in a way that almost makes it seem as though the teacher is listening and taking the idea on board.  Throughout the exploration of this book, the teacher kept a pretty tight control over what was discussed and how it was discussed, by using typical classroom tools like the use of questions to guide and direct the class, while students were permitted to ask clarifying questions but not guide the course of the discussion.  The teacher controlled who spoke and for how long, as well as the available interpretations of the text.  She made these decisions not based on what we know about best practices in discussing race, but based on a balance between knowing that she needed to discuss race but feeling a deep discomfort with doing so.

I wish the study had included a survey of the students’ attitudes toward tolerance before and after this unit, because from all of the studies I’ve read on this subject, it’s most likely that nothing changed here at all and that the person who was challenged most in the entire thing was the teacher.  And of course, this is one teacher discussing one book with one class, and we can’t possibly generalize just this experience.  But we do know that this approach was not rooted in what we currently believe to be best practices, and that it is likely to be the kind of discussion that most commonly occurs in schools today when the issue of race is raised.

Another way language is used in the classroom is in Show and Tell.  Show-and-tell is a ubiquitous feature in classrooms in the United States, although I didn’t grow up with it so I’ll describe it for listeners who are living elsewhere – basically the teacher invites students to bring objects from home and to sit in a circle when they’re young and talk about their objects.  When they get older the teacher might designate a single student to bring an object on a given day and the student will give a longer presentation about it.  These show-and-tell sessions are described by all manner of organizations as being critical to learning.  The textbook company Scholastic has a blog that says “Show and tell sets the stage for children to become comfortable when speaking in public.  When presenting during show and tell, students are expected to talk about a variety of topics, organize their thoughts and convey main ideas, all of which are skills I use as an adult in my job.”

The Illinois Early Learning Project says “Children as young as one year can benefit from show and tell if the teachers or parents who are facilitating it have appropriate expectations.”  When children become toddlers, they begin to listen more and take pride in their abilities.  Show and Tell should encourage children to listen, follow directions, and make choices.  In the preschool years, this website says the teacher should “Repeat rules such as ‘one person speaks at a time’ before Show and Tell and remind the children when necessary throughout the activity.”

I was really surprised to see an English website called Edu-quip describing show and tell, because I have no recollection of ever participating in this.  The site says:

https://www.edu-quip.co.uk/blog/the-importance-of-show-tell

And maybe by now you’re starting to see some of the problems with show and tell.  Showing off prized possessions is an invitation for the teacher and students to judge the appropriateness of what the child brought.  And they do judge!  Anything that doesn’t fit within gendered norms is shot down by the other students.  The children in my daughter’s preschool class were prohibited from bringing branded toys like Disney characters to show and tell.  I’m not sure what would have happened if a child had showed up with one, but teachers in general tend to express their disapproval through the kinds of questions they ask and don’t ask, and how much encouragement they offer, and whether they cut the child off early.  So the child will know if their prized possession is acceptable or not.  It also promotes a materialistic culture where things are prized above all else – an attitude that’s necessary if we’re going to keep our capitalist machine running.

Not all children want to be the center of attention!  This is a trait that’s highly valued in an individualistic society, and is actively discouraged in interdependent cultures.  Why should the audience sit still and listen thoroughly?  If they don’t understand something, why shouldn’t they ask for clarification?  There are some fascinating anthropological studies of storytelling in Black families reporting that very young children develop the ability to ‘hold’ an audience in part by being heckled by adults if their story isn’t good enough.

I would think that far from giving students the ability to make friends, show and tell divides them more than it unites them.  It sets up competitions to bring the best object, to give the best presentation, and to gain the teacher’s approval.  The fact that we see show and tell as an unquestionably positive component of the school learning experience reflects, once again, the norm of Whiteness in schools.

Another way that Whiteness pervades schools at all levels is in the types of knowledge that are valued, and to continue on our theme of topics related to language, schools privilege written knowledge over oral knowledge.  So classrooms are filled with books, and teachers read books to students, and encourage them to learn to write and to read, so they can become consumers of this written knowledge.

When was the last time you ever heard from your child that your teacher told your child a story that didn’t come from a book?  Or if the teacher is so embedded in White culture that they find storytelling extremely difficult, as I do myself, when was the last time you heard that they invited someone into the classroom who IS an expert storyteller to share stories with the classroom about their own lives or figures or events that are meaningful to their culture?  We did a series of episodes a while back on storytelling, and we learned how many Black families have an incredibly rich culture of storytelling where even preschoolers can tell a story with multiple narrative arcs and captivate an audience.  I contrast that with the stories my daughter tells, which doesn’t happen very often, but every once in a while she’ll make up something about how one of the bugs she has in the back yard as pets was playing a guitar when she went out to put them to bed, and the story usually takes the form “this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and it was really funny!”.  My daughter isn’t reading anywhere near fluently yet, but she can write all of the letters and some simple words, and this kind of knowledge is valued and celebrated in schools – I know this because examples of it would come home in the portfolio of materials that the school gathers up and presents to us at the end of the year.  Because these skills are valued, it doesn’t matter if her stories are simple and unsophisticated.  But if you’re a Black child who can tell incredible stories but you can’t read anything or write any letters yet then all of a sudden you’re a candidate for remedial intervention, simply because the school doesn’t value the assets you do bring.

Linked to the idea of writing over oral expertise is the privileging of history over memory, because history is written down while memories are usually conveyed in oral format.  Now memories can certainly fade, but history is written by the victors and the victors get to re-write the version of it that they want to remember – if they want to remember anything at all.  There’s a big thing going around on social media at the moment where middle-aged people are finding out about the mob attack by White people on Black homes and businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that happened in 1921.  This event was called the Tulsa Race Riot at the time, apparently because calling it a riot meant that insurance companies didn’t have to pay benefits to the Black families whose homes and businesses were destroyed.  It’s more commonly known today as the Tulsa Race Massacre.  I grew up in England and we studied European history on the premise that there wasn’t enough American history to make it worth studying, but Americans who grew up here and went through school here are just now discovering that this major event happened and they never knew about it because it wasn’t recorded in written form in their textbooks.  I believe a big part of the problem here is the centralized curriculum which allows a relatively few people to determine what everyone else should know.  If teachers were allowed to co-create the curriculum with students, and decide together what should be learned and known, then even the White students in Tulsa most certainly would know about these events, and students in other locations would learn about their own local civil rights heroes and activists, at the same time as they connect to the idea that there were thousands more of these individuals working in other communities across the country.  This would help to counter the idea that my daughter came home from preschool with at age 4 on Martin Luther King Day, when she learned something about how the country had a problem but a woman sat on a bus and now everything is alright.

I read a fascinating paper by Dr. Radhika Viruru at Texas A&M university that unpacks the primary importance we give to language.  She begins the paper: “Growing up in India, one of the ideas that shaped my way of viewing the world was the (unspoken) rule that language was for the unimportant things in life. If something really mattered, it was unlikely that it would ever be spoken aloud. These messages would be conveyed in ambiguous and layered ways, using symbols that had nothing to do with the written or the spoken word. Language seemed to play only a limited role in the relationships one had with other human beings.” She goes on to give an example of meeting the mother of a student called Vashnavi who had really, really struggled to settle in at the beginning of the school year.

Dr. Viruru says: “When I had an opportunity to talk to Vaishnavi’s mother, I commented to her about how well she had settled down. All Vaishnavi’s mother said was, ‘It took her 3 weeks, she is really exceptional’, but her face said a lot more. It is difficult to describe how a look can communicate so much but in her face, one could read all the emotion, and many other unnamed feelings, that had seemed absent. As was often the case, I felt like I had committed some kind of obscene act by imposing speech in a situation where it did not belong. At that moment, it felt like an act of almost unspeakable brutality and violence to force language into situations where it was entirely inadequate. The satisfaction of having understood what was really going on seemed an act of irresponsibility when compared to the sense of violating the codes by which people function.”

Dr. Viruru goes on to describe how teachers would create positive relationships with the students by carrying the youngest ones around on their hips, just going about their duties, and not talking specifically to the child they were holding.  At lunchtime, each teacher had her own particular group of children who wanted her to feed them their lunch, and they would refuse to sit or be fed by others.  The teachers and students had created relationships through these actions, not through language.

Here in the U.S. we classify children by the language they seem able to use or choose to use and if this doesn’t line up with standards we set we classify them as in need of remedial attention – think of the 30 million word gap research, which puts the blame for children’s inadequate language performance squarely on parental shoulders.  We are essentially telling children that using language is ‘good’ communication, and other forms of communication are not.  We even deny children the right to not answer a question, so silence becomes an act of resistance to parental (and teacher’s) power. We as adults use language to describe and understand young children, rather than entering into an equal relationship with them that respects their existence as human beings who can never be completely understood.

Here in the U.S., the lack of use of language is seen as a clear deficit.  Schools and other organizations set up to ‘help’ children see the gap in test score outcomes between Black and Latinx students on the low end, and White and Asian students on the high end, and essentially say “OK, well, clearly being in school isn’t helping these children to succeed, so we need to reach them earlier with services to help them do well in school and for their parents to improve their own parenting skills.”  If we think back to our recent interview with Dr. john powell, we see a clear sense of ‘othering’ here – there’s the idea that the White way is the norm.  If your children do well based on that norm, as children of Asian-American parents often do, then there’s no need for any special interventions and you can keep doing what you like.  But if you don’t meet the standards of the White norm then there’s something defective in you and the way you’re raising your children.  It goes without question that the norm is value-neutral, and it’s the deviation from that norm that’s the problem that needs to be fixed.  We try to find ways to steer families toward services we think they need, without ever seeking to understand the ways they already negotiate and maneuver through the racialized environment of school.  We present reading as some kind of universal need, which really is only a need because it’s an efficient way to convey information to children when you’re trying to minimize the number of adults who have to come into contact with that child to increase class sizes and make education cheaper.

There’s no place for anyone to question why reading is a universal need by a certain age, because the ‘experts’ have deemed when a child should be reading and how fluently, and anyone who can’t do this is singled out for special services regardless of the context or culture in which the child sits.  This language of needs hides the concept of power behind it, which is to say that the teachers, and the administrators, and the psychologists are the experts on your child, and what your child should be doing by when, and the knowledge you hold as a parent is at best irrelevant, and at worst is harming your child by holding them back and preventing them from success in school.

I found one case study of how a reading program was implemented in a school.  It’s called Accelerated Reader, and apparently it’s used in over 65,000 schools in the U.S.  The program doesn’t actually provide any books, but instead sells multiple choice tests about books that the school has or purchases to make sure the children can answer a certain percentage of questions correctly, at which point they are awarded points and allowed to move up to the next level.  The students aren’t allowed to choose what they wanted to read, but were told what to read next by a ‘readability formula,’ although apparently these formulas are known as ‘rubber rulers’ due to their lack of accuracy.  But Accelerated Reading has been deemed scientifically valid and is endorsed by No Child Left Behind, so schools continue to use it.

The school in this case study created a rewards system to incentivize students to read, so each book was worth a certain number of points and you couldn’t earn points for reading a book that wasn’t included in the program.  Students had to meet or surpass a points goal to be invited to a monthly ice cream party, a process which completely ignored the diversity of experiences, backgrounds, and experiences present within an individual grade level.  Students who read shorter, lower level books were awarded fewer points, and so were less likely to get the ice cream.

The program also promoted racial segregation by honoring practices that favor Whites.  It set up a competitive system that exacerbated the ways in which White culture ruled the school. It fostered independence and individualism, and negated the culturally relevant values of students of non-dominant cultures like collectivism, collaboration, kinship, and interdependence.  Most of the books for which the multiple choice tests were available featured White characters, and the students noticed that ones featuring “diverse” characters essentially mostly just looked like ‘colored White folk.’  So the children of non-dominant cultures didn’t see people who looked like them being depicted in authentic ways through the materials they were reading either.

The program affected students’ sense of efficacy as well.  One child, Gabriel, was excited to read the new Harry Potter book but when he got to the library he found that he couldn’t borrow it because he was in the red dot band, and Harry Potter wasn’t a red dot book.  Ten days later he had borrowed it from somewhere else and took the multiple choice test for it.  The paper recounts the conversation Gabriel had with the teaching assistant in the class:

Gabriel: 80% on Harry Potter!
TA: I’m gonna have to delete these points.
Gabriel: But…
TA: …you’re reading outside of your color again?
Gabriel: But I passed the test and I like Harry Potter a lot.
TA: Don’t you talk back to me! Now sit down and get a red [dot] book.

The students would compare the number of points they were earning per book with others in the class, and associated that with their own competence at reading. A person was a ‘good’ reader when they could read books worth 10 points each and could pass the test for the book, and the ability to decode the words and read fluently and understand the meaning of the book were irrelevant.  The kindergarten level books were perceived by many students as being the most difficult ones, because the stories were so simple they didn’t make sense, which meant the student basically had to memorize the book to be able to pass the test.  And nobody ever thought to ask if the student enjoyed the book!

And the more we look for these kinds of issues, the more we find.  When we look at classroom management practices, I’ve seen the research that talks about how classroom management originated in factory management practices, and that the goal of classroom management – and school more generally, actually, is to prepare children to take their places in a capitalist society.  But when I took another look I found a paper which noted that “most historians situate modern management as emerging in the United States with the development of the railroad system in the mid 1800s.  Yet by this time, 38,000 managers were already managing four million slaves in the United States.  White people justified taking the land that had been used by Native Americans, and enslaving people from Africa, because they had cast themselves as “uniquely fit to manage land and labour.”  White people used biological determinism, religion, and stereotype to “explain” how the races were different (although these categories had fuzzy boundaries so managers could pit workers against each other.  Managing enslaved people required their absolute obedience – the managers thought and planned, while workers, who were enslaved, implemented.  We can thus draw a line from the management of enslaved people on plantations through factories to the classroom management practices still used in schools today.

Returning to the classroom, the professors who wrote the paper on this topic say their students – particularly those who plan to teach in low-income, urban schools with ethnically diverse populations, feel as though they have to control unwieldy students before they can teach their lesson, because otherwise the students can’t and won’t learn.  In other words, a key component of classroom management is motivating children to learn.  But why do we need to motivate students to learn?  It’s because a centralized curriculum takes a topic that is irrelevant to everyone, breaks it apart into its smallest component, and requires that the child learn these irrelevant tiny components in just the right sequence.  Educational theorist John Dewey likens the learning that takes place in management-based educational environments to students either choosing to find intellectual stimulation in the routine and process of schooling, or simply choosing to feign interest over the consequence of punishment.

Through this process behavior, not learning, becomes the primary product of the classroom and the teacher is evaluated on their ability to control students’ behavior and direct them in learning tasks.  To paraphrase Alfie Kohn, we remove all control from teachers to choose what they teach and how they teach it, and then we hold them accountable for the results.  We end up getting caught in the dehumanizing rhetoric and practices of neoliberalism – we structure classrooms to better serve the needs and demands of global capitalism, rather than the needs and demands of students.

White people like things to feel organized and under control, and I think this is one reason why teachers get preoccupied by classroom management – because management is seen as the precursor to learning.  It’s like the anecdote from a paper by Dr. Susan Engel that I’ve mentioned probably a number of times on the show by now, where she was looking at children’s curiosity in the classroom.  She actually had to completely change her study because she thought she would find decreasing levels of curiosity in children as they got older and more indoctrinated into the school system where the teacher asks the questions and not the students, but she found they basically stopped asking questions once they got into kindergarten.  So in this paper she describes a classroom that has been divided into groups who had been given a set of materials to explore how the ancient Egyptians had invented wheels for transportation to carry stones for the pyramids.  Each group had a worksheet that included step by step instructions on what to do, and the teacher wandered around encouraging the groups and reminding them to answer the questions on the worksheet.  One group seemed to have forgotten the worksheet and was trying to figure out different ways to use the equipment.  When the teacher noticed this “she called out to the group, over the heads of her students, in a loud clear voice for all to hear, “Ok, kids.  Enough of that.  I’ll give you time to experiment at recess.  This is time for science.”

Where I’m going with this is the idea that children learn as much if not more in the spaces between the lessons than they do from the lessons themselves.  We try as hard as we possibly can to tame the chaos, and to put a stop to anything that looks like it isn’t part of the curriculum, and by managing behavior, and by setting expectations for what learning looks like and rewarding that, but the real learning is happening in between these spaces.  We’re uncomfortable with this chaos because we like things to be linear and controlled and organized, but that’s a failure of our ways of thinking.  If instead we could learn how to embrace the messiness behind these unified narratives of what success looks like and how to achieve it, then maybe we could also welcome what used to be just annoying and uncomfortable noise at the margins, which was being made by people who had been marginalized and excluded by our attempts to calm the chaos.

We have this idea that everything learned has to be taught, and an adult – either the parent or the teacher – needs to be the one to teach it.  But people learn in all kinds of ways that don’t require lesson plans to make the learning happen, or testing to make sure it happened.  Children learn from interactions beyond the nuclear family, and not just through the serve-and-return kind of conversation with their parents that’s promoted as some kind of ideal, and through reading the cereal box as well as books, and simply to function in their daily lives.  What if instead of having the teacher be the person who needs to maintain control, and to teach the curriculum, that instead the teacher was viewed as a co-creator of knowledge?  That we should support the teacher in developing expertise in connecting students to resources, and helping the students to answer their own questions, and being comfortable with not knowing all the answers?

Let’s think about those answers, and about learning, and knowledge.  When we think about knowledge, and especially knowledge created through scientific research, we typically think of something that is value-free.  That is, the highest form of knowledge is created when the researcher’s personal or cultural characteristics have no influence over the knowledge – in other words, the knowledge is objective.  But no knowledge is really objective, even when it’s created through scientific methods.  I came to grips with this in my former career as a sustainability consultant.  There has been a long-running debate in that community about how to communicate the environmental impacts of products and services to consumers.  Some organizations want consumers to know about the relative impacts of the products and services they use, while others say that consumers could never understand these issues in all of their complexity and no information is better than bad information.

So how would this play out?  Well let’s say we’re trying to decide between two packs of chocolate chip cookies and Brand A has an environmental impact score of 90 out of 100 where 100 is the best possible score, while Brand B has a score of 80 out of 100.  Seems like we should choose Brand A, right?  But behind those simple and seemingly value-neutral numbers are a whole host of decisions that went into a tool called Life Cycle Assessment, and doing these assessments was actually what I used to do for a living.

So we have these two numbers on the packages, and both packages say the numbers are results of a life cycle assessment, which sounds awfully scientific, so we figure the score that’s closest to 100 is the best one.

But maybe Brand B includes the tiny fraction of the gas in your tank that it takes for you to get the cookies home, and makes some estimate about whether you are recycling or throwing the packet in the trash.  Brand A says “well we can’t know anything about that, so we won’t include it.”  That’s a value judgement.

Maybe Brand A says “Well, we don’t think water pollution is that important of an issue in cookie manufacturing, so we’re not going to report that information.”  Brand B thinks water pollution IS important, and chooses to include it, and it reduces Brand B’s overall score by 20%.  That’s a value judgement about what’s important.  Is Brand A still better?

Brand A outsources its chocolate chip manufacturing, and doesn’t have a great relationship with the supplier, so they choose to use industry-average data even though they know they get chocolate chips really cheaply and the chances that there’s *something* untoward going on in the supply chain are high.  Brand B makes its chocolate chips in-house and has accurate data, which show a higher-than-average environmental impact.  The decision to use industry-average data is a value decision.  Is Brand A still better?

These are just a few of the hundreds of decisions that go into this kind of scientific study, and we haven’t even looked at the social implications of these manufacturing decisions.  Behind these apparently value-neutral number on the cookie packages were a whole host of decisions that were impacted by the researchers’ experience and education and biases.  And this is what we call science.  This apparently value-free tool of science turns out to be absolutely riddled with value judgements.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing – but it’s a bad thing when we don’t understand what are those value judgements and when we pretend that science is value-free.

The same thing happens in the psychological research when scientists think it’s fine to do research on White children and then extrapolate the results as if they were applicable to everyone, or not take into account the ways that different children play before saying that the way Black children play with toys represents less high quality play than the way White children play, or ask leading questions of Mexican immigrant mothers like “How important is English literacy to your child under 5?”.  These are all issues we’ve discussed on the show, and there have been many more besides.  The judgements that go into the study methods, the data analysis, and even the overarching research question that’s being asked in the first place all have value judgements behind them.  Dr. James Banks, who has studied this issue, says: “Often the researchers themselves are unaware of how their personal experiences and positions within society influence the knowledge they produce,” and he cites the feminist scholar Dr. Lorraine Code who says we need to ask:

“Out of whose subjectivity has this ideal of objectivity grown?  Whose standpoint, whose values does it represent?  The point of the questions is to discover how subjective and objective conditions together produce knowledge, values, and epistemology.  It is neither to reject objectivity not to glorify subjectivity in its stead.  Knowledge is neither value-free nor value-neutral; the processes that produce it are themselves value-laden; and these values are open to evaluation.”

And this shows up in school as well.  Dr. Banks describes five different types of knowledge, and he relates them in a diagram that I’ll describe to you as I go, and I’ll put a picture of it in the references if that would help you.  Four of the five types of knowledge appear on one level, and these are popular knowledge, mainstream knowledge, personal and cultural knowledge, and transformative academic knowledge.  Popular knowledge are the facts, concepts, and interpretations that are institutionalized in the mass media and other institutions that are part of pop culture.  Examples include the old movie How the West Was Won, and Dances with Wolves, both of which present narratives about how White people interacted with Native Americans from a White-centric perspective.  Mainstream knowledge is the concepts, paradigms, theories, and explanations that constitute traditional western-centric knowledge in history, and in the behavioral and social sciences (and I would argue that this happens in many other fields as well).  So the White historian Ulrich Phillips wrote a book in 1918 called American Negro Slavery which was basically an apology for Southern slave-holders, and which dominated the way Black slavery was interpreted until his views were challenged in the 1950s.  The (White) historian Frederick Jackson Turner described America as a thinly populated wilderness when Europeans arrived even though more recent historians now criticize this view, Turner’s concept of the American West is still influential in curriculum and textbooks today.  So these two kinds of knowledge are the middle two of the four, and these are the ONLY two that feed into school knowledge, which sits underneath them.

School knowledge consists of the facts, concepts, and generalizations presented in textbooks, teachers’ guides, and other forms of media designed for school use, and also includes the teacher’s mediation and interpretation of that knowledge.  School knowledge is most heavily influenced by mainstream academic knowledge and popular knowledge.

Let’s look at the other two kinds of knowledge too, the first of which is Personal and Cultural Knowledge.  Personal and cultural knowledge is the concepts, explanations, and interpretations that students create from personal experiences in their homes, families, and community cultures.  An example of that is the understanding that many Black and Latinx students have that highly individualistic, competitive behavior is needed to succeed in school, but will not be sanctioned by many adults and peers in their cultural communities.  Another example would be the personal narratives of elders, and traditional stories that have been handed down through generations.  In many communities these are a source of wisdom and messages about how to be in this culture, but in White culture these are cute and interesting but ultimately pretty irrelevant to school knowledge.

The final kind of knowledge is transformative academic knowledge, which are the facts, concepts, paradigms, themes, and explanations that challenge mainstream academic knowledge and expand and substantially revise established canons, paradigms, theories, explanations, and research methods.  When transformative academic paradigms replace mainstream ones, a scientific revolution has occurred, although this doesn’t happen very often.  Most of the time, transformative academic paradigms coexist with established ones.  This idea is particularly relevant to us because transformative academic knowledge does not feed into school knowledge.  So we have the idea that Western civilization started with the Greeks, which is part of school knowledge.  But some African scholars have located the roots of the important aspects of Greek culture in ancient Egypt and Phoenicia.  White scholars can produce transformative knowledge as well, like Dr. Martin Bernal’s work which uses evidence from linguistics, archaeology and ancient documents to substantiate the claim that when Greek culture was born, the people of the Aegean borrowed, adapted, or had thrust upon them deities and language, technologies, and architectures, notions of justice and polis” from Egypt and Phoenicia.  Being White doesn’t mean your ideas will automatically be accepted – if it’s far enough outside the mainstream, it’s probably not going to have much impact on school knowledge.

So what implications does this have for schools?  Well, when knowledge is related to power, and groups with the most power within a society often construct knowledge that maintains their power and protects their interests.  No matter how thoughtful and logical the transformative academic knowledge is, when it comes up against political and economic power the transformative knowledge is ignored or actively silenced.  Because the kinds of knowledge that end up being part of school knowledge are usually produced by White people, White norms end up being perpetuated in schools.  Because personal and cultural knowledge is seen as mostly irrelevant to school knowledge, personal and cultural knowledge doesn’t influence school knowledge.  And because transformative knowledge is often produced by people outside the mainstream, whose skin color is often (but not always) different from people who are in the mainstream, that doesn’t influence school knowledge either.  This is how school knowledge ends up perpetuating White ideals.

And finally, if we take a step outward from the children themselves, we see that schools tend to have a certain view of how parents should participate in their children’s learning.  Parents should make sure homework gets done, volunteer in the classroom, provide financial support when it’s requested, and show up at school for parent-teacher conferences – but preferably not at other times, because school is the teachers’ and administrators’ turf.  When parents don’t participate in their children’s learning they are often labeled as ‘hard to reach,’ and their absences from these specific methods of participation is lamented as a sign that these parents ‘don’t care’ about their child’s education.  Teachers and administrators don’t consider the variety of reasons why parents might not want to or even be able to come to school – from parent teacher conferences being scheduled while the parent is at work, or in the evenings when there’s no public transportation or alternative childcare available.  Parents of non-dominant cultures may have had traumatic experiences of their own in school, and just reentering a school building can retrigger these old injuries.  Or maybe supporting a child’s learning just looks way different in their culture.  I remember an anecdote from a paper I read years ago describing a school that put up a display of children’s school work in a supermarket somewhere in England.  One mother, who I think was described as either being from India or being British-Indian, and who had never been inside the school before, and whom teachers had described as ‘hard to reach,’ took different family members to visit the display three times over the course of a week to show them what the child was doing in school.

But when research on parental participation in schools involves sending out a questionnaire to parents asking them whether they help with homework, whether they do other educational activities with their child, whether they volunteer in the classroom, whether they go to parent-teacher conferences, and whether they ever talk with the teacher on the phone, and then rates how effective the parents feel and asks teachers to estimate how involved parents are, are completely grounded in a White-centered view of what parental involvement should look like.

We look at issues like racism and patriarchy in our society and we think “these things are too big to fix.”  The challenge just seems insurmountable.  Teachers may look at schools and think “the system is already set.  I need to figure out how to function in that system and the best way to do that is for me to have as much control over as many aspects of it as I can.”  Parents may look at their current situation trying to figure out how to balance work and school next semester and think “this seems impossible.  There should be safety nets.”  And they’re right.  There should be safety nets.  And also, we get to make choices about how we want to be in this world.  We get to decide whether we’re going to rush around and panic and form pods with our friends who look like us and hire a teacher who looks like us and make sure our children are fully prepared for the next grade level on-time.

Or we can take this extraordinary opportunity to slow down.  The school system that bound us is no longer functioning in the same way that it did, so we don’t have to break that mold.  The mold is already broken.  We can take this opportunity to begin reimagining what learning could look like.  I’m not naïve enough to argue that pandemic pods are the panacea to all of our problems.  They’re not.  But they will give us an opportunity to experiment on a small scale.  They’ll give us a chance to begin the anti-racist work that isn’t possible in schools where every single thing our child learns is learned through a lens of White supremacy.  They’ll give us a chance to reimagine what learning looks like when it isn’t confined by a curriculum.  They’ll give us a chance to share what we’re learning and fail and start again and iterate, and maybe build a new school system that’s actually responsive to our needs, rather than deeming that children who don’t fit into the system as it’s defined have failed, and are failures.   So if you want support in figuring out how to set up a pod that works on these issues, head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/pandemicpods.  You’ll find all the information you need there about the course.  And once again, the course isn’t designed to have you spend three months pondering these issues before you start doing something.  The information is actionable and there are templates you can use to talk with families so you’re discussing the kinds of issues that are important to you, and for interviewing a teacher or caregiver, and a sample contract for your teacher or caregiver you can modify so you don’t have to start from scratch, and ways to tell that your child is learning, and so much more.  So you can find that at yourparentingmojo.com/pandemicpods, and all of the references for today’s episode can be found at yourparentingmojo.com/schoolsocialization

References

Banks, J.A. (1993). The canon debate: Knowledge construction, and multicultural education. Educational Researcher 22(5), 4-14.

Banks, J.A. (2002). Race, knowledge construction, and education in the USA: Lessons from history. Race Ethnicity and Education 5(1), 7-27.

Blum, S.D. (2017). Unseen WEIRD assumptions: The so-called language cap discourse and ideologies of language, childhood, and learning. International Multilingual Reearch Journal 11(1), 23-38.

Brown, S., Souto-Manning, M., & Laman, T.T. (2010). Seeing the strange in the familiar: Unpacking racialized practices in early childhood settings. Race Ethnicity and Education 13(4), 513-532.

Casey, Z.A., Lozenski, B.D., & McManimon, S.K. (2013). From neoliberal policy to neoliberal pedagogy: Racializing and historicizing classroom management. Journal of Pedagogy 4(1), 36-58.

Engel, S. (2011). Children’s need to know: Curiosity in schools. Harvard Educational Review 81(4), 625-645.

Hollingworth, L. (2009). Complicated conversations: Exploring race and ideology in an elementary classroom. Urban Education 44(1), 30-58.

Hoover-Dempsey, K.V., Bassler, O.C., & Brissie, J.S. (1992). Explorations in parent-school relations. The Journal of Educational Research 85(5), 287-294.

Illinois Early Learning Project (2018). Strategies for developmentally appropriate ‘show and tell’ in early childhood classrooms.  Author. Retrieved from https://illinoisearlylearning.org/blogs/growing/showtell/

Leggo, C. (1998). Living un/grammatically in a grammatical world: The pedagogic world of teachers and students. Interchange 29(2), 169-184.

Pretti-Frontczak, K. (2020). A lesson in humility: Diving into anti-racist early education practices and policies (Episode 43). Pre-K Teach & Play. Retrieved from: https://prekteachandplay.com/podcast43/

Saavedra, C.M. (2011). De-academizing early childhood research: Wanderings of a Chicana/Latina feminist researcher. Journal of Latinos and Education 10(4), 286-298.

Sensoy, O., & DiAngelo, R. (2017). “We are all for diversity, but…”: How faculty hiring committees reproduce Whiteness and practical suggestions for how they can change. Harvard Educational Review 87(4), 557-580

Tulsa Historical Society and Museum (2020). 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Author. Retrieved from: https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/

Viruru, R. (2001). Colonized through language: The case of early childhood education. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 2(1), 31-47.

Wladich, A. (2014, January 6). The importance of ‘show and tell.’ Scholastic, Inc. Retrieved from https://edublog.scholastic.com/post/importance-show-and-tell#:~:text=Show%20and%20tell%20sets%20the,an%20adult%20in%20my%20job.

Jen  00:03

Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind 7 Fewer Things to Worry About, subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you’ll join us Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.

Today’s episode is a continuation of a series that I’m doing on the intersection of childhood and money. We started by talking with New York Times money columnist Ron Lieber, on his book The Opposite of Spoiled and then continue the conversation with Dr. Brad Klontz about the money scripts that we pass on to our children. Next, we heard from Dr. Allison Pugh who studies the way that parents and children manage in our consumerist culture. Dr. Pugh is a sociologist who is more interested in how people interact with each other than the ways their brains work. And she also takes advertising as a given and says, since advertising and commercialization is happening, how do parents and children respond? But of course, there’s another side to the story. And that’s the perspective that yes, advertising is happening and what does this mean for our children? How do our children perceive advertisements? Can they understand when a company is trying to sell them something and can we teach them to be more aware about this or is it a lost cause?

Our guest today is Dr. Esther Rozendaal. She’s an associate professor At the behavioral Science Institute, as well as an associate professor in communication science at Radford University in the Netherlands. Dr. Rozendaal is an expert on young people’s media and consumer behavior and Her research focuses in large part on children and advertising. She obtained a master’s in Business Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam followed immediately by an MSc in social psychology from the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, followed by a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, for which she wrote her dissertation on the topic of advertising literacy and children’s susceptibility to advertising. Welcome Dr. Rozendaal. Thank you. Thanks so much for being here with us. So I wonder if we can sort of start at the beginning and just say, Okay, why do companies advertise? It seems as though companies advertise products because they want us to buy the products. But how does this actually happen? What kind of changes does advertising bring about in I guess all people, children and adults?

Dr. Rozendaal  02:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, of course. First of all, for companies and for their brands, it’s really important that we are aware of them, right? So if they want to make money, so if it’s of course the core business, we need to be aware of all the products that they are creating that they’re selling. So that’s actually the fact that we can recognize all those products when we are in shops, or even that we can free recall those products that we can say okay, so I’m in need for a new type of mascara, for example. And now suddenly, this brand pops up in my mind, I’d like to have it so that’s actually the first thing they like to create in our minds. And then of course, they want us to like all those brands and products that they are creating in all the surfaces they are thinking about. So once we do recognize those products and brands, and once we also like them, then the next step is of course that we are going to buy those products and that we want to request it So especially with kids, is it’s highly important that those children start asking their parents to buy.

Jen  04:11

Yes, every parent’s favorite form of advertising this way. Yeah. And so what kind of tactics to advertisers used to influence consumers? And I’m wondering, are these different for younger children and what what age did children just kind of understand these?

Dr. Rozendaal  04:27

Well, there are, of course, several tactics that they’re using. And when you look at children in particular, an often used appeal is the popularity appeal. So children are of course highly susceptible to the influence of their peers, and to being popular. So when you look at, for example, the traditional television commercials, one of the tactics that you can see quite often is that they are showing some really popular children surrounded by a group of other children using kind of product or service and being really happy about it and all the other kids smiling and happy. Yeah, they’re so happy. And this is actually also a technique that is now used quite often not only in the traditional television commercials but also on YouTube for example. So, there also you have deep popularity appeals. So children are films are also other influencers who are not children themselves. Also, they film themselves in settings in which they are really happy and popular, while using the products and the brands they are advertising. And also a thing which is really used quite a lot. For example, by McDonald’s is presenting children with free stuff. Right? So the freebies, the things you can get for free and also this is a technique that is seen online quite often. So also with banner ads. For example, on TV ones websites, there are like, showing things like, Okay, do you want to win a free toy? Do you want to get free tickets for a certain festival, just click here, provide us with some of your personal details, and then you’ll get a free toy or two tickets. So this is also something that is highly persuasive for children, particularly, but also for adults. Of course, we also want to have free stuff, right? So these are some of the techniques that are used, but there are many, many more.

Jen  06:31

Yeah, there really are. And I want to delve into one of those a little bit because I think it’s particularly hard for us to get our head around by just describing a literature review in a study. So there was a pretty recent literature review that was done in 2016. And it found a general consensus that food advertising is positively correlated with unhealthy food take but there’s a lack of insight into the causal relationship. So we don’t know if more children who are watching ads are unhealthy or if unhealthy children are watching more ads. And then related to that there was another study that was actually too recent to be included in that one from 2017. And I’m going to quote it says children who watched a movie with more food product placement and branding were more likely to choose the snack most highly featured in that movie than children who watched a movie without significant unhealthy branded foods placement. And so what the researchers are doing here is they were putting the children down in front of the movie album, the Chipmunks. And then after that these children were three times as likely to choose the cheese balls snack that was frequently featured in that movie as cheese puffs which weren’t seen in the film. And the children were saying then they weren’t particularly hungry. They were told they didn’t need to finish the snacks. They still ate on average about 800 calories or half the recommended amount of calories per day for children aged nine to 11. And so the researchers were thinking okay, maybe a child who sees a character often eating a product in a movie may be more likely to automatically choose that product in the future and then casting even further light on that and even more recent study from 2018 this is really an active field found that children, when you explain this concept to them, they initially don’t believe that integrated advertising could possibly have any impact on their life. So it seems as though you have some thoughts on this.

Dr. Rozendaal  08:17

Yeah. Well, the thing is with those integrated forms of advertising and these, these types of advertising received a lot these days, right, not only in the movies and TV programmes, but also on YouTube, in different influencer videos. The thing is that it’s so highly integrated and embedded in non commercial content that children and adults as well do not always recognize the product placement as a type of persuasion with a commercial intent. So all the possible defense mechanisms that could be there are not really likely to be activated in situations like this. And then what happens Is that the brands and the products are associated with a happy stuff in the movie. So this is called effect transfer or evaluative conditioning. So there are a lot of nice things going on in those movies, right? So a lot of funny things. And those brands and products are placed in parts of the movies in which the feelings are really positive. So those positive feelings are associated, this is really an implicit and oftentimes a non conscious process. So it becomes an association in the mind of which we are not really aware and children are also not really aware about this force. And I really recognize this from my own interviews that I had with children about product placements in in influencer videos, that when you ask them, okay, do you think this really affects you? So they just show this product or this brand in in their video? Does it affect you that you’re saying no, no. If this really this doesn’t affect me at all, and they really believe that some of those children, they do think that it affects others. So this is the third person effect, right? It’s not me, he undercuts me. And this often shows something, it shows that somehow they think, yeah, okay, there could be something here. But what I’ve learned is that being influenced is not really a positive thing. So I resist the fact that it could possibly have an effect on me.

Jen  10:36

And to be fair, I’d probably say the same thing.

Dr. Rozendaal  10:40

So yeah, I would say the same thing as well, even even now, I know that it’s not true, right. I’ve done this research for almost 15 years now. So I should know better than that. But

Jen  10:54

we all want to think we’re not influenced right.

Dr. Rozendaal  10:58

And sometimes, we are Actually, no, that is not true. But many times we actually think that we are not influenced. So sometimes we need just need some proof that we actually are to make us aware of the fact that it can have a major impact on our behaviors or thoughts or feelings. Mm hmm. But yeah, so this is really the thing with integrated types of advertising. It’s a less conscious influencing process that’s going on and we see it more and more often.

Jen  11:28

Yeah. Okay. So I wonder if we can get into the heart of your research. And maybe you can briefly start by defining for us what is advertising literacy?

Dr. Rozendaal  11:36

Yeah, advertising literacy. It’s really it’s a broad concept. The way I’d like to define it is that it’s a set of understandings, it’s in the literature, you can see that the focus is mainly on different types of knowledge and understanding. So first, you have to start with it’s the understanding how you can recognize different types of activity. And also actually the ability to recognize different types of advertising. And with that comes an understanding of its commercial intent. It’s the selling intent and also the persuasive intent, and also the understanding of the different tactics that are being used by advertisers to influence you. It also includes some understanding of the economic models behind advertising, about the source of advertising, who’s creating it with what kind of purposes but on the other hand, in the literature, you can also see advertising literacy being defined as a kind of attitude. And this is also what I like about advertising literacy. It’s not only about having certain kind of knowledge, it’s also about having a general critical attitude towards advertising. So that include a healthy kind of this liking, so to say, right, so it’s more like okay, I just this like this. Unless you really convinced me that this is really a good thing. So it’s kind of a certain level of skepticism, not believing the things for what they are. It’s about criticizing, it’s also about thinking about the appropriateness of advertising. So especially with integrated types of advertising, it’s also important to have a certain feeling of Okay. How do I feel about this particular tactic? Is it okay that advertisers use these more implicit wastes to influence me? Is that appropriate for me or not? So yeah, so it includes glutes, all these kind of things. And then I do believe that it’s also really important also as a part of advertising literacy, that it’s a certain scale of using this general knowledge and these general critical attitudes that you can have to work advertising That you are able to activate those knowledge structures and also those attitudes when it’s really necessary. So when you are really exposed to advertising, when you’re actually exposed to it, and when you recognize it that you can also try to evaluate those advertising messages in light of the attitudes and the knowledge that you have about it. So that’s, I call it advertising literacy performance. So it’s really using your advertising literacy, instead of only having it. So you can see a large difference between for sure. Yeah, and

Jen  14:37

I wonder if you can talk us through the main stages that children go through as they’re developing and sort of an adult level of understanding of advertising recognition, because I think this doesn’t come at an early age and it doesn’t come all at once, right?

Dr. Rozendaal  14:51

No, no, no, no, it definitely develops when children get older. So when you look at the literature, what it says about family Young children is that they are able to recognize clear forms of advertising. So for example, television commercials, children around the age of five, and recognize these commercials as being an ad, and I have a five year old son myself, and this year around Christmas, I really became aware of the fact that around the age of five, they start recognizing those advertisements on television only he also watches YouTube in there. It’s a totally different story. But what’s also interesting is that so he said, okay, Mommy, this is advertising. So I asked him, okay, so do you know what advertising is? And he said, No, it doesn’t matter. It’s just fun. So, what you can see here is that when children are younger, they are probably able to recognize those clear forms of advertising, but they are not yet able to understand the whole commercial intent behind it. The only thing is He could explain to me was that Yeah, so I know that all these things, I can put it on my wish list, right. And I can get it for Christmas. And I’m like, Okay, so that’s, of course, one of the basic elements of advertising that is provide you with information of all the things that are in store. But that’s just a basic understanding. And you can see it in the literature as well with those young children. And when they get older, you can see that their brain is developing, of course, so they’re developing a certain theory of mind. And that’s actually the ability to think from the perspective of someone else, and also did his theory of mind as different layers. But basically, it really means that when children get older, they are more and more able to understand that there are other people at ISIS in this respect, that might have this Front thoughts than they have, and that might have different intentions than they have. So first, they need to be able to understand these different perspectives before they are able to understand that there are advertisers that want to persuade them to sell products, and then also to make money. So you can see that around the age of eight children are well, better able to understand perspective, a different perspective and that they are also better able to understand the intentions of advertisers and all sorts of different persuasive tactics.

Jen  17:35

Okay, and then there’s sort of another level that comes in at around age 13, isn’t there?

Dr. Rozendaal  17:41

Yeah, well, and that also has to do quite a lot to do with critical thinking. So around the age of 12, or 13, children are much better able to think about abstract concepts. And that’s of course, also highly important also to email. Wait advertising and also to develop a critical attitude towards it. And not only so when children are really young, they can say, just advertising is stupid and you don’t? Well, you just do not believe what they’re saying. But they’re actually just repeating what their parents are telling them, and not really, really understanding why they should be skeptical, since that’s also, of course, a pretty abstract thing to think about. So when they are older, they’re better able of doing so. And then of course, also because they’re just gaining more and more experience with advertising, and not only with the clear types, like television commercials, but also online types of advertising, integrated forms of advertising, since they are more experienced, they are also better able to grasp what’s going on. Mm hmm.

Jen  18:50

Yeah. And so the majority of parents who are listening to this have preschoolers and a good chunk of them are less than five years old, and I can hear them I can even see them. throwing their hands up and saying What? My younger child really doesn’t have much of a grasp of this. And of course, this comes online at different ages for different children. But in general, is it safe to say that a three year old, even a four year old has a really pretty nebulous grasp of what advertising is?

Dr. Rozendaal  19:19

Yeah. Yeah. For their brains is just really, really difficult to understand what’s going on. And I think that the things that they can understand is that okay, the things you see here are the things that you can buy in the shop, since that’s really concrete for them, right? So they go to a shop and they see that you can, well, there are products over there. And so it’s here to inform you, but they also want you to buy it, but the thing is that if you tell them that they want you to buy they say, yes, of course, I want to buy it, right. So in their experience products are just there. And you can have it you can just go in Get it. So the whole thing about the economic model behind it, and also that product cost money. Well, that’s pretty difficult for them to grasp. Mm hmm.

Jen  20:08

Yeah. The only barrier is whether or not their parents is yes or no. Yeah,

Dr. Rozendaal  20:13

yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. And also with money. Well, of course it helps. But then still, we have to work for our money they don’t. So scarcity is not really on top of everything.

Jen  20:28

Yeah. Okay. And so quite a lot of researchers by now have attempted to train children to improve their advertising literacy to improve their ability to understand what advertisers are doing when they put commercials on the TV. And so I’m curious, can this kind of training, reduce the effect of children’s exposure to television advertising, because I know that’s your focus, and then we’re going to talk about other forms of advertising in a minute, and how much they have this desire for products that are advertised

Dr. Rozendaal  20:59

Yeah. I believe that training, advertising education that’s focusing on increasing children’s understanding of advertising and durability to recognize it and maybe even to install more critical attitudes that they are, they can be effective in increasing the knowledge, the understanding and the critic attitudes. But it’s that’s not to say that these increased levels of understanding and more critical attitudes will also change the influence process. So what the literature shows, and I did many studies on that, and also, many of my colleagues in Europe but also in the US, they try to find the link between advertising literacy and advertising effectiveness. So not only by increasing the literacy through advertising education, but also by compare and natural differences between children in advertising literacy. And what we see there is that we find It’s really hard to find a link there. So increased levels of advertising literacy do not decrease children’s susceptibility to advertising effects necessarily well. When you start to think about it, it’s not that strange, because we know from many other fields, for example, healthy eating, and also other types of health, healthy behaviors that increasing knowledge and increasing attitudes toward a kind of behavior. In this case, then well defending yourself against the effects of advertising. So by focusing on increasing the knowledge and the awareness, that doesn’t change behavior, right, so there are other things needed here. And especially with children, if you start to think about it, children have to activate their knowledge well being exposed to really interesting, appealing advertisement. It’s a difficult process for them. Huh, in their brains are still developing the prefrontal cortex. That’s the part of the brain that regulates all their thoughts, emotions and actions. This is really a part of that’s highly well in mature, so to say in children. So the process of using knowledge that they’ve stored in mind to become more critical or skeptical towards the things they really like, is a highly difficult process and really calls for more self-regulation. So what I believe is that what’s really needed for advertising education is not only to focus on increasing awareness of advertising and understanding, and even skeptical attitudes, but also focusing on providing children with more self-control or helping them to develop more self-control, since I believe that’s what’s needed here.

Jen  23:58

Okay, I just want to pull apart A couple of the things that you said there, I definitely read the literature on the effectiveness of this kinds of training. And one study that was fairly recent, again, found the cognitive training, the, you know, what is advertising? How do you recognize advertising and these kinds of things that was actually effective in reducing purchase requests for the advertised product. But it was kind of moderated by children’s general liking of advertising. So if the children liked advertising, it was the result was less likely to be seen, if they didn’t, it was more likely to be seen. And when you actually look at the results of this graphed out, the researcher had it on a scale of one to five, where five is, you know, still a lot of purchase requests, and one is not many. And we’re talking about a decrease from three and a quarter to two and a half. So it’s not like you’re going from the kids asking all the time for something and all of a sudden, the parent is thinking what’s going on my I’m not being asked for anything all the time. This is something that the parent might not even perceptually notice the difference between three and a quarter and two and a half requests. So the difference is that can be found in the Research are not necessarily ones that are meaningful in real life. And I also wanted to just point out something that you said and make sure that it comes through loud and clear, which is this difference between possessing conceptual knowledge about advertising. And so this might be a parent or a teacher or a researcher saying this is what advertising is, this is how you recognize it. This is what you should do when you come across it. And the ability to use that information at the precise moment when you’re confronted with a cute character and a cool movie that everybody else is watching, and it happens to be a chipmunk who’s diving into a pool of cheese puffs or whatever happens in these movies, and the executive function skills, the emotion regulation skills that we’re asking children to draw on, to put this knowledge that they have into practice. I mean, it’s barely even there. I mean, parents know this, you ask your child to do something and they can’t help themselves. They just keep doing it because they don’t have the skills to stop doing it. So why do we continue to train children in this way, and Are there more effective ways that we should be starting to investigate in terms of improving advertising literacy?

Dr. Rozendaal  26:06

Yeah, well, I think there are two reasons why we are still focusing on increasing knowledge first, it’s still really important of course. So without the awareness and without the understanding, no critical processing will happen. So it is still important and to the second reason for it is that this is the most easy thing to do. Right. So the whole school system is focused on increasing knowledge. So we know how to do it and then we know how to train. So training children to regulate their emotions, to train their self control is far more difficult. So I think this is one of the reasons why we still see the focus on increasing children’s conceptual advertising literacy, and while other ways of doing it so other ways of educating children is for example, By learning from mindfulness techniques, so this could be one of the things that you could do to help children become more aware of the fact that they are actually affected by their own emotional responses, right? So many children are not even aware that they asked for a product, because there are some emotional responses triggers somewhere in their body. And that those emotional responses actually make them ask for the product or cry for the product or screen for the right. So this awareness is actually needed first for them to change it. And then still, when you are working with really young children like the preschoolers, it’s actually the question of, can we really increase their emotional regulation? I’m not really sure if you go through the literature. This is just a phase in which the regulation of emotions is difficult for them. And it’s also not really trainable. But it when children start to get a bit older, so especially around the age of eight, and from my own research, actually, then you can talk easily to them about emotions, emotional reactions, and how those emotional reactions influenced our behavior. And they can become more aware of their own emotions in certain contexts. And also with mindfulness techniques, this is actually not more than attention training, right? It’s just focusing on how you’re feeling on your own feelings on the thoughts that you’re having, and trying not to immediately respond to it. And by doing so, it creates a kind of space kind of mental space in which a certain stopping think responses is possible. So this is actually needed in situations that you just described like, for a child to think about it in Centuries of advertising, it’s actually necessary that the child is able to stop and interrupt the initial emotional process that was triggered by the appealing advertisement. And then starts to think about effect. Okay, but they are trying to influence me, what can I do to defend me myself or to make a reasoned choice? So yeah, so mindfulness techniques are one of the things that I’m, I’m just trying all those mindfulness techniques with the kids in my studies, and to see whether it helps them to become more in control over their own responses.

Jen  29:40

Okay, so this is very preliminary work right now. Do you have any findings so far? how effective are you saying that it is?

Dr. Rozendaal  29:47

Well, no, it’s just, I’m still experiencing it. So I created a new kind of advertising education material. And indeed, of course, there’s a large part focusing on becoming made more aware of advertising, understanding all the things behind it. But then in the classrooms, I practice with these mindfulness training, things, techniques. And I can see, I can experience that there is something going on in their minds, right? But I’m not. So this is just a first experience and like to do more substantive research on this.

Jen  30:27

All right, well look out for that then. So we’ve talked a lot about advertising on TV. And I wonder if we could talk about other media. I know there’s advertising and games, there are advert games now where you’re essentially playing an ad. There’s advertising and apps and blogs and branded websites and social media. And a lot of this creates data that’s super useful to marketers, and I’ve seen a lot of very contradictory research findings that children get into these flow states when they’re playing these games where they’re completely focused on The game, and one study will say and this has absolutely no impact on their ability to identify advertising. And then another study will say, Yeah, they have no ability whatsoever to identify advertising when they’re in this state. What do you make of this body of research?

Dr. Rozendaal  31:14

Yeah, I think well, the difficulty with it all research, actually, but especially in the field of advertising literacy is that it’s highly context and individual dependent, right? These games were, of course different. So there might be something in the game that created these different types of processing within the children or maybe two children different from each other, right? So maybe these children were like, higher educated or more experienced, which could explain the different outcomes here. So some studies do find effects others don’t. So what’s actually going on here? I think these are the contextual differences. Interesting. Yeah, the thing with flow is that when children are in flow while playing a game, this could mean that they are totally distracted so that it’s kind of an automatic affective process that’s going on. So they are not actually activating their literacy there enough thinking about the game, in terms of their knowledge about advertising, and about etRa games. But it could also be that this state of flow brings them in a really well in a kind of super awareness in which they are aware of the fact that they are actually playing an advertisement. So these are two different things that can happen, right? So it’s flow in terms of an effective process and an emotional process in which they’re unaware of the fact that it’s advertising or it’s just a Highly cognitive process in which all those advertising schemas, all those knowledge structures that are somewhere in their brain are easily accessible and applicable.

Dr. Rozendaal  33:13

And you alluded to make it really

Jen  33:15

much more easy, right? No, it doesn’t make it easy to understand. And and, of course, I was thinking about bringing this up to a higher level. And you alluded to the idea that children experience these things very differently. And so my question was, do children need to be protected from advertisements? And I was looking at research on sort of thinking through commentary on how we should think about this and one researcher said that vulnerability is not the property of groups or environments, but as an outcome of personal social and economic and ecological conditions. Thus, whether a vulnerability is experienced depends on the specific hazard, which is the context, the characteristics of the person and the characteristics of the situation. And I thought that definition was really cool because I mean, pretty often in research and in other things, Who’s of life we sort of have this super simplistic view that well, children haven’t been educated the poor children and the children of the non dominant cultures are really vulnerable to this in particular. And this gets us out of that. But on that date sort of takes us to the other extreme and vulnerability is so specific as to be essentially individualised, then how on earth can we develop policies? So it seems as though some researchers are arguing for consulting children in developing regulations, but that requires children express themselves in ways that adults define and interpret and that’s problematic, too. So I’m just curious as to your sort of overarching view on how we should view children in relation to advertising.

Dr. Rozendaal  34:41

So I think we, for example, one of the individual characteristics that might differ between children is their level of scepticism. And so you mentioned one of the studies in which for the highly sceptical children that pulls up to advertising literacy could decrease their requests requests to their parent For the products, so but these children may be in another situation with another advertised brand other type of advertising could react very differently. So maybe in this situation, they were highly sceptical, and therefore they were highly motivated to defend themselves. But in other situations, these sceptical processes might not be activated, and then they could be highly susceptible to advertising. So based on all these different individual differences, and also contextual situations, it’s really difficult to create advertising regulations, specifically focusing on children. Mm hmm.

Jen  35:41

Yeah. And I want to talk through some things that people have proposed in terms of regulations and potential regulations. But before we get there, I just want to acknowledge that we sort of seem to vacillate between this view that either children are these sort of people who create knowledge and don’t take what advertises At face value, or they’re super helpless, and we need to protect them. And so just to look at some of the research on that there was a doctoral thesis that was done in 2018. That was talking about how children’s peers are really influential in transferring advertising related cognitions or thoughts and also attitudes. And studies that are looking at individual children are probably missing this. And then other studies have looked and found that children use their knowledge of ads themselves, have I seen an ad and what was it like and they’re using these to gain group access and fit in and establish group routines and rituals and metaphors. And they use the knowledge of the ad as well as the actual objects that are advertised to negotiate their place in a social hierarchy through showing an item like whether your iPhone is the latest generation or whether it’s three generations back and that has, that sends a message to your peers. And you can also have a super detailed discussion about the features and the price and the availability of these products. And that shows knowledge that you have that is valued in that social context. And, of course that goes back to Dr. Allison pews research on. And she studies how even super young children in a preschool type aftercare environment are doing this as well. And so I think there seems to be this implicit tacit layer of knowledge that children have where they don’t necessarily talk about consumption. But there are rules about what you’re supposed to know about products and even about the ads themselves and how you’re supposed to discuss what you have. And what happens if you overstep these unspoken boundaries as well, because obviously bragging about having the latest iPhone is not cool, but you can can you can kind of show it and, and be perceived as cool. So I’m curious about whether you see children as these sort of helpless victims of corporate greed who must be protected or are they savvy consumers of knowledge, or is it somewhere in between, or does it vary by children or how do you see that?

Dr. Rozendaal  37:54

Yeah, I think that they are about right. Sometimes they’re really like victims and In other situations, they are just not helpless at all. But this makes it also really difficult, since it just depends on the situation on the type of brand on the type of advertising. And so the question is actually, yeah, how can we create a kind of regulation that takes into account these both sides instead of just one side? Mm hmm. And can we combine both sides? So for example, when you look at all those integrated types of advertising and also influencer marketing on YouTube and Instagram, and which, of course, creates this social pressure of having all those brands, which makes you just as popular as the influencer. With this, it’s it’s one of the steps that could be done to protect children is to make sponsorship disclosures a must do for influencers right? So that they are just really transparent about effects that they created this video because they were being paid by certain brands. And that’s not to say that this is something that will stop the video from being persuasive and that it will definitely make children less susceptible but it actually makes the whole thing more fair. So it increases the ethics of creating these kind of videos and integrated types of advertising. But on the other hand, I think we really have to empower children through a traditional education programmes in schools, and also by parental mediation practices by parents. And it we really not only provide them with the awareness and analogy we discussed it quite a lot already but also really motivate children. So okay, why is really important for you to evaluate these commercial media messages. critically, and also by creating awareness of the why behind their craving for all those products and brands. So making them more aware of the fact that it is because of the brand symbolism because of the fact that all the other kids in school also have these kind of brands, that this creates a certain emotional pressure for them, to also want to have it and to want to buy it, it actually starts providing them with a little bit more self control. So these are the first steps in providing them with more self control of making their own decisions, instead of us being automatically influenced emotionally, non consciously, by the commercial messages.

Jen  40:48

Yeah. And you mentioned identifying commercials there. And I imagine parents are thinking, Well, that seems to be sort of a no brainer to put some kind of warning sign or something on a commercial so that children can know this is a Commercial. And I just wanted to mention a couple of studies that I found on this warnings may lead to an increase in liking of the brand where the child already feel positively about the brand. So And on the flip side of that, even children who feel that they’ve been informed about the presence of advertising are less likely to feel manipulated. And then because they feel the brand has warned me that this is an ad. They’re more prone to tolerate or even appreciate ads. So even something as simple as sticking a warning sign on something which we think should be an obvious thing to do is actually when you look at Children’s reactions to it not at all up. Yes.

Dr. Rozendaal  41:38

Yeah, yeah, through. So this is actually the side effect of becoming more ethical. So becoming more transparent. Yeah. So especially for the young children since their defence mechanisms, their critical defence mechanisms are not that well develop it, then a disclosure can just have the opposite effect. So disclosure definitely increases brand awareness. So many studies have shown that also with eye tracking, like, Okay, if there’s a disclosure that says, hey, this video contains advertising for Nike, for example, and Suddenly our eyes are more focused on the Nike. So it’s creating more brand awareness. And especially for the younger children, they think, oh, okay, cool. So this is Nike, I can buy Nikes This is nice. So I like to video so I like Nike. So this is just a process that’s going on and it doesn’t really trigger their their critical defence and coping mechanisms. So this is something that that is trainable. So helping children Okay, what can you actually do? What are those critical coping mechanisms? And but this this needs practice, right and it also needs to become a bit more easy for them to do. Since like I said, this is especially for the younger children, it’s a difficult process. It requires a lot of mental resources, a lot of thinking, and this is something that they are not really good at yet. But there are different strategies like creating implementation intentions don’t know where you heard about No. And just so it’s a kind of strategy that you you create a certain if then plan. So for example, you say, Okay, if I see advertising, or if I see a warning that says hey, this is advertising in I well, and then you can fill out a certain coping strategy and together with the child is also really young children. It is strategy with children of seven years old, seven, eight years old. You can let them think of a way they want to react to Advertising messages. So for example, those younger children, they just come up with things like then I look away or then I click it away or something like that. Really easy for them to conduct. And then they create their simple if then plan so if I see advertising, then I look away or then I click it away. So then you can make that the coping mechanisms more easy for them. And when you well it needs some practice of course, so they need to practice this if then plan and then over time, it can become a new kind of habit.

Jen  44:37

Okay, so you’re very interested in this because you’re, you’re still speaking about supporting in children’s individual capabilities. You’re not talking about banning advertising and Sweden has banned all advertising for children up to age 12. The UK has banned advertising of foods that are high in salt, sugar and fat in and around TV programmes that are geared towards children. Product placement in programmes directed towards minors is banned in the EU. Do you think banning is effective? Or should we focus our energies on talking to our children and helping them to develop more individualised capabilities here?

Dr. Rozendaal  45:14

Yeah. Well, I think I don’t know about banning, I think it’s a highly complex thing. And I didn’t come across any convincing research that showed positive effects of event. So even in Sweden, of course, it’s highly difficult to study again. So that’s difficult. But I think that many of the problems that are discussed in the context of children advertising are still there when advertising is banned. Since a ban on advertising is really, really difficult to implement, and especially with the internet, advertising is all around us and it’s all around children. So I do Believe that banning advertising for unhealthy products is a good thing, since unhealthy products are not a good thing for children. But I’m not totally convinced of the fact that this is also highly effective in changing their healthy diets or improved diets. There’s more to that, right. There are more factors that impact the eating behaviour of teal and then advertising alone. But yeah, so I’d like to talk from the research facts and the research results. And since Yeah, since then, bends are such a difficult thing to study. And also the results do not really show convincing evidence of the effectiveness. I find it really hard to decide whether I’m pro or con, just a neutral, so. Okay,

Jen  46:53

all right. Well, thank you for sharing that with us. And so I’m thinking through Okay, bringing Mr. Conclusion in What kind of things can parents do? And you’ve mentioned a few things in this interview. We’ve talked about instilling a general scepticism towards advertising. You’ve talked about the IF THEN plans if I see advertising, then I’m going to. I know there was one study that found that it looked at teachers and what they were teaching about advertising literacy in schools and for traditional TV media. And it turned out that the more teachers knew about this topic and talked about it in class, the less children reflected on the appropriateness of advertising and and so the researchers are thinking, Okay, maybe this super strong, didactic teaching approach might not encourage critical thinking, which makes sense from what we know about learning. And so I’m just thinking through Okay, you as a parent of a five year old, what tools are you equipping your son with? And what tools should we be equipping our children with, to help them cope in this world and make them empowered consumers in this world?

Dr. Rozendaal  48:00

Yeah, well, okay, so he’s five years old, right? So what I try to do is just ask questions, and just ask them. Okay, what do you think about this? What What is it? What you’re looking at? What do you think about it? Why do you think about his indigenous weight? So for him, of course, it’s still pretty difficult to answer all those questions, but it just it triggers what it does, it triggers a kind of rational process. And what I know from the literature is that this kind of processes are necessary for children to think, Okay, what am I actually looking at? What am I playing? What is it here, so, it’s just a trigger to start the reflection. And that’s also what I found in one of my other studies, it was with eight to 12 years old, and you can see a great difference. Of course, they’re they’re much better able to critically reflect that in that study. In one group, I constantly asked the children when they were watching television commercials, what are you thinking right now. So I triggered the critical evaluative process. And with the other group of children, I didn’t ask him anything about it. And you could see that the whole process was different. So afterwards, those children were much more critical to watch the advertisements, they were far better able to think about the commercial intentions of it. So children do have a lot of knowledge and certain attitudes stored in the back of their minds, but it needs to get activated. And by asking questions of what they’re doing, and what they’re seeing what they think about it, you can trigger those structures, which can help to make them more critical about it. So I think that that’s one of the things I would advise parents to do.

Jen  49:53

Okay, and of course, the super helpful thing about that is it doesn’t require us to have an amazingly in depth, understand Of how advertising works. Know that all we need to do is ask questions and be curious about what our child is thinking and guide them through a discussion on that. We don’t have to teach them 30% of children after watching this commercial will do whatever.

Dr. Rozendaal  50:16

So that’s also I guess that was what was going on in the study you just mentioned with the teacher or was really not knowledgeable. I think what happened there was that the teacher just started to argue about all the things he knew now what he wanted the children to do. And that’s also something that we as parents do quite often right. So we do okay, we tasting so it’s really important for you to be critical, critical about it, because it’s not always true what they’re telling us it’s not it might not be healthy, and the children are thinking yeah, right. So this is what my mom’s telling me or this is what my teachers telling me. I don’t want to listen to it. So they are just highly resistant towards all those types of things. information. So when you ask questions to them and ask them for their own opinion, then it comes from insights. So it triggers their intrinsic motivation to create their own opinions. And then that’s the difference. So it’s not up to us to tell them what to do, but to help them to find out what they should do.

Jen  51:22

Awesome. What an empowering message to end on. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today and sharing all of your research and thoughts with us.

Dr. Rozendaal  51:29

You’re welcome.

Jen  51:30

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

References:

Brown, C.L., Matherne, C.E., Bulik, C.M., Howard, J.B., Ravanbakht, S.B., Skinner, A.C., Wood, C.T., Bardone-Cone, A.M., Brown, J.D., Perrin, A.J., Levine, C., Steiner, M.J., & Perrin, E.M. (2017). Influence of product placement in children’s movies on children’s snack choices. Appetite 114, 118-124.

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Jen 01:11

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. In today’s episode, we’re going to draw together themes from a couple of different series that we’ve been working on over the last few months. One of these was on the intersection of Whiteness and parenting, and the other more recent one has been on the intersection of money and parenting. And one common theme across both of these topics is the idea of seeing someone who’s different from you as somehow other than you. And so I’m deeply honored today to welcome Dr. John Powell, who is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties. Dr. Powell is the director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California Berkeley, which supports research to generate specific prescriptions for changes in policy and practice that address disparities related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability and socio economics in California and nationwide. Dr. Powell is Professor of Law and also Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. And is the author of the book Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society. Welcome, Dr. Powell.

Dr. Powell 02:17

Nice to be here, Jen.

Jen 02:19

And so I should also add that we scheduled this interview way back in February, right? Because your calendar is absolutely bananas. And we’re just now talking here at the beginning of May. And so to put this in context, when we scheduled this in February, COVID-19 was something that was happening in China and really didn’t seem to affect us very much or like it was going to affect us very much. And here in May, obviously, we are in a very different situation. And so I think our conversation today is going to be even more powerful with this additional context of othering that we’re seeing related to things like attacks on Asian Americans here in the US, as well as under counting the number of Native Americans who have the virus, and how the whole world is basically shut down for an illness that’s killed a small fraction of the number of people that diarrheal diseases and tuberculosis kill every year. Although, obviously the people that those diseases typically kill is very different from the people we are seeing the highest numbers of COVID-19 cases. So I’m sure our discussion today is going to be as this backdrop. And I think it makes it even more timely and even more compelling to listen to. So, I wonder if we could maybe start with a definition because othering is, I’m guessing is a term that’s not going to be so familiar to many of my listeners. So can you start by grounding us a little bit and telling us about what is othering, please.

Dr. Powell 03:33

All right, so there’s, as you would expect, there are many different ways of thinking about othering and the flip side of belonging, which we’ll get to, I guess early.

Jen 03:41

Mm-hmm. Certainly, will.

Dr. Powell 03:42

It comes from many different disciplines, from healthcare, from sociology, from psychology, from philosophy, from feminist studies, from political science, each one has a slightly different variation as to how they talk about it. But one way of thinking about it is just when you do not accept someone else’s full humanity and full equality. The bus concept as people are not seen as grievable, or people don’t count, or in some way, they’re less that. So it could be because there are different levels of othering, you connect othering between husband and wife, but not gonna have genocide in that context. Whereas when you have extreme othering of some groups, it also can lead into genocide. And there’s othering that’s exploitive. So, I was young made to observation that to be superfluous is worse than to be exploited. Because when you are superfluous, you can be subject to genocide. When you’re exploited, you’re not likely to suffer genocide.

Jen 04:47

Because you have a use to somebody.

Dr. Powell 04:49

Right. So, there are forms of othering, but sort of broad way of thinking about it when someone is seen as less than fully equal, less than mutual, and it can add to that like maybe a threat. In some sense, we’re in different slow to some ways of thinking about it.

Jen 05:07

Okay, and so I’m trying to think about this from a psychological perspective and thinking about we’ve talked a long time ago now about how social groups form and a big part of it seems to be about creating this difference in your mind between what is me, what is myself, and to understand that you have to have something to compare it to some kind of other, how do you integrate that psychological aspect into the definitions of othering that you work with?

Dr. Powell 05:32

Well, the psychological definitions tend to be individualistic. And whereas some other definition certainly when I talked about Judith Butler or when I talked about sociology, Steve Martinot, they’re not psychological in that sense, in the sense that one of the preconditions to think about othering is when you think about group othering, there does seem to be a mind is set to actually categorize and differentiate and out of that comes the concept of ingroups and outgroups. But there’s a lot to suggest that there’s no stability in ingroups and outgroups, that people move in and out. And when we were talking about othering, we’re largely talking about at a group level, not at individual level. And there’s no natural other. I mean, that’s the mistake I think that a lot of the psychological literature suggests that you see someone was different. And as the Dean of Harvard Law School wrote a book called What Differences the Difference Make [Jen note: I believe Dr. powell is referring to the book Making All The Difference]. So the psychological literature seems to suggest that there’s natural others. And we think that those natural others and natural othering process fall along certain well traveled categories like race, gender, and that’s clearly wrong. There’s no natural other and there’s no natural group. And part of that comes from a misunderstanding of our history. And so we think about, we organized in tribes, and so in tribes we had intimate contact with anywhere from 50 to 150 people. And that was it. And everyone else was an outgroup, and potentially either a threat or a different. But when we talk about Whiteness, for example, we’re not talking about 50 people. So the 2 million years that we spent on tribes, there was no concept of Whiteness. And people weren’t organized from Whiteness, they’re organized around proximity. And race as we know it is relatively new, a few hundred years old. And then the capacity to actually define someone as an ingroup is a sociological process, it’s not in a build on a psychological tendency. For example, there are over 1 billion Christians, they’ll never see each other. They have different languages, they have different race, but in some sense, they think of themselves as a group. They identify as a group. There’s 340 million Americans and so why is that a group? That sounds nothing to do in a deep sense with 50 people, right? This is a very broad process. And so it’s not that I see a person who has a different race than me, and then I have a whole bunch of things happen is that I’ve actually been constituted in such a way, not on my own behalf, and not on my own efforts entirely. In fact, a lot of this is pre-given. So for example, prejudice can only really exist when there’s already a structure in the language and a grammar for prejudice that’s not the individual. So there’s a little tension between the way psychologists approach it and the way sociologists and others approach it.

Jen 08:39

Yeah, for sure. And one thing I wanted to pick up in what you said was that we sort of assume that these are essentialist categories that I one thing or I’m another thing, and actually, we create these categories, right? I mean, I’m thinking about the immigration of Irish people who were not initially considered White in the US when they first came over. And so what are some of the other ways that you see this? You know, we think these are essentialist categories, but actually, they’re not in any way, essentialist.

Dr. Powell 09:07

Right. And so interesting question, I’ve been a little bit about this so as you suggest essentialist sort of will locate something in the person who’s just it’s in your biology, it’s in your nature and change, we have largely moved to anti-essentialist posture, in the sense that there are very few, if any essential categories and even if they were essential, the meaning is not essential. So when I was growing up, initially, race was considered essential. And you read stuff from the 1950s and 60s and races talk about us being biological and essential. And then some people would take that biological understanding of race and then attribute certain characteristics to it. As that started to melt away or become contested, people shift it as that okay race is an essential or biological, it’s sociological. But gender, aha, that is different. And they’re only, you know, a man or woman, you know.

Jen 10:01

Yeah.

Dr. Powell 10:02

And some people early on, so that’s not quite true, you can be more. And now of course, people don’t think of gender, or gender roles as essential at all. And there’s no clear human biology associated with it, you have transgender. And so, again, in terms of the Academy, people question if there’s anything that’s essential. Now, the mistake that people make with that is that they then assume, because we’re not essential, and if these categories are sociological and creative, can we step outside of these categories, and live in some way in which there are no categories? And that seems pretty wrong. And the categories don’t have to be as rigid, and they can be multiple and they can be fluid and we can influence them. But the way the mind works and the way we work as people, we’re always in relationship. And we need some categories to actually negotiate the world. We seem to be taking too much information. And another are saying that is that all of my interactions are mediated. We have no direct interaction with the world or with each other or even with ourselves. It’s sort of interesting, my experience and when they say that, they assume they’re talking about some unmediated, unfiltered phenomenon. Most people who look at this carefully would say, there’s no such thing, that the very concept of reception is already structured. But it’s not essential. So it can’t restructure. And there are things we can do to shift it. But we can’t simply step outside and have God’s eye view and just see the world as it is.

Jen 11:42

Yeah. And so when we start to think about things that we could do that are different from othering, one potential way we could think about it is well, I’ve seen it referred to as saming, you know, we could just say, well, we’re going to treat everybody equally. Why is that a bad idea?

Dr. Powell 11:57

Well, first of all, it doesn’t work. In some ways, it’s basically saying, in order for me to treat you as a full human being, you have to become some version of me. And that’s better than saying, you’re categorically different. And I can never understand you. And therefore, I can do all these terrible things to you. It’s like, so I have this thing, it’s like, because we are both the same and different, dialogue is necessary and possible. And what it means by that, if we were just the same, dialogue wouldn’t be necessary. I don’t need to talk to you on the same thing. I don’t need to ask you how you feel.

Jen 12:35

You already know.

Dr. Powell 12:36

You know, it’s like, what would I feel? A gentle exactly is out here because she’s an extension of me. And the other is that because it were totally different, the infinite other as Hegel talks about, that I couldn’t understand. And so his life is a little bit more messy. The other things that are interesting, I find very fascinating, is that the process of suppressible saming some ways an erasure, you know, it’s like, it’s actually kind of the liberal response to the categorical differences that we made in the past like, Blacks are women, it’s like, no, we’re all the same. And that all the same, the person speaking, generally is the dominant group. And so then, in order to be a member of society, it means I have to adhere to whatever the dominant group considers to be the necessary thing. And so if you think about something like a Bill Clinton, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, right? Like you can join the military and kill people just like anybody else, but we don’t want to hear about your sexual exploits. But from heterosexual, a heterosexual man, I can brag about my sexual exploits. So even in that formulation, you’re saying one group can show up and be messed up on the chest for how many sexual exploits I have, but if you’re homosexual, shhh, no one would talk about that.

Jen 14:00

Yeah.

Dr. Powell 14:01

It’s different. So the goal is not to be treated as the same. In fact, the idea of equality exit from the western concept come from Aristotle. And Aristotle understood that there were two different forms of equality when he calls arithmetic and what he calls geometric. And arithmetic is when we people are situated the same. And he says basically treat people who were situated the same as fare or treat people who are situated differently is unfair, but when people are not situated the same, to treat them as if they were the same, doesn’t make any sense. We got half of Aristotle’s insights and not the other half.

Jen 14:40

Yeah. And it seems as though a lot of what you’re speaking to is sort of getting at the idea of denying people agency and I think I see that a fair bit in the parenting world, you know, I’m obviously White and a lot of people who are talking about parenting are White, and schools I think you’re very much geared for the success of middle class White children, and you know, in the parenting spirits, it’s really common to hear about children needing protection. And often there are specific groups of parents, they’re usually, you know, Black or Brown, low socio economic status. And these parents don’t care about their children’s education in some way. And in doing that, we’re kind of removing, we’re constructing a narrative where we really remove agency from these individuals. And we say, well, the school knows best or the state knows best. And if only you parented, like middle class White parents did, then your children would be so much better off and so much better able to succeed in the world. How do you relate what we’ve been talking about so far to parenting and the parenting world?

Dr. Powell 15:36

Well, it’s actually interesting on a number of levels. I mean, even the construction of the family, right? It’s a relatively new phenomenon.

Jen 15:43

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Powell 15:44

And, you know, the idea of a nuclear family, just a few thousand years old, but it’s not a basic human trait.

Jen 15:55

Right.

Dr. Powell 15:56

In the way that we organize the family.

Jen 15:56

Right and just to pause on that for a second, I think it is assume that the way that we, when I say we, you know, middle class White families organized the family around two parents, a certain number of children probably living at some distance from grandparents that that is how families are. And that that is what you’re saying is that that is not the case at all.

Dr. Powell 16:16

Right. And in fact, there’s interesting anthropological literature that suggests that anyway, they were doing it wrong. They didn’t do it in a way that we actually evolve. We evolve not to have the nuclear family. There’s some examination of grandparents and all that. But you know, again, it’s sociological, we sort of have cultures, we have expressions, which is conflated with race. But it’s not the same as race, but even, you know, sort of hard to get to a ground and I know we’re trying to do that. But if you think about I mentioned Judith Butler, she wrote in Gender Trouble, she writes that the way we talk about agency is not only Western White, it’s also male. And so we again, a certain agency mainly in the context of free standing separate individual, and I can do what I want to do or I have the capacity, a will. If you go back to psychology, which you mentioned earlier, it’s like peeling an onion. So where does the will come from? What does it mean at a deeper level? Where does I come from? And so what Butler says is that there’s agency but it’s not the same as conceived of in terms of White dominant culture, that’s a fiction. And she says that the human being that’s described in western literature is actually a male. And I would go further and say, it’s an aspiration. It’s a distortion, because the agency is actually reached for is to be freestanding. For example, in Western society, and this is particularly strong in the United States, dependency is seen as a negative. And so part of agency is framed in terms of the opposite of dependency and the different kinds of dependencies or interdependencies but in part because of events, this history with slavery, dependency has taken on a particularly negative connotation. So that’s associated both with slavery and with femaleness. And so if you look at our reactions, for example, to the social safety net, we’re always even in this pandemic, it’s like, well, we can’t give people money, because that will make them, it’s a moral hazard. Give corporations money, because they don’t suffer from that. Or even we can give rich people money. Poor people, we’re gonna make them dependent so in a way we have this really distorted way of looking at people in the capacity of people. And that’s not even just Whiteness, right? That’s the US expression of Whiteness, because not nearly as strong in Europe or even in Canada. So I think agency has to be rethought and how do we actually have agency within relationships, agency that never achieves full autonomy. Never achieves sovereignty, which is how we talk about agency. Actually, we in the United States took land from Native Americans, and when this issue went to the Supreme Court, and famous case, and Supreme Court justify the taking of the land, because they weren’t using it right. And they had a collective relationships rather than one person owning a piece of land. And then later, they actually tried to correct this by giving Native Americans land, but they actually gave it to them as individuals instead of as a tribe. And so if you think of agency within a tribe, or agencies within this interdependent set of networks, or agency in relationship with the earth, it looks very different than agency to standing apart from everything.

Jen 19:51

Yeah, for sure. And of course, that’s resulted in all kinds of problems with land getting divided into ever smaller pieces on a reservation doesn’t it? So yeah.

Dr. Powell 20:00

Right. It’s like, is it a problem that our children, especially today are coming home, right? In many instances, in the United States, we think of launching our children and they’re gone it’s like they’re on their own, you know, and that’s…

Jen 20:15

My work is done.

Dr. Powell 20:17

As a parent, I’ve launched this talk. And that’s not the way most of the societies and that’s not historically what happened. The children were never launched. And we’re seeing a lot of psychological trauma associated with launching children. I teach at UC Berkeley, and they’ve studied as to why, for example, students of color and also really actually have much more stress, and one reason is one thing is associated with it is this extreme notion of individuality, which means their ability to have resiliency, which is always a collective effort. Resilience is not an individual effort. We’re stressed out when we have trauma, one of the ways we deal was return to our community, if there’s no community to turn to. What if that makes you weak? You know, if you’re a guy, if you cries, like what if it could be vulnerable? So we have a lot of ideas that really don’t serve as well.

Jen 21:14

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And just to backtrack slightly for anyone who might have kind of missed the reference to the sense of self and our ideas about sense of self, for some folks that might have gone over their heads, but I would just encourage you to listen back to our interview with Dr. Chris Niebauer, he wrote the book, No Self No Problem. That was actually the last interview that I recorded and very much, I think, feeds into this discussion of what you’re saying about this being a fictional idea that we have this sense of self. So kind of moving on a little bit. I feel like I’m skating on thin ice here because I don’t know exactly how to talk through this. So I’m going to look to your guidance on this. And I’m looking to your book and you cite statistics on poverty in your book, and I’m gonna quote you say that, “In 2009, 74% of Blacks did not live in poverty”. There is an association of poverty and Blackness that is reinforcing self-perpetuating and part of the racing process. And so I agree that the automatic association of Black and poor is not helpful to us. But it’s also a fact that 25% of Blacks do live in poverty compared to fewer than 10% of Whites. And so one thing that I really appreciate about your work and your book is that you argue against this idea of closing the gap between Blacks and Whites as if what Whites have and are is some kind of gold standard, everybody else needs to kind of achieve that standard and instead to have these conditions where nobody lives in poverty. But the part I really struggle with is how we can do this without addressing the systems that have created a poverty level for Blacks that is two and a half times what it is for Whites. Because it seems to me that to do that, we have to talk about how the systems we have now have created these two groups unequally, so it’s in my head trying to get out of this space in my mind where I feel like to examine othering it sort of feels like we have to define the other. So how do I get out of that rhetorical Catch-22?

Dr. Powell 23:06

Yeah, and also it’s actually a very nuanced issue. And we don’t have again sort of a grammar and vocabulary, easily accessible to deal with it. So I’ve written a short piece where I basically said, poverty, especially in the United States is not primarily, or simply the lack of stuff. And Amartya Sen, a Nobel economist from India has written about this a lot, but it’s a lack of belonging. And when you think of not belonging, which we talked about, if the fixed for othering is not saming or what is it is belonging. A lack of belonging or being other, being seen less than human in some ways, Susan Fiske at Princeton has done some work around this and she has something called stereotype content model. First of all, she shows that being other happens at different levels, so not everyone’s othered in the same way. So for example, and these are national samples although she’s having like 30 or 40 different countries, women in the United States, othered and they are not seen as same value as men, but they’re liked, there’s sometimes pity. And the same with old people it’s like, you know, my uncle, so and so you know, I like him. So her two axises liking and competence. So you don’t think women are as competent as men, but you at least like them, right? Whereas some group that you think are not competent, and you don’t like them. That’s a deep kind of othering. And when you get deep into that group, there’s a part of the brain that goes off when you see another human being, and nature just become cool to recognize our same species. It doesn’t mean you’re going to go have coffee with them or talk to them. Just sort of a recognition. When you deeply other someone that part of the brain does not light up and in fact, the part of the brain that does light up is the part of the brain associated with disgust. So it’s a little bit of a Catch-22, but you can’t develop effective social policies for people that you don’t see as people. So it’s not simply the lack of not having stuff is you could say, and I’ve argued this in some places, is that it’s a lack of belonging, and not having membership. And so that becomes a fight. And it’s not a single thing, right? It’s not just races, race and gender, and class and sexual orientation. And so all these things are actually in communication with each other. And in our society, we have this norm. This is what a normal person looks like. And it happens both at a conscious and unconscious level. So I’m not saying you don’t address the condition. What I’m saying the deep condition, it’s a condition of not belonging, or only belonging provisionally. And back to our earlier conversation, it’s the same kind of variation of saming. It’s like, what do I need to be a healthy person? Well, I mean, White people have. It’s like, well, wait a minute, why people don’t look so healthy to me. But that’s what you get. That’s all you get. Plus, in a funny way, it not only deepens the othering of people of color or people who are not White, it actually also diminish Whites in some way. Right? Because, in a very subtle way, because if you see a White person suffering, can you have empathy? Right? And my extreme example is think of Prince Harry and Princess Megan, you know, they literally are princess and prince, one is White and one is mixed, and they’re super rich, they’re famous. They’re royalty. They’re young. They’re beautiful. Do they suffer?

Jen 26:39

Yeah.

Dr. Powell 26:40

Yes. Can we take that into account? Now, not to center their suffering not to center there, but to not ignore it either. And the other things that are potentially dangerous about just sort of making it White versus people of color is that it leaves out the elites. If you think about the construction of Whiteness, Whiteness was the middle stratum. People of color was the bottom stratum. What was the top stratum? It was elites. And early on did not consider themselves Whites. The middle stratum had a role. The role was to police and maintain the structure of racial dominance for the elites, and to have allegiance to the elites, but they were not the elites. And so oftentimes we reframe things just in terms of Whiteness, versus we forget the work the Whiteness is doing as an ideology, and how we should apply it. Also, we confuse the ideology with people. You know, so you are phenotypically White, but are you performance constitutionally White? I don’t know. I have to know more about it. Instead of, oh, race is socially constructed. It can be constructed in such a way that people who are not phenotypically White are Whiteness in white performance. And people who are phenotypically White are not white in their performance we talked about the Irish. And so part of what it’s saying is let’s set a goal where everyone can achieve what we want people to achieve. When we do that we do change conditions, but we’re also not assuming the conditions were aiming toward or aspiring to our conditions of White. And part of what we’re doing is changing the physical condition. But also changing the conditions of belonging, the spiritual conditions if you will, which we need to pay attention to. And the final thing I signed up for now is that in changing those conditions is not paternalistic. It’s not like I’m going to fix Black people, I’m going to fix gay people, is everyone participates in co-creating the thing that we belong to. So it’s not already there. It may be saying, okay, you know, Dr. Kane talks about being integrated into a burning house. Well, I might say, you know what, I’ll go outside for a while until we get that.

Jen 28:55

I’m more mortified here. Thank you very much.

Dr. Powell 28:58

So it’s a much more complicated process. But it’s also a much more engaging process. It’s all the same. And it also acknowledge that, okay, so we talked about children and families, you know, we don’t want to valorize or romanticize Black families, you know, we have pathology and Black families. But so do White families. So, I don’t want to necessarily trade my pathologies in for your pathologies, normal and better. So if we’re going to try to be healthy, how do we actually have that conversation? How do we think about it? And how do we come together to sort of set aspirations for our collective society?

Jen 29:34

Yeah, I love that. And I think that that sort of gets to the next question that I had, which was thinking about how other people raise their children. You know, this may be one of the first times when parents in their role as parents sort of come across this topic. And I think it’s not totally uncommon to see some kinds of parents is lacking in some skills related to parenting, and we already talked about you’re not caring about their children’s education and firstly, I mean, I think we ignore the tools that these parents do bring to their relationship with their children, and that these are not valued in schools in the same way that tools and skills that other kinds of parents do bring. And secondly, there are structural reasons that can prevent them from raising their children and participating in education in the same way that middle class White parents do, which is assumed to be the right way. And so I’m just wondering, you know, you sort of posed a rhetorical question, how can we re-imagine what it means to be part of this society? And this is a lot of the thinking that we’re doing on the podcast right now you’re talking with people about how do we re-imagine what education looks like? And so what are some concrete things that we can do to re-frame our ideas of what it means to be, I’m using air quotes so often, people who are watching on YouTube are seeing all air quotes, the people who are listening on the podcast are missing out on them, but what it means to be a good parent in a way that has space for these different approaches to raising children that the way we think about parenting right now just doesn’t seem to have.

Dr. Powell 30:55

Yeah, I think those are important questions. And of course, the way, you know, assumptions we have, like, you know, we raise our kids very differently. And we’re all farmers. I mean, at the beginning of the 19th century, something like 98% of people or close to that were farmers, right? So you’re raising your kids for a certain world or certain situation. That world now is less than 2% of people in the United States are farmers. So we urbanites. And we assume, again, I grew up in Detroit, the idea to hopefully your kids were, can be gainfully employed, to stay out of trouble and go to work in the factory. When we went to college, and I had one of those loving families in the world, the question was, why? Why are you going to college? You could stay here in the factory and get a job and make a good living and then 25, 30 years retire and be set for life, which is what most of my siblings and family members did. That’s not true in Detroit anymore. You can’t do that. So even the idea of education itself is constantly being reshaped. You know, Dewey and Jefferson who are oftentimes considered early architects of education, educational thinking in the United States, they talked about education as one of those primary purpose was to help us become citizens, not naturally citizens. We have to learn to take the perspective of others. That’s what being a good citizen from Dewey’s perspective, and then the ability to actually, we would say, empathize, but also perspective, take the perspective of others. Well, the very notion of the way in which we do race in this country prevents that. But we’re not interested in the perspective of Black people. We’re not interested in doing the sort of a soft assimilation, we’re trying to help Black people become more like White people. And then there’s also a fear. And this is actually I think, reflected in a lot of the Trump supporters frankly, but not just them. It’s actually global. The world is changing very fast and we don’t know how to prepare children for the right future because there’s too many futures at stake. There’s no future. And we also operate on the assumption of scarcity. You know, there’s only so many people that go to Berkeley and so many people say, well, you know, sorry, but that’s my kid, you know, so I had to push your kid off. And it’s complicated in multiple ways as in other people’s children, right? It’s like, how much am I willing to tax myself for other people’s children? What we see across the United States and seen for the last several decades is that as the school age population becomes more and more kids of color, and immigrant kids, and older people are still predominantly White, and people with more financial resources, they are not inclined to tax themselves to pay for those kids. And that’s what the other people’s children. So I think we need a really sort of a whole new way of thinking about education and educating, the other last thing I’ll say, we used to think of education as a public good. Now think of it as a private good. And of course it can be bulk. But if it’s a private good, then it’s mine and, you know, I can get it and whatever I get from going to college or whatever is mine and I don’t have to share it and the government is taxing me too much, as opposed to we’re actually trying to create something together. So, I think the secret of course, and Albert talked about this in 1954 the nature of prejudice is contact, people need to have contact with each other. And people like pedigree when others have actually built on that lens in terms of what is the nature of contact that creates a cohesive, interdependent and healthy society. There are certain conditions, you know, you have a shared goal, you have relative equality, you have some cooperation, you have a need for each other. So when we may think of sports, you know, like we’re on a football team, we’re all trying to do the same thing. So we’re different. Some people are fast, some people are slow, some people are big and bulky, some people, but the shared goal creates a space where something happens that something emerges that wasn’t there before. You can notice it’s not the individual. It’s the shared, we have individual expression, sorry, this was metaphor. But you think the same thing in terms of the military, it’s another sort of example. But we’ve had tremendous by some standards success in the military, sort of dealing with some of these hard and persistent and stubborn disparities. And again, you sort of put people in a space, it’s like your life depends on me. My life depends on you. We have a common goal. Now the goal may be a messed up goal. But we shared it. And you think about you take oftentimes, young White guys, from the south, especially the rural south, tend to be overly conservative. You take young Black guys, young Latino guys from the south, but also from urban areas. You put them in, there will always a way you get them some guns.

Jen 36:07

That’s like a great idea.

Dr. Powell 36:08

Right? Why does it work?

Jen 36:12

Yeah. Because they have a shared goal.

Dr. Powell 36:13

Shared goal and they’re deliberate about it. And out of this experience, oftentimes come lasting friendships.

Jen 36:19

Yeah.

Dr. Powell 36:20

So we can do some to people. Now, in terms of schools, we don’t have the same kind of prerogative, right? And our neighborhoods are segregated, our schools are segregated, our lives are still very much segregated. So part of the thing is how do we actually come together and start that perspective taking and have some shared goals, have some experience, build bridges, build empathy and compassion for each other. Now, the good thing is some of that’s happening. So it’s not all bad, but people are largely doing it on their own to get very little help from government, again very little help from large institutions. And basically we tend to reduce everything to the individual. Methodological individualists that’s what the term we use. And so it’s like, what can I do? As opposed to not only what can we do but how do we organize space, culture, institutions to actually lend support, to help us move in one direction as opposed to the other.

Jen 37:24

Yeah.

Dr. Powell 37:25

In my house right now, and I’m reminded because I’m looking out on my back porch, the 1940s and 50s all the porches were in the front.

Jen 37:32

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dr. Powell 37:34

That’s we became more private and want other parts in the back. So we don’t have to interact with our neighbor so much. So there’s a lot of ways we can do this. But part of it I think is taking on the language we use. And the difficult thing is when we’re going upstream, swimming upstream. It takes a lot of work. So when we’re going against the cultural norms, the physical practices, it feels hard. When we’re going downstream, it’s just habit. We relax. And all my friends tend to look like me. All my friends tend to go to the same church. If they go to church, all my friends have the same values. But that’s a recipe for disunity, if you will.

Jen 38:17

Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. And so I wonder if we can talk through briefly just some of the main kinds of situations that parents probably encounter this topic in. And I think the first one of these I’d like to touch on is related to poverty. And this came up for me when we were driving through Oakland and my then four-year-old asked, you know, why are all these people camping on the side of the road because she’d been camping, we’d been camping. And so if she saw the tents and assumed they were camping, and so, it seems to me as though any effort to kind of explain why some people are poor can never be adequate because, you know, there are so many factors to include. There are always individual factors to consider as well. So I’m assuming that when we talk to our children about poverty, we should kind of describe the structural issues and not make out like I was this person that made bad choices, but also add something about our individual experiences. And I’m wondering about, you know, how do we balance not trying to be a White savior with acknowledging the other person’s agency? And how does that all come together when you see a person with a cup outside the grocery store, and you want to do something to help and probably just shoving a banana at them that came out of your cart is not the right thing to do. But what is it that we can do that balances their need with the need of the other people outside all the other stores I’m going to go to today as well.

Dr. Powell 39:34

Well, no, with just children and my children are grown now, I have grandchild, so I have to rethink some of this again. Part of it is education. When I was growing up, there were virtually all the new movies are on culturally expression. It was basically challenging extreme wealth. So the movies were more about in the working class people, even poor people presented in a more flattering way. Not true today.

Jen 40:03

No.

Dr. Powell 40:04

And now we sort of also has many billions and it’s like a point of pride, right? Like, oh, because this person has billions, maybe even if they don’t know anything, have never done anything, they could be president. These are money, right? I think education can help us. You know, we talk in this country a lot about being race blind, which we’re not and can’t be, but really what we tend to be is structurally blind. And I think for children, giving them both experience but also giving them a language, educating them. And there was a bad movie that you may have seen that’s called Trading Places with Eddie Murphy.

Jen 40:44

I’ve heard of it. I’m not sure I’ve actually seen it.

Dr. Powell 40:46

Yeah. What was brilliant about the movie is Eddie Murphy is I guess either homeless or semi homeless and Dan Aykroyd is well heeled, whatever and works with these billionaires or whatever. And these two brothers, and one of them thinks that one’s disposition in life is biological, is essential. The other one thinks it’s situational. And so they make a bet. And that is they end up Trading Places between Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. And they bring Eddie Murphy into this, you know, wealthy world and make Dan Aykroyd live on the streets. And the question is, Will their characteristics stay the same? And they don’t. So, I don’t review the whole movie, but children I mean, it’s really smart. Because the saying what’s going on is largely situational. It’s not going didactically. It’s like a common, it is common, right? It is showing what happens when you put people in certain situations. And then the obvious question, if you get that and the question is why we put certain people in certain situations? If you think it’s the people, then it’s nothing to be done. Right? If you think a guy’s an alcoholic, and a woman is a drug dealer, and you know, she’s bad, maybe it’s a family. So that’s one. And I think you could help do that with kids, I think you can do very accessible stuff. The other though, is ourselves as parents. And there’s a lot of literature suggesting that the best one, best ways that children’s learn is not something what you tell them to go or to see you doing. And they had this experiment of why liberal parents want their children to be open to all different races is tough. And they had moderate success, but not very much. And parents are confused like, you know, I talked to my kids, kids have a different color and I take them over. And what they found is that a more powerful thing was if the child saw the parent having friends of a different race that was much more powerful than telling the kids to go figure it out. And in terms of making mistake what I would say is make it, do it. Because these are just two quick examples, I was living in San Francisco and I went to a very upscale store, this woman there who was very disabled and she had trouble negotiating the house. And the sort of cultural standard is, you don’t ask the disabled person that they need help, it’s paternalistic or whatever. And so finally I just said, forget it. I went up to her. And I said, “Can I help you?” And this woman, she said, “Thank you.” And the store is packed with people, right? We’re all being constantly correct by ignoring her and helped her. The other is, I live in San Francisco, I had a number of people who are homeless who lived around me and I got to know some of them. This is one woman called Mabel and I talked to her almost every day and I’d give her some money. And we’d have a conversation and then I’d say so “Do you need anything today?” And she said, “I need money for food.” And I give her money and then one day I came home from a trip, and I saw some friends and we are hugging, and yey, good to see you where have you been? And then they left. And then I walked on. And I saw Mabel. And I said, hi, Mabel, how are you? And she’s, you know, disheveled from living on the streets for a very long and smelly and all that. And I said so what do you need today? She kept quiet and she looked down. I said, everything okay? She said, “Yeah”. Do you need something today? She said, “Can I have a hug?”

Jen 44:29

I had a feeling that was what you’re gonna say.

Dr. Powell 44:33

And I anticipated. It’s like uhh. You might have lice and this and the other. But I did hug her and tell some of my friends and they were teasing me, oh, John’s girlfriend is a homeless, you know. But what she was saying she knew human contact. Yes, she needs some money. She needs to eat but she needs some contact. And I would say without knowing how much she benefited from that hug, but I certainly benefited from that. That was something that was invaluable. Yes, you’re gonna make mistakes because there’s not a playbook. But I’ve written for example about the danger of allyship. I mean, it’s not somebody else’s game of helping them but this is our game, this is all of our game. When you step into it, we need to be vulnerable, we need to be smart, we need to ask other people and we make mistakes. And part of having grace is given a space to make mistakes. And I also say, to air is human, to love an air is intelligent. I like intelligent humans. So not to stand back, be so careful. And what you inferred which I will lift up even if you didn’t mean this is that, again, this is not poor people’s problems. This is not Black people’s problems. This is not homeless people problem, it is. But it’s our problem. It’s not their kids. It’s our kids. These are our kids. And I don’t want to have too much hubris in terms of, when I was growing up, I grew up in Detroit literally, you know, somebody saw you going down the street it would be, put your head on boy. Those aren’t my parents.

Jen 46:19

Yeah, everybody’s watching out for everybody else’s kids. Yeah.

Dr. Powell 46:22

It’s like, well, don’t do that. Smart kid or it’s not my kid, we lost something with that.

Jen 46:29

Yeah, for sure. I know we’re running out of time. And there were at least three more things I want to ask you about. I do want to end up with belongingness because I know that’s your thing. But before we get there, I wonder if we can so briefly talk about volunteering, because I really hadn’t thought about this at all, before I started researching this episode and how other notes can be kind of produced through volunteering because if we don’t see the people we are volunteering for as other then it wouldn’t be called volunteering. It would just be called working together or something like that. Is there a way to volunteer and you know, often parents are bringing their kids along with volunteering and trying to instill good values in them through doing this, which is why I’m so keen to ask the question, is there a place for volunteering in the way we raise our children? And if so, how do we talk about this in a way that doesn’t other the people who are on the receiving end of it?

Dr. Powell 47:10

No, I think this again, complicated questions, and I love them. So personally, volunteering can set up a thing of othering. And it also can set up a thing or amplify one station in terms of privilege, right? I’m gonna go help these people.

Jen 47:33

Yeah.

Dr. Powell 47:34

And it’s optional. I mean, with the people who live, my daughter was in Nicaragua, and there’s some kind of natural disaster, and literally bodies were being floating down the street and I was talking to her and I was saying, you got to come home. And she said, “The people here can’t leave. You don’t have that available to them.” I said, yeah, but then have a door.

Jen 47:58

You said, darn it, I didn’t mean to teach you that well.

Dr. Powell 48:03

And so part of being vulnerable is giving up that capacity to leave. It’s like, I’m in this, this is my thing, I’m committed. And I don’t know what I’ll do and what’s going to be asked of me, but I’m trying. I would say, give what you can, because sometimes people can’t get everything, for whatever reason, but then also try to learn from it. And so, you know, as I say, don’t make the perfect enemy of the good. But try to find those spaces where people can be more engaged, more vulnerable, but the tables have turned. So for example, my sister who taught children in Detroit who are called ungraded. They were special needs children who accommodate to go to houses in Detroit in the wintertime, and they have holes in the side of the house. And frankly, there might be roaches crawling around, and she said, when people would offer her something like a glass of water through roaches crawling, she would take it. You know, because it was important for all of us to contribute. And it’s also important for us to contribute from, accept things from other people. So being able to give is actually, in a sense a blessing or a privilege. And I say to my children, but they are not kids anymore, but you can’t totally disown their privilege. You know, my kids have gone to fancy schools and both parents are college professors. They never went hungry. And that’s their privilege. They’re more than middle class, right? And I say, you know, you can’t just abandon that. You know, you could actually give away all your money, you still have the education you have. The thing is, what do you do with that privilege? Greece have that story of the Golden Bough, where this golden, the Gods give the king and queen this Golden Bough, it produces all this thing, all this abundance and they are entrusted with it. But it’s not theirs. They are sharing it with the people in the community and nation tribes. At the point that they think it is theirs, and they stop sharing, everything goes bad. Right? So part of it is, do we see ourselves in relationship? And do we hoard? Or do we really share? We keep things flowing. And volunteering can help in that, it is the first step. It’s not the last step. But you mentioned earlier about the person outside of a supermarket and be given a banana. It’s versus hungry, you might say, that banana help. If you’re thinking about it, you might say, well, this person is hungry, thousands of people are hungry. Now I didn’t change the structure, so I could start do what you can. And John Rawls has this thing between what’s reasonable and what’s rational. And they’re not the same. We conflate them. And he’s saying what’s rational in terms of schools he says what’s rational, what’s good for me and my family? What’s reasonable is what’s good for society. They don’t always come together neatly. We should try to bring them together, but not all the time. So it’s rational for me to want my daughter to come home from a terrible situation. Someone might say it’s not reasonable. She has skills or whatever. We have to sort of deal with these complexities. And that’s complexity and other people complexities within ourselves. We’re internally conflicted, and certainly helping trying to help our children navigate that and respecting others as they try to navigate it. So I don’t know if there’s an answer in there somewhere.

Jen 51:34

I think there is I mean, it’s about giving as much agency as possible, right? Granting agency. I don’t know if even that’s the right word because it assumes there’s somebody there to grant the agency but allowing for another person’s agency while also having the freedom to make a mistake if you need to make a mistake, but while giving what you can, as much as you can.

Dr. Powell 51:54

I think that’s right. And I think recognizing from my perspective that even though we can’t always live it, or they are profoundly spiritually interconnected.

Jen 52:03

Yeah, and goes to belongingness. Right? Which is where I wanted to end up with this. And I know if you want to back up and share your chart for those who can see it, your Othering and Belonging Institute, I can’t see the small type at the bottom, but I assume it’s a URL otheringandbelonging@berkeley.edu, something like that.

Dr. Powell 52:19

Yes.

Jen 52:20

Perfect. So do you want to give us your life’s work in a 2-minute spill? What is belonging and building on what we’ve talked about so far? What can we do as parents to build towards it?

Dr. Powell 52:30

I think belonging, you know, just think about Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, and he said the first need is food, the second need is security, the third need is belonging. Some of his students now say he got it wrong as an order. That the first need is belonging. If you don’t belong, you don’t get food.

Jen 52:52

Yeah.

Dr. Powell 52:53

If you don’t belong, you don’t get security. None of us are self-made. We literally are part of each other. And I think one of the most extreme negative things that comes out of Western society is this notion that we’re separate. And there’s multiple separations. We’re separate from each other. We’re separate from the earth, we’re separate from nature. We’re separate from the divine. And in that separation, there’s also fear and anxiety. So therefore, things that we’re suffering from, we feel like we have to control, we have to dominate. And so that’s our relationship with nature. It’s like nature is there to be exploited. And we talked about in terms of self-preservation, as if we can preserve ourselves and they do not exist in contradiction. So belonging start of by acknowledging that we’re deeply connected to each other, deeply interconnected. And the right connection is what we’re actually trying to get to. So the slave master and the slave person is also connected. Abusive husband and the battered wife also connect. So it’s not just connection, it is the right kind of connection, connection that animated release by our shared vulnerability, by shared need of each other, by our share rush to the grave, in the case of you dealing with children, a shared love of our children. And then how do we keep amplifying that? And belonging also then cause into a kind of agency because it’s based on the notion of we co-create the world in which we live. It’s not ours, it’s not yours. And it’s not even just human. We’re all part of it, we all have a part of it, and part of the part of it, we will never fully understand. And that’s in some ways where spirituality or religion comes into place. We call to do things that don’t make sense that we can’t explain. And yet, in my sense, that’s what makes us really alive, and human. So, belonging is closely associated with love and caring of inside and outside. So yeah, so the antidote or other meaning is not saming but belonging.

Jen 55:01

Yeah.

Dr. Powell 55:02

It’s a process. It’s not something that we arrive at. So some people would say, can’t happen, right? But it can be what Bernstein calls it regulative ideal. It actually tells us it organizes our behavior, and organizes our ethics, and organizes our life, even if we can’t achieve it. My father is a Christian minister, so most Christians will say they can’t live exemplary lives of Jesus. Most Muslims would say they can’t live the exemplary life of Mohammed. Most Buddhists would say they can’t live the exemplary life, but it orients them in a certain way.

Jen 55:35

Yeah, they still try, right?

Dr. Powell 55:38

That’s the belonging. It is an orient systems doing right in a world, not just in the country or in our neighborhood, but in the world. We’re in this together, and the Coronavirus is such a powerful example that we are interconnected and that what I do affects you and what you do affects me. And so people who think that my freedom, somebody is telling me I can’t go outside. How dare they, you know, it’s my body. Maybe it’s your body, but your body affects other bodies. We are connected, and it’s not an abstract. And what the Novel Coronavirus says is that, yes, take me from body to body. This is how I get around. I can’t walk by myself. I need you, human to take me from body to body. And we do an amazing job.

Jen 56:27

Yes, we are.

Dr. Powell 56:28

If we stop doing it, it feels bad, right?

Jen 56:30

Yeah.

Dr. Powell 56:31

How do we actually hold that in a healthy way?

Jen 56:34

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, a slightly depressing note to end on. But overall, a fabulously uplifting episode I think. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your life’s work with us and really helping us to get some tools to move beyond this kind of feeling of paralysis. Well, I don’t know what to do to think about how we can create this society where people do belong, where everybody has the right to belong, where everybody feels like they do belong. So, thank you again for joining us.

Dr. Powell 57:01

Thank you for your work.

Jen 57:02

Thank you. And so I do want to give a hat tip to Brian Stout who introduced us and I have to say that in some ways that talking with you is worse than talking with him because when I talk with him I come out with this massive list of things I now have to go and read and I think my list with you is even longer. But I will put a full list of references as many of them as I can track down and that I caught on the episode page as well as links to Dr. Powell’s book Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society. A link to the Othering and Belonging Institute, that Dr. Powell leads and the institute’s podcast as well. They have a podcast called Who Belongs and all of those resources can be found at YourParentingMojo.com/Othering.

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Todorov, T. (1984). The conquest of America: The question of the other. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast!  I know that listeners who have been with me for a while know that an episode is going to be different when I dispense with the music at the beginning – I think the last time I did this was six months ago when I announced that I was taking a break from the show.  But have no fear; I’m not going anywhere – I just did it today to indicate that this is not a normal show because these are not normal times.  I’m recording this on March 15 2020, four days after the World Health Organization declared that the coronavirus outbreak is a pandemic, which means it is dispersed across a very wide geographic area and affects many individuals at the same time.  Many, many things have been canceled in the last few days – most schools are canceled for at least the next few weeks; big events are canceled or postponed, and we’re being advised to practice ‘social distancing’ by remaining six feet apart from other people.

This all seems really big and super stressful and I’m not going to go into the details of much of the epidemiological information because frankly that isn’t my specialty.  But I also know that a lot of you are struggling with issues that very much do fall into my wheelhouse – things like “what on earth am I going to do with my kids for the next six weeks when we usually start to get on each other’s nerves on day six of a vacation,” and “will my child get behind on school work,” and “how am I going to still get my own WORK work done so I can get paid and keep us afloat while we’re all cooped up in this tiny space?”

So in this episode I’m going to cover two main things – firstly, resources for you, because you may well be feeling quite anxious and approaching the end of your rope already and unsure how you’re going to make it through the coming weeks.

Then we’ll talk about issues that affect your children while we’re going through this and how to answer your children’s questions about the virus and how to be thoughtful about screen time when it seems like there’s nothing else to do and also how to support their learning while they’re out of school.

And because I know some of you are REALLY stressed out about this, I also want to let you know about a FREE one-week workshop that I’m running starting on March 23^rd. It draws together elements of many of the paid workshops and memberships that I’ve built over the last few years into resources that you can use RIGHT NOW.  So for example, I’m in the middle of hosting a workshop on Taming Your Triggers, where we spend weeks digging into the many sources of your triggers because we often find that if we understand those better it creates space for us to choose a different reaction.  But right now we KNOW the source of our triggers – for many of us it’s our anxiety about the virus and about being cooped up with our kids – whom we love and cherish and enjoy, but just not ALL DAY EVERY DAY.  So we go right to the strategies that you can put in place immediately to feel less triggered by the situation, which will allow you to respond more effectively to your child when they’re acting out.

We’ll also cover similar, immediately implementable strategies to cope with sibling fighting in a way that gives your children tools to solve their own problems, ways to keep children busy so you can get things done, and how to use their own interests as a jumping off point for real learning that isn’t based on worksheets or spelling drills or math problems for when you do have focused time with them.

So if all that sounds like something you could use, just head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/coronavirus and sign up; you just have to enter your name and email address and you’re in.  There’s no charge whatsoever, so if you know of other parents among your friends, family, colleagues, and online networks and groups that could benefit from this then please do feel free to forward the yourparentingmojo.com/coronavirus page. The workshop gets started on March 24^th, and as a bonus, as soon as you sign up I’ll email you a sample daily routine that you can use to bring a sense of order to the few days that we have until we get started.  I don’t think you necessarily need a formal schedule, and you may do just fine even without the parameters of a loose routine, but since many of our children will be coming from the highly routinized worlds of daycare and school, they may find the structure gives them a sense of security when so much around them might feel uncertain.  So that routine should carry you through the days when this is all still new and being out of daycare or school is still somewhat exciting, and then when you’re starting to get on each other’s nerves and you’re wondering how you’re going to do this for the foreseeable future, I’ll be standing right alongside you with tools to help.  If you’d like to download that sample schedule and sign up for the workshop, just go to yourparentingmojo.com/coronavirus, and as a reminder it is completely FREE, so please do share it with anyone you think might benefit.

OK, so on to our topic for today – and in the spirit of putting your own oxygen mask on before helping others with theirs, let’s start with you.

I know a lot of you are really anxious about what’s happening in the world at the moment, so I want to be really specific about our language here and define our terms.  I’m going to walk through the difference between fear, worry, anxiety, and panic.

When we’re thinking about fear, then that’s a response to a known or definite threat.  If we’re hiking in the woods and we see a bear, fear is a normal response.  Our bodies use fear to trigger us to do something productive, which is usually fight or flight, or sometimes the freeze response which can mean playing physically – or emotionally – dead.  For many of us, we are very fortunate that in the situation we’re in with the virus, objectively speaking there really isn’t a lot to fear.  If we are healthy and our children are healthy and the elderly people we know are staying home and staying away from people who might have been infected, then there really isn’t a lot to have actual fear about.  Yes, there is still a possibility that we might catch the virus and we’ll probably feel crappy for a couple of weeks, but the transmission rate in children seems to be very low, and the fatality rate in healthy adults and children is very very low, so we probably won’t be too severely impacted.

But if we think out beyond our immediately fortunate circumstances, then there actually is quite a lot of reason to be afraid.  If our elderly relatives can’t be completely isolated, or if we or our family members are immunocompromised, or if we care about people who are forced to live in close quarters like prison, or who are homeless and lack access to the basic sanitation practices that we are able to take for granted, or if we are working on the front lines in hospitals then that fear suddenly seems very rational because there IS a threat.  The threat is HERE, and it’s happening now.

When we feel fear for an extended period of time – longer than it takes to run away from a bear – we often worry.  Worrying is defined by being exact; we’re not generally worried about things in general; we’re worried about something specific.  We’re worried that we are going to catch the virus and pass it on to others.  We’re worried that our vulnerable friends and relatives are going to be seriously ill or die. In many cases, in regular life, worry is actually adaptive, which means it’s useful.  It tells us that there’s something we need to focus on and maybe shift our approach.  The problem here, of course, is that many of us are already doing the things we’ve been told to do to reduce the transmission of the virus, but if there are things we simply can’t do – like not going to work if we’re a nurse and we’re not sick, or completely protecting our parents who are in ill health – and then it’s much more difficult to reduce the worry by changing our approach.

When we can’t reduce our worries, they may become generalized into anxiety, which is a diffuse, unpleasant, vague sense of apprehension.  It’s possible that you might not even say what’s making you anxious – yes, you’re anxious about the virus, but even after you’ve rationally told yourself about the relatively low risks to most people, you might still feel anxious and not really be able to fully explain why.  We don’t often feel worry in our bodies, but we feel anxiety.  The official diagnosis requires three or more of the following six symptoms to be present – restlessness or feeling on edge; being easily fatigued, difficulty concentrating, irritability, muscle tension, and sleep disturbance.  These reactions aren’t going to help you to cope with any specific threat, so they are maladaptive.  A good test is to tell a friend about your thoughts – if they can understand, you’re worrying.  If they say “that makes no sense,” or if you already know yourself that it makes no sense, that’s probably anxiety.  Worry might make us nervous, but anxiety makes us afraid; it feels beyond our control, and it changes our ability to function in life for a substantial period of time – the diagnosis criteria say six months on this, although I’m guessing that in acute situations like this that the six month criteria may not be as relevant.

A panic attack is like an acute onset of anxiety.  Instead of having ongoing, low to moderate intensity physical symptoms and a generalized sense of apprehension, the official diagnosis of a panic attack is defined as periods of intense fear or discomfort in which at least four of the following 13 symptoms develop quickly, reaching a peak within 10 minutes.  The 13 symptoms are pounding heartbeat, sweating, trembling or shaking, shortness of breath, feeling of choking, chest pain, nausea, feeling dizzy or faint, derealization (which means you have altered perceptions about your self and/or your environment), fear of losing control or going crazy, numbness or tingling, and chills or hot flushes.  If you are already anxious then it’s possible that you might experience the symptoms of a panic attack if you’re in a public place where people are coughing and sneezing, especially if that place is your work so you can’t escape from it.

And when we’re experiencing these things one of the things we’re probably also worrying about the impact that our experience is having on our children.  Some children aren’t terribly perceptive and might not notice that something is wrong, while others will be sensitive to every shift in your mood. Either way, many of them will notice if your symptoms cause you to snap at them or lash out at them, and of course it’s hard enough to be patient with your children when you’re cooped up with them in a small space, even if you WEREN’T experiencing fear, worrying, anxiety, or maybe even panic attacks yourself, along with all the uncertainty that comes with the constant change in status of what’s open and whether we’re still going to have a job in six weeks and if our city is going to be put on lockdown.

So what can we do?  If we think about what helps us to feel less afraid, worried, and anxious, it’s usually not that someone tells us “Don’t worry; that thing you’re thinking about is never going to happen.” These aren’t rational responses in us, so they often don’t respond well to rational logic. It’s far more powerful to reach out to a friend (via phone!) and say “hey, I’m really worried.  Can I talk with you about it?”  Hopefully if your friend is a good listener they’ll empathize with your feelings and your experience first, and connect with you as a human being to show you they care about you before letting you know whether or not you’re being irrational.  And if they’re worried too, hopefully you can do the same thing for them.

When we are ready for some rational information, we can try to understand what is the real risk to ourselves and our family.  It can be hard to see countries on lockdown and not think that this virus is coming to get us personally, and while the risk to the community is very large, the personal risk to you as an individual is actually quite small.  We just can’t extrapolate the community risk to the personal risk and assume that because the community risk is large, the personal risk is also large.  Finding trusted sources of information on issues like this is really important – so look to places like the World Health Organization, or your healthcare provider. You can look at what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is doing as an advisory, but I will say that in general the American government has not been good at detecting, understanding, and reducing risks associated with all kinds of public health threats over the years, and that they it tends to be more reactionary than proactive so I personally don’t necessarily trust that I’m getting all the information I need in a timely manner from them.

You can do a simple mental risk analysis and ask yourself if you know of anyone who has been infected with the virus, and if you’ve been in contact with them.  If you have, then there’s definitely more of a reason to worry than if you haven’t.

And thirdly, what are the steps you can reasonably take to prevent the spread of the virus?  These are fairly simple – regular, effective handwashing for 20 seconds, not touching your face, and staying away from someone who might be infected.  That’s where the advice to maintain social distance comes into play, and most of what I’m reading says to stay around six feet or two meters from other people when you’re out.  There’s probably not a lot of point in wearing a face mask unless it’s a very high quality one and you’re trained in how to use it and you are disciplined in using it – I was at the hospital the other day picking up some medicine for poison oak and I can’t tell you how many people I saw with masks pushed down around their chins.  Masks are actually mostly designed to keep nasty stuff in rather than out, so they’re designed for sick people to wear so they don’t get other people sick, not for healthy people to wear to keep other people’s germs out.  There are mask shortages as well at the moment so it’s best to save those for people who are on the front lines dealing with real exposure risk.

For those of you who are in these situations where you genuinely do have an elevated risk of exposure, my heart goes out to you.  One of the things that seems to happen when we experience symptoms related to anxiety is we feel alone, and like no one else can possibly understand.  But since there are thousands of people experiencing this right now, it’s highly likely that there are very many people who do understand how you’re feeling not only about the exposure, but the fact that this is happening in a situation that you can’t get out of.  One thing you might try is to create a virtual social community for people who are at increased exposure risk using a phone or video conferencing tool so you don’t actually have to be together in the same room.  I’ll put a link in the references to an article about video conferencing providers who are offering free services right now. It could be as simple as you and a colleague sending out an email saying you’ll be on the line at a certain time; if nobody else shows up then you’ll have one other person to talk with, but you might find that many others have been feeling a need for connection like this but didn’t know how to make it happen.

When we’re anxious it’s possible that understanding rationally that our actual risk of exposure is fairly low if we have access to adequate protective equipment, but you also need to address the emotional aspect as well which seeks reassurance and solidarity and empathy, so by going at this from both sides you’ll stand the best chance of making it through this with your sanity intact.  In the free workshop we’ll go more deeply into some other tools you can use to create space for yourself when you feel triggered so you can choose a different response, as well as resources to help you have conversations about your fears with your colleagues and your partner that invite them to help you and allow you to offer your support to them.  We’ll also talk about a concept from Buddhism called grasping, which is the idea that we tend to get attached to certain outcomes (like keeping our families safe) that in reality we really can’t control.  Taking steps to stop grasping – even as we continue to take all necessary precautions like handwashing and social distance – can go an enormously long way toward releasing the grip that anxiety has over us. This is really powerful work, and I’m excited to share it with you in the workshop.

OK, so that was a lot on anxiety specifically related to the virus.  For those of us who aren’t feeling especially anxious about our risk of exposure, there’s still the anxiety of knowing that while we love our children, we really do better when we spend a significant chunk of the day apart from them.  Even for those of you who have chosen to be stay-at-home-parents, getting out of the house and socializing both with other children and other parents has probably provided a big part of the resources that you use to feel connected and have a purpose beyond that of raising your children, and with that rug pulled out from under you, you too may also feel very isolated.  One thing I really want to underscore here is that I don’t think you need a minute-by-minute schedule that tries to replicate the kind of schedule your child has at school, and when we talk about children more in a minute I’ll also make the case that keeping up on school work is a pretty low priority. But I do think that if your children have been in a very structured environment and will probably be going back to a very structured environment in a few weeks, that there’s a strong case for maintaining some semblance of a daily routine.

A routine is different from a schedule in that a schedule says exactly what you’ll be doing and when, while a routine is more of a loose structure that you use to guide you.  If neither you nor your child thrives on routine and you’re both welcoming these unstructured days with wide open arms then I’d say to go for it and run with that and enjoy it while you can!  But if your children are bouncing off the walls, then you may find that rather than constraining you, a routine actually gives you space to feel as though you know what’s coming and removes the stress of what can seem to be constant decision-making about what to do next.

The free workshop I’m running doesn’t start until March 23^rd, so when you sign up for it I’ll immediately send you a free downloadable sample routine that you can use or modify to guide your activities in the intervening days.  It does have times on it like a schedule, but these are just a suggestion. It’s designed on the assumption that there are two parents at home who both need to put in at least half a day of remote work, so it allows for one parent monitoring the children in some activities in the morning, and switching off after a family lunch.  If you’re parenting solo then you might want to work with neighbors or friends on some kind of switching off arrangement – yes, we are trying to limit social contact here so I wouldn’t advise rotating a different set of people in and out of the house each day, but if you’re working with just one or two other families who are also trying to limit their outside contact then you’re probably not greatly increasing your exposure risk.  So do go ahead and download that sample routine by entering your name and email address at yourparentingmojo.com/coronavirus.

OK; we’ve talked quite a bit about how the coronavirus may be affecting you; now let’s shift gears a bit and talk about how it may be affecting your children.

You may well find that younger children don’t seem to be particularly worried about the virus at all, possibly partly because they don’t really have a full understanding about what it is or how it could affect them.  But there are some children who may be quite worried or even anxious, particularly if they are a bit older and have been talking about it with their friends (and maybe their information sources aren’t the most rigorous either), or if they’re younger and they are kind of child who thrives on routine and certainty and having that rug pulled out makes them feel very unstable, and in addition if you are feeling worried or anxious then they may be picking up on this as well.

If your child does seem worried, try asking them what they’re worried about.  They may not be able to put it into words but if they can, as with adults, the key thing to do is to EMPATHIZE.  We can be quick to rush in with our rationalizations and explanations of how we’re probably not going to get sick and even if we do we’re probably going to be fine, but as you know yourself, this doesn’t necessarily help. So the first step is to empathize. We can do this through physical touch like hugs and kisses, which can be just as powerful as the things we say. We can say “I hear that you’re really worried about that.  You must feel very scared.”  (And as a side note, I would use this language about “feeling” scared rather than “being” scared, as this helps our children to understand that feelings come and go, rather than being something that’s inherent to us and therefore won’t change.)  Then after you’ve sat with them for a while and empathized you can talk about some of the information to help them cognitively understand that the risk is low and they will probably be fine.  But do always lead with the empathy.  If I think about the times when I’ve been scared or worried about something and I think about what helps me, I firstly want to know that the person I’m telling hears me, and sees me, and accepts me for who I am.  Once I’m sure that piece is in place, then I can start to receive information about cognitively reevaluating the risk, but not before.

So this leads us nicely into what we should tell children about the virus, and I think parents who are asking me about this already see that this information needs to be differentiated by the child’s age and maturity, but aren’t sure where to go with it from there.  I think one tool that can be really helpful is something I learned in the episode Talk Sex Today where we talked with Sex Educator Saleema Noon, and her advice to parents is that whenever their child comes to them with a question about sex, the parent’s first response should be “Oh, why did you want to know?”  Not only does this buy you a few seconds to think, but it also helps you to understand what’s really going on behind the question and whether your child is interested or confused or worried or something else, which allows you to tailor your response.  If you still feel as though you just can’t answer the question in that moment, it’s totally fine to say “I’m so glad you asked that question.  I need a bit of time to think about the right way to give you the best answer.  Can we talk about it [and then name a specific point in the day when you’ll come back to it, like after dinner]?”  And then you do need to actually come back and talk about it later; don’t just use it as a tactic to get out of the conversation.

Whenever you do end up talking about it, try to just answer the child’s question fairly narrowly.  We parents often think that we would want to have more information rather than less so our children must prefer this too, but our children are often the opposite.  So if they want to know why daycare is closed, you could say something like “there’s an illness called Coronavirus that you can catch by being to close to people who already have it, so even though we don’t know anyone who has it, school is closing to make sure children stay safe.”  Then if they ask you what Coronavirus is you can give them some more information.  You’re always using their questions as the departure point for giving them information, rather than telling them things they haven’t asked about, which should help to assuage their worries without giving them new things to worry about.  You may also need to emphasize the importance of handwashing, and teach them to count to 20 while they’re doing it, and explain that we can’t see our friends as much as we’d like to to try to keep everyone healthy.

For older children who do prefer to have more information and who are curious, this could be an ideal topic for what I call a learning exploration, which is where you take the child’s question as a jumping off point for a real exploration of the topic, going as deeply into it as they would like to using resources like online books, which are still available even when libraries are closed, and YouTube videos. If we weren’t so constrained we’d use all kinds of other community-based resources as well, but right now we’re making the best of what we have, and there’s still an enormous amount of information available to children to help them learn about what truly interests them, which is learning that is far more likely to stick with them than doing rote tasks on a worksheet.

So this is leading us to some of the issues that are going to come up related to your children actually being out of school.

One of the first things you might be worried about is whether they are going to fall behind academically.  My slightly facetious answer to that is that I don’t think your child is going to fall behind academically because everyone else’s child is out of school too.  Even on the tables you may have seen comparing children’s academic performance across countries, no one country is probably going to fall behind because of this time off school because all the other countries are dealing with the virus too.

Listeners who have been with me for a while know that while I am in awe of the many dedicated teachers who are out there supporting our children, I am beyond frustrated at the system that they are forced to work within, in which curriculum is set by bureaucrats in distant conference rooms, and where standardized testing is seen as an adequate assessment of what a person knows, and where learning also has to be standardized to make sure performance on the standardized tests is adequate, so the learning can have very little relevance to the child’s real life and interests and concerns.

So I hope I can encourage you to not worry about academics for right now!  If your school has provided an academic packet to work through and that’s a part of your routine that you and your child find helpful, then it certainly won’t hurt them to do it.  But what I’m hearing from teachers is that the only reason they’re putting these packets together is because parents are terrified of having no structure to their days and so academic assignments are one way to provide that structure. Instead, I want to see this time from a different perspective.  There are always so many projects we wish we could do if we had the time.  Things like gardening and washing the car and baking and sewing new curtains for the living room (or clothes for our children’s toys). There never seems to be enough time in the day to read all the books our children want us to read to them, or snuggle with them as much as they want to be snuggled. We feel so much pressure to stay on schedule and go places and do things, and in a way we’re now being called on to drop all of that.  We’re being shown what’s close to us at home, and what’s important to us, and being encouraged to spend time with that.  I was talking with Dr. Laura Froyen yesterday morning, who has been a guest on the show a couple of times and who co-teaches a unit of my parenting membership with me, and she was saying how she thinks the Coronavirus is going to define the memories of this generation of children.  And I think we both agree that yes, it can define their perceptions of risk and health and staying safe.  But I’m also reminded of a story I read somewhere a long time ago about a woman whose father had been laid off from work when she was young.  She said she somehow knew that money wasn’t as plentiful as it had been previously, but what she really remembered was that her Dad was AROUND, and they would work together to cook dinner, and because he was there he was embedded in her life in a way that he couldn’t have been if he was working a traditional job, and from that perspective she really saw that time as a gift. So to reiterate on that front, if you and your child enjoy traditional academic work and you find the routine of it helpful, please go ahead and do it.  But do you really want to spend the next six weeks or feeling like you’re pulling teeth every single day to get your child to spell 10 words that they don’t care about?  Or do you want them to look back on this period with such a sense of warmth at all the things you were able to do together and how it enabled you to be more connected?

At this point I can hear you saying “Alright Jen; I’m on board with the no academics but this is real life here.  I still have to work.  What the heck am I supposed to do?”  And I acknowledge that yes, this is not the easiest time.  So here are some things that might help.  Firstly, the routine that we’ve discussed.  If we have been functioning in a routine for a long time, the endless process of making decisions about what to do next can feel very overwhelming, and at that point the easiest thing to do can be to reach for the iPad.  That’s why having SOME sense of what’s coming next can keep you moving through the day, which means you don’t slide into screen time without intentionally doing it. Secondly, it can be hard to explain to children why Mama or Daddy gets to spend half the day on THEIR screens while the children are barely allowed to have any time on it at all.  If this is an issue in your family then I’d suggest that the working parent goes to another room and closes the door, rather than being somewhere where children can see you on your screen for hours at a time. And the final thing on screens is that I really believe it’s OK to relax a bit around screen time right now if that fits with your philosophy on raising children, because I know some of you are not using screens at all and of course that’s totally fine too if that’s how you prefer to do it.

I’ve done a couple of podcast episodes on screen time, and the broad-brush conclusions I can draw from the studies I looked at from those is that yes, endless hours on screens isn’t great for children’s brains or bodies.  While the American Academy of Pediatrics does recommend no screen time for children under 18 months and 1 hour a day of high quality programming for children ages 2-5, there’s really no actual evidence that says one hour a day is some kind of magic number and that if you exceed that number, damage will result to your child.  The guideline is more like the scientists saying “based on the available evidence, which is inconclusive, here’s the best attempt we can make at saying what we think most likely won’t harm most children.”  And in addition to making sure they’re watching high quality programming parents are supposed to sit with their child while they’re watching their show and discuss it with them.  Of course, these guidelines were developed for a world where we aren’t being asked to not be close to other people, which for many people means spending A LOT of time at home.  Nobody can say for sure what will or won’t harm an individual child, but I’m fairly confident that a couple of hours of screen time on most days over the coming weeks is not going to result in lasting damage to your child, as long as your child hasn’t been diagnosed with some kind of speech delay for which you have specifically been advised by a professional to minimize their screen usage. But again, the key thing about having a routine is that it keeps you moving through your day without having to make constant decisions that can lead you to using screen time as a default, which may reduce your child’s feeling like they want or need to nag you for more screen time, which benefits your sanity as well.

When I posted a call for questions on this topic in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group, quite a lot of people responded with questions around socialization – they’re worried about loneliness, particularly among extroverted children, and that the loss of interaction with their peers is going to cause their child some kind of harm.  They’re wondering what to do instead of the playdates that might be a traditional fallback in more normal situations when school is closed.  So let’s take a look at those concerns.  We are an inherently social species, and it’s definitely possible that we’re ALL going to feel a bit lonely at some point in the next few weeks, with the possible exception of highly introverted me, and perhaps my daughter Carys as well who would be quite happy spending here to eternity in the house wearing pajamas sorting out her LEGOs by type into plastic containers.  But I wouldn’t necessarily be particularly worried about the impacts on a child of spending a few weeks apart from their peers. Yes, this is a sensitive time in a child’s development, and if it was a single child being absent from a tightly integrated group for a long period then they might find it hard to reintegrate with the group once they returned.  But all of the child’s peers are in the same boat too, so nobody is getting left behind.  Yes, we know that prolonged social isolation over a period of time is very damaging to the brain, but your child is safe in a loving environment with you, not totally isolated.  As far as I’m aware there’s no specific research on the effects of a short-term period of isolation from peers in young children, but everything I can gather from the thousands of academic papers I’ve read on child development tells me that while they might struggle for a few days to get back into the routine of daycare or school, in the long-term this is not going to be something that causes harm as long as they are in a loving environment at home.

We also don’t need to see this as a period of total isolation from peers, if we get creative in terms of how we think about interaction, and we’re fortunate that modern technology is going to be a huge help to us in a way that it couldn’t have been even a decade ago.  The teachers at Carys’ preschool are going to be at the school cleaning over the next week, and at a set time each morning they’re going to start a video call so all the children who want to can call in and see the teachers and read a story and have their normal ‘circle time’ together.  After that first week when the teachers won’t be available any more, this could still be a great part of the daily routine to keep up, maybe with a different parent hosting it each day so all the other parents get to have half an hour of down-time while that’s going on.  And even the American Academy of Pediatrics doesn’t count screen time where the child is interacting with other people through the screen, so you aren’t counting against your allowance on that either.

Screen time can be an important source of social relationships for YOU too, as long as you don’t look up two hours after you idly pick up your phone and wonder why you’re still scrolling Facebook, with no memory of what you’ve been looking at. If you’re in supportive parenting groups sharing ideas and empathizing and gathering strength for the next day, then I’d absolutely consider that to be self-care work.  Also take time to check in with friends via phone or video chat, and keep up those connections as well.  You could even set their kids and your kids up with a computer in your living rooms to video chat with each other while you retreat to a bedroom and have your own conversation at the same time.

And I don’t think we have to completely rule out in-person interactions either, or going outside for that matter. The key is to try to keep some distance between people, so riding bikes would be a fantastic activity that allow you to get outside, move around, and see people without getting close enough to pose a risk.  Some parents are asking me about playgrounds, and I think this is a bit more of a grey zone. Here’s what I know about it.  Flu viruses can remain active on hard surfaces for 2-3 days if they are undisturbed.  We also know that the sun is actually a potent virucide, which means it kills viruses.  I found a really helpful paper that looks at the amount of time it takes at different latitudes for the sun to kill the flu virus on surfaces outside.  Based on this data, if you’re living in San Francisco or at any latitude south of San Francisco right now as we approach the Spring equinox, the sun will probably kill around 90% of any flu virus present on hard surfaces in one day, assuming it’s a fully sunny day, and the surface has to be exposed to the sun and not underneath a play structure or something. The paper only provides data for the virucidal potential at the solstices and equinoxes, but my extrapolation is that you’d have to wait until sometime in late April before you hit that 90% threshold in Seattle, and later than that at latitudes in Canada and northern Europe.  Those of you in the Southern Hemisphere can check the latitudes of those cities against your own latitude the other direction and figure it out from there. So what I’m taking from this is that if the playground hasn’t been used very much, and it’s sunny outside, and if you’re feeling extra cautious you could take some disinfectant with you and give some things a wipe down, and yours is the only family there, then playgrounds are not totally off-limits.  This might be especially useful for parents of children younger than about two, who tend not to play directly together anyway and may be quite content to be six feet apart from each other while the parents get some much needed connection time.  But of course if you see a playground with lots of children running around then you’re not going to be able to keep an adequate space between people so that’s probably a no-go situation.

There was also a piece in the Atlantic recently which interviewed several experts on social distancing, and the situations the experts were asked about like dating and going to bars were more applicable to adults than children, but the one that came closest to being relevant to playdate situations was whether it’s OK to have a small group of friends over at your house for a dinner party or board game night. Dr. Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said she thought that small gatherings are probably OK as long as nobody has respiratory symptoms.  Dr. Albert Ko, chair of the epidemiology department at the Yale School of Public Health didn’t come outright and say a game night was a bad idea, as long as you can sit somewhat far apart, but there is risk of transmission through game pieces or doorknobs or bathroom faucets that lots of people touch. And Dr. Carolyn Cannuscio, the Director of Research at the Center for Public Health Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania was the most conservative of the three, saying that all social engagements should be limited, with the exception that if two households are in strict agreement that they are going to reduce all outside contact and only socialize together to support one another, then the social and mental health advantages could outweigh the small increase in virus transmission risk.  So if you absolutely need – or your child needs – to have contact with someone outside of your immediate family but you still want to be conservative, I would try to pick someone that your child could potentially spend a lot of time with in the coming weeks and not get bored, and agree with that family that you are each other’s support system, and you will each minimize outside engagement beyond your families.  And the more successful you are at reducing that outside engagement I think the more lax you can be about maintaining social distance between the members of those families, in just the same way that we aren’t maintaining distance between people living in the same household as long as none of them are sick.

And before we leave outdoor time totally behind, I would also like to say that for many of us this is a great time to be outside!  If you’re somewhere snowy, put on some warm clothes and go out and play.  If it’s raining like it is here in the California Bay Area, put on some waders and explore a creek, or turn over some logs and look for salamanders.  If it’s sunny, go for a hike.  Try geocaching, which is like treasure hunting using an app on your phone – Carys absolutely LOVES to see what treasures the next cache will hold.  Just watch out for poison oak, because I’m pretty sure that’s where I got mine.  I’ll put a link to the geocaching website in the references.  Animal tracking is also a lot of fun – there are books and apps that provide a lot of information, and then you head out somewhere where there aren’t a lot of people around (which should be easier, now everyone is indoors!) and look for tracks in mud or sand or snow.  You can tell a lot about what kind of animal it was and what it was doing just by studying its tracks.  Start a nature journal – keep track of the weather and the changes in plants that are coming as Spring sets in; I’ll put a link in the references to some great videos on basic drawing techniques that could actually have you doing drawings of flowers and things you find in nature that you might have thought were completely beyond your capability, and you can bring art supplies for the kids too and let them draw or paint whatever they want.

You can also just have unstructured time – lie on the grass and look at the leaves on the trees moving overhead, or the clouds.  Roll in the grass.  Make snow or sand angels.  If we can keep the maximum number of people healthy by doing these things in our small family units, and also create the kinds of memories that our children will look back on as defining moments in their lives, then I think we’ll have weathered this challenge about as well as we can ourselves.

And before we leave this episode behind, I also want to encourage you if you relatively unimpacted by the effects of the virus right now, that you offer help to others who might be in a less fortunate situation.  You might have elderly neighbors who are feeling extremely isolated because they don’t know how to use videoconferencing software.  If they have underlying medical conditions they might not have been able to leave the house to get food.  The homeless people sitting outside the grocery store probably don’t have access to water, so if you have a spare bottle of hand sanitizer you might consider giving it away and washing your own hands with soap and water instead. Call your local food pantry and see what they need.

Listener Brian Stout, who cointerviewed Dr. Carol Gilligan with me on the topic of patriarchy and whose follow-up interview was supposed to be published today instead of this episode, wrote a blog post recently gathering some thinking on how community is going to be key to surviving through the virus’ rampage and thriving after it.  Brian quotes British journalist Dr. Nafeez Ahmed’s recent article on Medium, in which he said “The coronavirus will strain social, economic and political systems to the brink… Getting through coronavirus will be an exercise not just in building societal resilience, but relearning the values of cooperation, compassion, generosity and kindness, and building systems which institutionalize these values.”  Brian goes on to quote Dr Frank Snowdon, professor emeritus of history and the history of medicine at Yale in an interview in the New Yorker, who has written:Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning.  On the contrary, every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities. To study them is to understand that society’s structure, its standard of living, and its political priorities.”  And in the New Yorker interview, he said:“Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are… They show the moral relationships that we have toward each other as people.  There has to be an absolutely fundamental change in our mind-set. We have to think that we have to work together as a human species to be organized to care for one another, to realize that the health of the most vulnerable people among us is a determining factor for the health of all of us, and, if we aren’t prepared to do that, we’ll never, ever be prepared to confront these devastating challenges to our humanity.”  Brian concludes: “We face a moment of reckoning: this is who we are.  Is this who we want to be?”  Deciding this as a society requires that we decide this for ourselves.  Who do youwant to be in this society?  And what will you do as a result of that decision? 

Another thing you could do with your kids at home is to learn how to cook some new vegetarian dishes, because long after the craziness of Coronavirus is just a distant memory, climate change will still be here and with us.  In some ways our reaction to Coronavirus makes me sad, because we are taking all these precautionary measures to make sure WE don’t get sick. The virus doesn’t discriminate who it affects, so we enact drastic measures to stop it.  But the effects of climate change ARE discriminatory – we in the West haven’t been willing to do much about it because it doesn’t affect us personally in the same way the virus does.  When it gets hot we can just turn on the air conditioning.  When sea levels rise we can just pay to have the water pumped out of our streets during king tides, and call our insurance company when our house is burned down by wildfire.  We don’t feel the pain of the effects of climate change in the same way that we do the effects of Coronavirus.  But there are billions of people around the world who ARE feeling those effects right now; whose houses and entire towns are already permanently flooded but they keep living there because they have nowhere else to go. Because we see those people as different from us, we just think “well, why should I do anything differently?” So my ultimate hope is that each and every one of us will take this opportunity to see how we personally fit into this huge global system, and what we want our role to be in that, and what needs to change for each of us to make a positive contribution to that and to take personal steps and enact policies to make that vision happen.

I do hope this episode has left you with a sense of calm as well as optimism.  We can get through this.  We WILL get through this.  But if you need a little extra help getting through this, go over to yourparentingmojo.com/coronavirus, enter your name and email address and I’ll send that sample daily routine right over to you, and together we’ll walk through the FREE one-week workshop starting on March 23^rdto bring down your stress level, keep the kids busy, and support them in learning things they’re really interested in to make the most of this time.  You’ll get daily emails and live videos where you can interact with me (or you can watch them later if you can’t make a set time), and so much support and encouragement from all the other parents in the same boat.  I’m sending warm, remote hugs to each and every one of you from a distance of much greater than six feet, and I hope I get to meet you in the workshop as well.

References

Ahmed, N. (2020, March 2). Coronavirus, synchronous failure and the global phase-shift. Medium. Retrieved from: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/coronavirus-synchronous-failure-and-the-global-phase-shift-3f00d4552940

American Academy of Pediatrics (2016, October 21). American Academy of Pediatrics announces new recommendations for children’s media use. Author. Retrieved from: https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/Pages/American-Academy-of-Pediatrics-Announces-New-Recommendations-for-Childrens-Media-Use.aspx

Chotiner, I. (2020, March 3). How pandemics change history. New Yorker. Retrieved from: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-pandemics-change-history

National Center for Biotechnology Information (n.d.). Table 3.15: DSM-IV to DSM5 Generalized Anxiety Disorder Comparison. Author. Retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519704/table/ch3.t15/

National Center for Biotechnology Information (n.d.) Table 3.10: Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia Criteria Changes from DSM-IV to DSM-5. Retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519704/table/ch3.t10/

Sagripanti, J-L., & Lytle, C.D. (2007). Inactivation of influenza virus by solar radiation. Photochemistry and Photobiology 83, 1278-1282.

Stout, B. (2020, March 11). Coronavirus…and the choice we now face. Author. Retrieved from: https://citizenstout.substack.com/

Tiffany, K. (2020, March 12). The dos and don’ts of ‘Social Distancing.’ The Atlantic. Retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-what-does-social-distancing-mean/607927/

Jen  01:31

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today’s episode is part of a series that I’m doing on the Intersection of Childhood and Money. A while back now I interviewed New York Times columnist Ron Lieber, on his book The Opposite of Spoiled and we do use his approach to several topics related to money. But it seemed to me for a while now that there’s a lot more to say on this. So more recently, I interviewed Dr. Brad Klontz on his concept of Money Scripts, which are the ideas about money that were passed on to us by our parents and that we will probably pass on to our children as well if we don’t critically examine these and potentially make a conscious decision to choose a different path. Another avenue I’ve been wanting to explore is consumerism since I come from England, which is certainly becoming more Americanized than many other places, but where consumerism still doesn’t have the same force that it does here in the US where buying things to express love or because you’re feeling sad or just because you feel like it is pretty much considered a birthright. And I spent a lot of time looking for someone to talk with on this topic and finally found our guest today Dr. Allison Pugh. Dr. Pugh is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia whose teaching and research focuses on contemporary work and relationships, and particularly the intertwining of culture, emotions, intimacy and economic life. She’s currently a fellow at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles while she writes a book about her research on the automation of work that’s historically relied on relationships between people like the caring professions. She wrote the book Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children and Consumer Culture back in 2009, in which she studies how children and parents in both affluent and working class communities in the East Bay Area of California where I live, manage the commercialization of childhood. The book was named by contemporary sociology as one of the 12 most influential books on the family written since 2000 and received several awards. A decade later, it remains the seminal work on this topic. So I’m excited that Dr. Pugh is here today to talk with us and help us think through this important topic. Welcome, Dr. Pugh.

Dr. Pugh 03:26

Thank you so much.

Jen  03:28

All right, so I’d like to start by quoting a few of the very first sentences from the preface of your book. So you say “Ask them straight out and most upper income parents will tell you they don’t buy much for their children because they have the ‘right values’. Meanwhile, low income parents will try to convince you they buy quite a bit because they are not ‘in trouble’. Go into their children’s bedrooms, however, and you will find many of the same objects Nintendo or Sony gaming system, the collectible cards, the Hello Kitty pencils.” You go on to describe how nine in 10 Americans feel that children today want too many material things. And four out of five parents think Americans overly materialistic society produces over commercialized children. Oh, my goodness. So what are some of the popular reasons why we might think this situation exists?

Dr. Pugh  04:17

Well, the first thing I would say is what is the situation?

Jen  04:19

Yes.

Dr. Pugh  04:20

And the situation is that children have a lot of things and yet Americans are worried about how much children might attach to those things, how much kind of emotional attachment they might feel towards material things. And those two, that’s why I’m saying that, I’m describing that situation using those two things. They both have the things and Americans are worried about their feelings toward those things. That’s the situation we’re describing. And why do we have that situation? One issue is the kind of massive influence of consumer culture on Americans generally, not just children but children and adults, and that’s why children have those things. And then the question about like, or the issue about how Americans are worried about how children feel about those things, that’s a different issue. And that reflects our ambivalence towards consumer culture. As a culture, we both embrace it and we are worried about it. We are concerned about its impact on our own lives. And we express that concern with our concern around children. That’s what I would say, kind of writ large. Now, the question about like popular reasons why people think children might be materialistic. That is, you know, people are sure that children are just glued to the TV or to their screens and then very susceptible to the advertising that’s they’re more susceptible than they see themselves as being. That would be like the number one reason why people are afraid that children are too materialistic. Another thing that you hear sometimes popular reasons would be people are pretty sure that other people, other parents are less able to control themselves than they themselves are. So they’re pretty sure that other parents are, you know, kind of opening the spigot and just letting kids have whatever they ask. And then there’s often a lot of generational critique, like, oh, kids today, you know, that would be another kind of popular reason why people are afraid. They’re like, oh, kids today, they’re more materialistic. They’re more screen-focused, they’re more obsessed with stuff, you know, that kind of thing. So those are three potential reasons why people—those are reasons you hear batted about, like, why kids, they have so much and be maybe too attached to those things.

Jen  06:45

It’s like we’re caught in a really difficult bind here, isn’t it? We want the convenience of being able to make one click and buy something on Amazon that shows up tomorrow, whenever we feel like it. But at the same time, we’re so worried about what this means for our children’s futures. It’s a very difficult position to be in for parents, I think.

Dr. Pugh  07:04

Yes, I agree. And, yeah, my overall kind of conclusion from all the years of research that I did and talking to people about this subject after is that, you know, the overarching conclusion I would want people to walk away with is something like, you know, be aware that children live in the same culture that you do.

Jen  07:25

They do?

Dr. Pugh  07:28

And whatever you’re worried about for your children, kind of look at your own self, and what is the kind of modeling that you are doing? That’s kind of the main thing that I come away with.

Jen  07:42

Yeah. Okay. All right. Thanks for giving that away early on.

Jen  07:46

And so you’d mentioned advertising, and I know that advertisements geared towards children isn’t a big focus of yours. And so I’m hoping to do a follow up episode on that with somebody else who does really focus on this, but I wonder if you could just tell us briefly before we move on, why do you take a different view on this topic?

Dr. Pugh  08:02

Right. Well, it’s not that I don’t think advertising is important. Advertising is very important. I’m not, you know, kind of discounting the findings of many, many psychologists and experimental scientists that find that, you know, you show children an ad in an experimental situation in a lab, and then they turn out they want it more later or, you know, like there’s a lot, not to mention all the corporate research finding efficacy, you know, they spent billions of dollars on advertising to children, and they’re not doing it for their health. They’re doing it because they believe it to be effective. So it’s not that I’m saying advertising is not effective. For me, I was less interested in tracking the effectiveness of advertising than I was in kind of how children what’s the meaning children make of the stuff in their lives when they’re out in the real world? What does it mean to them? And so the reason why I didn’t focus on the advertising is because I kind of made it a constant. I just assumed all kids are exposed to advertising to some degree. And I did this at a time when I myself had three young children ranging in age from about, I think it was about three to 10. And my kids, you know, we don’t have a TV, you know, like all these things, I was doing all these things to, I thought shelter my children from advertising.

Jen  09:26

As a good middle class parent does.

Dr. Pugh  09:29

You know, doing my best. And then they’re in school or just walking around, like they swim in this water just like we do. So, even if you’re doing some things, to keep them what you think sheltered or protected from advertising culture or consumer culture, they get it anyway from a whole bunch of other sources. And so that was part of the thinking that like, you know, advertising is everywhere. But that’s not the end of the conversation. That’s the beginning of a conversation like, given that advertising is everywhere, what do we know then? What’s next about what to know about the meaning that children make from stuff? That’s where I started. I wasn’t controlling the effect of advertising because I didn’t perceive that that was very possible. I was just like, okay, assuming advertising is everywhere, what next?

Jen  10:24

Yeah. And so that takes us nicely to one of the key themes in your book, I think, which is the balance of needing to fit in, but also not be too different from people. So you want to be different enough to express your individuality, which is why you need Nike sneakers, right? The right logo on the side. So you have to fit in, but you also have to show your individuality. And of course, this exists both on the part of the children that you studied, as well as on the parents’ memories of their own childhoods and whether or not I as a parent felt like I fit in as a child really can have some profound impacts on how I want to raise my child. And so I’m curious, what can you tell us about the differences that you notice that were important to children and parents?

Dr. Pugh  11:05

Mm-hmm. Well, one thing I want to emphasize a little bit differently, put a slightly different emphasis on what you are saying, which is I found that everyone, I would say, was concerned about fitting in. And the concern about individuality seemed, I’d say, of course, that’s going to vary by temperament. So some kids are more concerned with that, but really, that was coming from the parents. So the kids were much more interested in belonging. And that’s why I came up with that title. That title says it all.

Jen  11:39

Yeah, longing and belonging.

Dr. Pugh  11:43

What’s the meaning? If the question is what is the meaning that kids make of the stuff in their lives? The answer is belonging. And that’s actually a really different thing than a lot of research I found thinks the existing research is like thinking about status and how to be better than, you know, the better than your neighbor or your, you know, in a hierarchy. And actually, the kids and I remember, you know, I sat with kids for three years.

Jen  12:16

You knew these kids really well.

Dr. Pugh 12:17

I knew them really well.There were three different locations that varied essentially by class. There was a kind of wealthy public school, a private school, and then a low income public school setting. And each of these the kids are using the meaning of the goods and the kind of services that they could buy or that the parents were buying to belong more than to assert their dominance. So it was like I kept seeing again and again, you know, kids sitting around going, you know, I have a Gameboy, which I realized is a rather outdated reference, so, whatever they’re talking about today. I have a Gameboy and then someone else would say, well, I have a We or something they would try and trump it. They would instead say, well, I have a Gameboy. Yeah, I have one too. Yeah, I have one too. And it was like, I have one too or I’ve done that too, was much more prevalent and much more prominent in the conversations that I was witnessing over three years. Then, well, that’s for losers and really everyone should have this or whatever, you know. Now, that’s the kids’ world that I was witnessing. And that was a surprise to me, because I had been kind of prepped by the culture, I think the Mean Girls trope, you know, the obsession with status that is a lot of popular culture as well as the existing research. But then you talk to the parents. So I also interviewed parents of the children that I was observing in each location, and the parents were worried like about belonging also. But they were also worried about their kids’ individuality or I should say the affluent parents in particular were most focused on their kids’ individuality in ways that the children were less so. And I can talk more about that, because that’s tied into all sorts of other things about parenting, but those things I found in their consumer.

Jen  14:19

And I think from the affluent parents’ side, that sort of, I’m thinking ahead to the college years and the getting into college years, and you’ve sort of got to show that your kid is different from the other 50,000 kids who are applying to Harvard, right? Is that a big part of the difference aspect?

Dr. Pugh  14:34

Isn’t that interesting? So I think that’s true. But it’s mediated through a kind of generalized parenting style of, you know, intensive concerted cultivation that I think you may have talked about before on the podcast. So Annette Lareau’s really important work diagnosing what middle class and above parents are trying to do, this concerted cultivation is figure out how your kids are unique individuals and then cultivate the things that they are going to make them particularly special that are their particular passions. That’s something that starts at very young, will say toddlers, and I think is powered by, in my opinion by rising inequality and the higher stakes of getting into college and which colleges, the college race.

Jen  15:27

Yup. So you mentioned Dr. Annette Lareau’s work there, and yeah, we have mentioned that on the podcast before and the term concerted cultivation is one that she used to describe how parents used organized activities and I guess consumption as well to foster their child’s talents and I’m going to quote you on this that you said,“From the perspective of upper income parents knowing children’s desires was also part of caring well, of listening, empathizing and reflecting back to their children their true natures, so they grew to know and love themselves. Upper income parents sought to understand their children’s individuals including their desires as part of diagnosing their individual strengths and weaknesses, the central task of every upper income caregiver before commencing on the path of concerted cultivation, plumbing the depths of children’s desires was good parenting.” And I have to say, I’m gonna go out on a limb here, this statement made me really feel kind of uncomfortable, because I see so much of myself and my daughter in it. And there’s a lot kind of going on in my personal life right now that I’m struggling with or related to not really knowing myself and I talked to Dr. Carol Gilligan recently about how patriarchy causes women to not really truly know and to use their true voice and men not to know and express their true feelings. And so I do want to help my daughter to know herself and to express herself from a very young age and we plan to homeschool and so we’re going to have the time and space for her to really know her own strengths and weaknesses. And kind of in a way cultivate herself and I think and hope this will help her to live a fulfilling life. But I also see Dr. Lareau is arguing I’m essentially preparing her to function as an upper middle class White person in society. And of course, the reason I’m able to do this is because I have economic privilege. And so what I’m trying to tease out here is, is it wrong of me to do it in some way?

Jen  17:12

It’s okay to say yes.

Dr. Pugh  17:15

I completely empathize with it. And I have a kind of two part answer.

Jen  17:20

Okay.

Dr. Pugh  17:21

The first is that what you’re describing is kind of seeing another person with positive regard and reflecting that person back to her or him, you know, the child, that’s part of good parenting. That’s part of good caring on some level, like even the psychologists with their analysis of infant caregiver relations will tell you that that this is mirroring. And that’s part of good care. So on the most fundamental level, the answer is no, no, it’s not wrong. The problem is when it gets kind of activated as entitlement, and that’s the direction in which our culture is going. So there’s really great work after Lareau, which was published, you know, 15 years ago or more. There’s really great work showing that kids of middle class versus kids of working class or poor backgrounds, take that the streets you could say that they derive from being seen so regularly and so typically by their parents, and take it into the classroom and customize the classroom to their needs, in ways that accentuate the advantages that they have. You know, it’s not just their parents speak more vocabulary to them or that they have more books in the home, but that they assume that they can customize their environment to meet their needs in a way that working class and poor children do not. This is this great work by Jessica Calarco, who’s at Indiana. There’s additional work talking about, you know, kind of a customization of experience that kids take into high school, and may I say as a college professor, you know, I see these kids, which are my own kids as well, going in and being like, you know, I’ll just give you an example, you know, like just at the last semester that I was teaching, this girl was saying, oh, I didn’t see that the final exam was on this date, and I bought these very expensive plane tickets, can I get accommodation so that I can take it on another day, you know, that’s like, a classic example of kind of assuming on some level that you can customize your environment, because that’s what’s been done for you your whole life. And so I’m making a link between recognition or this mirroring, that is good care, and this kind of message that you can customize your entire environment that leads to a kind of entitlement that I do think is wrong. So, somehow, our task I think as middle class parents in particular, because we have all this privilege accruing to us is to somehow convey recognition, convey mirroring, convey that the person you see is a valuable person and these are their contours and you are an individual, convey this positive regard of who they actually are, but also say, as somehow convey a sense of humility and restraint with that.

Jen  20:35

I love that answer. And yeah, the idea that the world doesn’t revolve around you and that part of your role in society is to make society better for other people, not just make it better for yourself.

Dr. Pugh  20:50

Yes, but you can understand I mean, I think it’s completely understandable that it’s not clear like those are different, different messages. One might be the world like, I see you in all your uniqueness. And then the second message is all that uniqueness is fine at home I guess.

Dr. Pugh  21:13

But when you’re out there, be a little less unique and settle with the masses so that you’re not like assuming that the world revolves around you, you know, like it’s different message and that can be hard. That kind of subtlety can be hard to convey.

Jen  21:25

Yeah, for sure. And just as sort of a sidetrack here, we talk a lot about middle class parents. And Dr. Lareau’s research is getting a little older now. And she said that the low income parents are not as engaged in concerted cultivation and really use this different approach where they support the development of their child’s natural abilities. But some more recent research has observed and I know that you pointed me towards some research as well on slightly different topics related to buying food and that kind of thing that support the idea that low income mothers actually do engage in a lot of sacrifice, a lot of self-reliance and protection in the absence of really anything in the way of social support and a great cost to themselves. What do you make of that sort of discrepancy? Is it just a question of looking at different populations or a different way of thinking about things since Dr. Lareau was working on this?

Dr. Pugh  22:13

Well, two things, first, I don’t think it’s necessarily a discrepancy. And I think Lareau would definitely agree that the working class parents that she saw had a lot of self-sacrifice. It’s not that they weren’t sacrificing, they did withhold a lot from themselves to make sure their kids could get it, you know, they could pay rent, they could house them, they could, you know, like they’re doing a lot. It’s not that they weren’t doing self-sacrifice, it’s that they thought good parenting was about establishing right and wrong, and kind of letting the child kind of come to who they were going to be kind of. As opposed to this kind of active cultivation through daily scheduling of activities and stuff like that. But in addition to that slight difference in emphasis, I would also say there has been some changes. What’s interesting is this is a hotbed of scholarly research people are really in this area and have been for the last 10 or 15 years since this book came out. It just started spawned this enormous industry of experiments and surveys and extensive research and the reason why it’s spawned the so much activity is because people are arguing, and they’re arguing about two things. They’re saying, is it a cultural difference, which is what Lareau was arguing like that by which she means working class people had a different values about parenting compared to the middle class people.They had a different cultural approach to parenting, you know. A whole other category of scholars are instead arguing no, no, no, this is about material resources. And if we gave working class people more advantages, you know, more money, more, etc, their parenting would look more like the middle class parenting. It’s not a cultural difference, it’s material. That’s a fight that’s happening. And there is some research suggesting that the two groups are getting closer. By two groups I mean these middle class working class family parents. The most pithy summary I’ve seen says that working class parents in the kind of parenting they value and what they’re kind of doing like after school activities, etc, working class parents are moving towards middle class parents in scheduling kids, in reading to kids, etc. They’re about where the middle class parents were 25 years ago.

Jen  24:43

Okay, interesting. So things are changing. And I want to pursue this line of thinking on the differences between affluent families and parents with less income, but I don’t want to let drop something when I asked question about a while ago, when we were talking about how children are using their possessions as a way to belong to indicate their belonging and it just made me feel so sad when you said that. I mean, it just feels so wrong to me in some way that we need to have physical things that are produced at great environmental cost and great social cost to people in often other countries living in atrocious conditions, so that they can make us a Gameboy that we can use to express our belonging in a culture. What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Pugh  25:29

Yeah. Well, the first is kids will do this with anything. So actually not necessary that it’d be a Gameboy.

Jen  25:37

It could be a stick.

Dr. Pugh  25:38

Right. In fact, they’ll do it with rocks that they like gave different, you know, some of them would like there was a kind of painting rocks. In my book, I talked about this puff balls and they were like creating out of these little strings or whatever. Like it doesn’t have to be a Gameboy. They create meaning from the stuff that’s around them and then the others want to join in. If it’s got enough, I don’t know, charisma to it or magnetism to it, the others want to join in and then that creates its own economy of sorts. And so it’s not necessarily something that is, you know, has that whiff of tragedy to it that you are sensing. The tragedy, I agree, though, that when it’s attached to expensive goods made in other countries that, you know, with under terrible labor conditions, and you know, with horrible environmental effects, and purchased by working class parents who are just trying to help their kids feel normal at school, that is a tragedy.

Jen  26:40

That is a whiff of tragedy.

Dr. Pugh  26:42

That’s a bad situation. And so actually, in my book, and actually in talks that I’ve given since then, I’ve been thinking about what’s to do? Like if this is something that kids do with anything, but it’s been attached to this pretty high priced and damaging consumer economy, what’s to do here? And I kind of went down, I go down two paths. One is to help people in their neighborhoods and schools, in their small communities, control to some degree the meaning of difference and the meaning of sameness. That’s what it comes down to. So what that means is if you’re in a neighborhood and everyone and like the birthday gifts are getting out of hand or not just the birthday gifts, but the party gifts are out of hand, that’s something that was happening when I was raising young kids. You can get together as a group and just kind of agree like, okay, actually, we’re just going to spend X on party gifts or how about we just do you know, like kind of collectively decide things. Similarly with school uniforms can kind of often bracket a whole area of spending out, you know, take it out of the equation. There’s ways in which our communities kind of almost established sameness that just may takes a little bit of the heat off of this for kids. That’s one path to go down as a group. And I have to say my research says these solutions are going to be by group.

Jen  28:18

Yeah. Ron Lieber describes that too in his book, doesn’t he, where he talks about that parents getting together for Hanukkah celebrations and realizing they’re collectively going to spend like 30 grand on this, and they decided to set up a fund that the children were going to administer and decide how it would be split among different charities that everybody could participate in whether or not they contributed money.

Dr. Pugh  28:39

Yeah, I think his work is pretty terrific. So the other thing though is to make difference safer, and that’s a much more complicated. But also it’s one that I think actually, you know, adults benefit from too like I’m a real believer and do as I do, kind of like walk the walk is what I think like parents and parenting and myself, I’m no exception, we think that we can talk our way through these issues, but kids aren’t actually listening that much. They’re watching, and they’re really watching. And so if your own life doesn’t really include a lot of difference, then how are we to assume that the kids are going to do that too, so they’re going to look for difference themselves. So thinking about difference, thinking about who your friendship group is, and who their friendship group is, thinking about like how it is to walk out and someone else might perceive you as weird or strange, you know, like doing that more and articulating that more, I think is actually a powerful parenting tool.

Jen  29:46

Interesting, okay. And so to keep going on this point about how parents from different economic backgrounds think about consumerism because this was another major theme in your book, and I wonder if you can tell us some of the things that you identified among affluent families and parents with less income as well.

Dr. Pugh  30:01

You mean like the differences between them?

Jen  30:03

Yeah. What were the major ideas that that each of the different groups of parents had about money and how they were spending it?

Dr. Pugh  30:10

Yeah. So I found this core similarity among the children. And I was looking at children with vastly different resources. You know, people who spent the summer in Oakland in their tiny little apartment and someone who went to Brazil and Germany in the summer, like totally different universes.The patterns were the same, the wanting to use stuff to belong, etc. But among the parents of these children, they really had markedly different ways of talking about spending that showed me that they were kind of, I would say, responding to different pressures. So the way I captured that was with the term symbolic deprivation, and symbolic indulgence and symbolic deprivation is what I found the affluent parents doing by which I meant I would be talking to affluent parents and they would be saying, you know, we don’t spend, I’m not very materialistic, my neighbor, now my neighbor, that’s another. Like oh, my sister, she’s really bad or whatever, you know, like, they would have these kind of people that they saw themselves as not us and those people were almost cautionary tales for themselves and they were kind of trying to cue a different line of honorable parenting that was not materialistic. And then you go into the kids’ bedrooms and the kids bedrooms have a ton of stuff, you know, it’s just what it was. They had like all of the basics, obviously, but then also some other stuff. But the parents would like kind of point to particular items that they didn’t buy, that other people were buying to tell themselves that they were kind of honorable, as I say, or you know, not materialistic parents. So I had one family that I use as an example, they were going to Australia for the summer and you know, all the stuff, but the kid didn’t have a Gameboy. And again, I know that the data differs but like, you know, didn’t have the electronic thing that all other boys his age in his school had. So he had to kind of figure out a path to belonging without it. And a lot of my observations were charting how interesting and adept he was at making those paths, but also the parents’ tactic of bringing him to Australia and outfitting with all this stuff, but then like not getting him the Gameboy, as if that was a kind of statement of, I’m not materialistic. I kind of saw that as in some way characteristic of that kind of dimension or that level of parenting. Then on the low income side, they didn’t care about being materialistic, that was not their problem. And that was actually a very powerful transformation that I experienced when I began this research, the research question itself was a middle class question. You know, how do we handle the commodification of childhood? You know, like that is a middle class question. The low income parents did not care about my question. The kind of parenting they were, they’re kind of cautionary tale. It was not the overly materialistic neighbor or sister. It was the person who couldn’t provide, it was the person down the street whose kids were neglected or abandoned or the homeless person or like they were like I’m a good provider. And so that’s what they were proving. So they did not care about, you know, how much stuff their kids has. So, their language, what I’m talking they were like, he’s got this and that and this and that. I’m like, oh my god, and then you go in their bedrooms and they have very little very, very little. In some cases, because I was speaking to parents who were quite destitute, the kids would have almost nothing. And they definitely would not have what a middle class family would consider the basics, they wouldn’t have blocks, they wouldn’t have bikes, they wouldn’t have, you know, things that are the first order of business for a middle class family. The low income family wouldn’t have those items, but instead, they’d have a few of the items that got a lot of conversation at school. So people don’t really talk about their bikes at school, but they might talk—no, there’s a lot of that, but they might talk about their We or their Gameboy or whatever. They talked about their electronic item, they talked about, you know, and that’s what these people would have.

Dr. Pugh  34:47

So it was the like the mirror opposite of what I saw going on in the middle class families. And so I call that symbolic indulgence. Because they were doing what they could to prove that they were good providers, and in some cases, they’re holding back on their own very basic purchases, even rent or food to be able to afford these kind of big ticket. But I would say also kind of big bang for the buck socially for their child in school. And so those were very different. But yeah, those were the primary differences I saw.

Jen  35:24

Yeah. I recall one anecdote from your book about how a mother subsisted on one meal a day for I think three months so that she could spend $50 on something that was really important to her child.

Dr. Pugh  35:34

Mm-hmm.

Jen  35:35

So yeah, and you summarize these differences so succinctly and I guess this is why this book got so many flipping awards because there were so many quotable statements on it. You said affluent overspending is a bad idea, but low income overspending is in decent. The affluent parents have a responsibility to teach their children restraint. But it is shameful for low income parents to spend money on toys and branded sneakers when there isn’t enough money for food and you go on to say that to be able to…

Dr. Pugh  36:01

Look, if I can interrupt that?

Jen  36:02

Yes, please.

Dr. Pugh  36:03

You’re saying that I mean I hope you realize that I’m saying that as this is what the culture says.

Jen  36:08

Absolutely, yes.

Dr. Pugh  36:10

Not what I am saying.

Jen  36:11

Yes. Yes.

Dr. Pugh  36:12

Not part of the shame and indecency. I’m just saying what the culture is telling these parents basically.

Jen  36:18

Yeah. Thank you for clarifying that. And so people buy again quote “To be able to create their experiences, their lives, their identities, their very selves.” And also the people that you interviewed spend money on their children to compensate for something, either something amiss in their own lives or something they perceive as amiss in their children’s lives. And I guess it sort of goes to what we were talking about buying things to belong, you know, is buying things the best way to accomplish these goals?

Dr. Pugh  36:45

Yeah, I mean, exactly. I would say that there’s a lot of different reasons people buy and there’s been a lot of research that documents all those different reasons. You know, people buy to connect to their child, to make their child smile or feel joy or feel wonder, you know, there’s a lot of reasons why people buy for their kids. The reasons that kept coming up in my conversations with them because I was coming from their kids’ classroom maybe these were kind of accentuated in these conversations or maybe they were able to articulate reasons that we don’t hear in other places or another research but in any case, I heard mostly parents talking about wanting their kids to fit in. And that I think speaks to it’s their anxiety about their kids fitting in was so much stronger than I thought warranted having watched their kids. Like I watched kids really manage those moments. All kids at some point, no matter how wealthy didn’t have the thing or hadn’t experienced the thing that everyone was talking about at some point in the school, like everyone had that experience. It was not something you could protect your children from ever experiencing, ever. And kids manage those moments like they manage them well, you know, they do a lot of different things. And I actually have a whole chapter where I talked about that. You know, they learn a lot about the culture so that they can talk knowledgeably about it, even though they don’t own one. That’s what I saw that was so interesting to me. Sometimes they lie. Sometimes they borrow. You know, like they just do a lot of different things that suggest they’re really good at their own cultures, I would say. And, of course, their facility or their competence at managing these moments is going to vary by child, but I saw a lot of really adept management of these slightly uncomfortable experiences. As parents we’re really, this was a motivator for them. So if kids had figured that out and would say that to their parents in some way, couch their requests to parents in ways that emphasize belonging. That was a powerful motivator for parents and I saw parents respond in ways that made me think they’re working from their own memories of their own childhood, feeling undue shame, or just those moments where you don’t have where you’re feeling left out, like parents response to the children’s, you know, fitting in motivations, or fitting in questions, you know, nagging around fitting in. They responded so quickly and so strongly that it made me feel like oh, this is responding to something in your own childhood because the kids are actually fine.

Jen  39:51

So yeah, that reminded me of something that you had said in the book where, just to draw this out more fully, the parents would purchase toys that were otherwise prohibited if their children said they needed something to fit in with their peers to participate in their social worlds, and yet it does seem as though we’re looking back to our childhoods and thinking that I think there was a Greek woman particular in your study who really seemed to have this experience when she was younger of not fitting in and possibly even continuing today, when her daughter saying don’t speak Greek to me, when you come pick me up, that’s a pretty obvious marker that there’s some kind of difference there, some feeling of difference, and that we don’t want our children to feel as outcasts. And if we can buy something to make that feeling go away, we’re going to do it.

Dr. Pugh  40:37

Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Jen  40:38

Yeah.

Dr. Pugh  40:39

Yeah. And I noticed that, you know, so that’s affluent, as well as low income parents are responding to that. As some parents were able to say, you are unique, we are unique. We’re not like these other people in our neighborhood. You are not like those other kids in the class. We’re not buying. But those people, the people who could say no on a regular basis were few and far between and many more people told me that they said no than actually said no. Just based on what I saw in there.

Jen  41:18

Yeah.

Dr. Pugh  41:19

Bedrooms or saw their kids with.

Jen  41:20

Yeah. So do you think we should say no more often? I guess I’m thinking back to the child that you mentioned earlier who didn’t have Gameboy. So his parents had the right values. Should more parents be saying no to the Gameboys? And I guess that’s maybe a bad example, because that child was going to Brazil and Germany and all the other places as well. But is this a lacking skill in parents?

Dr. Pugh  41:43

Oh, that’s such a hard question. My feeling is that it’s not a bad thing to say no. Part of my message is, you know, kind of, I would say Postcards from children’s world. Hey, I’m watching them and they’re doing just fine in those moments there, you know, that they’re not suffering as much as you think from not belonging. And I can’t remember exactly what he said. But Ron Lieber I think has a very nice way of parsing this moment, which is something like you don’t want to be the first by and you don’t want to be the last by, but you wanna be the two thirds in.

Jen  42:19

Yup. Something like that. Yeah.

Dr. Pugh  42:21

Again, I don’t remember how he does it, but I actually thought that was not a terrible thing because I also, in talking to the parents who could say no, there was this one family that I profile in particular, and they were refugee family who had recently moved to Oakland, and they view themselves as separate from their low income neighbors and better and they were like, we are, you know, we are not like them. You know, what? Buy you a Halloween costume? Why would I do that? You know, and so they were had a very hard line, even though they had a lot of affection and care for their kids. There was no doubt that they care for the kids. But their kids had a lot of work to do in the classroom to overcome not having even a Halloween costume, you know, not having even the most basic even in a low income environment. So it looked fatalist to me. It looked rough. It looked tough on those kids to me. So I think is that my American middle class self saying, oh, but the kids just want to belong, you know, like it’s really a balance. I don’t think you want them to be the first as Lieber would say and you don’t want them to be the last and you want them to be somewhere towards the end.

Jen  43:34

Somebody does have to be first.

Dr. Pugh  43:37

Somebody has to be first. Don’t let that be your child.

Jen  43:40

Yeah, and I remember that anecdote about the immigrant child. And I think you described him as picking up something in the store and not even asking for it. Just picking it up and looking at it and putting it back and already knowing that there’s no point in asking for it.

Dr. Pugh  43:55

Right.

Jen  43:56

And there was a sort of sadness in that as well. You know, it’s sad that we have, to me at least, that we have to buy these things with huge impacts to express belonging. But it’s also sad to know that this child is seeing something that could help him to belong and he knows that it’s not even worth making the request because the answer is going to be no.

Dr. Pugh  44:13

Right. I mean, I agree. And that’s why I, you know, told that story, that’s why I let the readers see what I was seeing.

Jen  44:23

Yeah.

Dr. Pugh  44:24

But I also want to remind us that, you know, how many times we live in our consumer paradise, where we’re surrounded by things we want, and would love to have maybe, you know, like, so how many times as an adult are you looking at something and then going, I’m not, you know, can’t do that. I’ll put that back in or whatever, you know, so it’s actually not a terrible experience, not to look at something and then put it back. It’s not a terrible experience.

Jen  44:48

Life will go on.

Dr. Pugh  44:50

So, we see it in all of its points, but it’s not absolutely terrible. And actually, the other thing that I saw him do in the same shopping trip was pickup magazine about I think Gameboys and like kind of leaf through it, basically picking up the cultural symbols and language so that he could bring that right into the classroom and be like, Oh yeah, the latest Na-na-na-na, you know, and that was him learning the culture so then be more fluent in it, even though he didn’t have the stuff and I should say, again, going back to this theme, like children are not an alien creature but they actually are just like, living in the world that we do. Adults do the same thing. So I see my, you know, my husband talk about why, you know, like what are the things that is important that you are knowledgeable about? And you may not be spending all that or, you know, you might not have everything but you’re learning about it so you can talk about it and whatever is important in your world, you know, sure some of it is politics or, you know, more high fluent language but it’s also could be consumer goods. We do this as adults also.

Jen  46:05

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so as we…

Dr. Pugh  46:08

And how do I know? I should even mention this, but those fancy shoes that have red on the bottom, why do I even know that there’s a brand of pump that has, well, I will never afford those. I will never wear those. And why go about that?

Jen  46:23

Right. Yeah. If somebody mentions them someday you have some idea of what they’re talking about.

Dr. Pugh  46:27

Exactly. Exactly.

Jen  46:30

Yeah. Okay. So let’s look at kind of the other end of the spectrum for a minute before we end on a really practical note. I think you mentioned in the book, the idea of noblesse oblige. And I wonder if you can describe that term for us and then talk about how you see it playing out among affluent families.

Dr. Pugh  46:45

Right. So, noblesse oblige is when I would say privilege or advantage group people who have more money, see that money and privilege as coming with obligations to help people who are worse off. It is not generally tax me at a higher rate things are redistributed or I’m going to pay myself less and my lowest paid worker more so that the ratio is less so that we have more equality. It is more an emphasis on I would say philanthropy and giving back in a way, but not necessarily taking away from what gives you riches in the first place. So I would say, you know, my radical children and you know, my leftist colleagues and you know, people would critique noblesse oblige, as not really changing the inequality that makes so much trouble in our society. Nonetheless, without noblesse oblige you’re left with a kind of, you know, oligarchy of wealthy that feel no obligations to others and don’t have that purpose in their lives kind of structuring their spending and their practices. So, some wealthy parents communicate noblesse oblige to their wealthy children and some do not. And you can do that through the kind of consumer practices that you model, and you suggest for your children. There’s a writer who’s really good on this that I would recommend, called Rachel Sherman, who wrote a book called Uneasy Street, which is about she interviewed, you know, the ultra rich in New York City and how they manage parenting as well as other things. And it’s a really interesting book. Yeah, so I had some people talking about what we owe others and how we do that through what we buy, or we’re spending and others did not.

Jen  48:47

Yeah. And so I’m thinking particularly of an example of one parent who’s saying to her child, you have so much stuff, don’t tell me you need four teddy bears or whatever. There’s a kid out there who doesn’t have one. I think she’s a recounting this anecdote to you. And then of course, my question was why do we have four teddy bears in the first place? And then the same parent refused to take her child to places where poor people live in Oakland. And she said, “I don’t want my kids to have to see that much. I don’t take them to most places where homeless people are. I’d much rather write a check and deal with it on that level than expose them to anything”. And so your summary of this was most of the affluent parents seem to prefer the inequality serve as an abstract lesson and charity and the responsibilities of the wealthy rather than as a concrete experience of empathy and what we owe each other as humans. I mean, where do we go with that?

Dr. Pugh  49:34

Yeah, I think that example and this problem really like crystallizes so much that’s a problem right now because what we have there is a case of ultra responsible parenting on one level, you know, she’s trying to help her kids be safe, be protected, be sheltered. She views her, what is good parenting is sheltering them from the coarseness, the kind of strife of modern society and I am deeply sympathetic to that, you know, that’s why we have say movie picture ratings, you know, like we don’t show them R rated movies. There are reasons why we shelter children on some level. But on another level, what does not seeing it in your daily life when it’s all around? What does that do to the child growing up? And what does that tell them? Is there place in the world, this kind of bubble that is, okay, it’s okay to be in a bubble. So real attention. So if we think that’s wrong, somehow, that’s kind of perversion of the ultra responsibility of the good parents, you know, how do you introduce children to inequality safely? How do you do it in a way that doesn’t kind of dislodge all that they think is secure in the world. You know what I mean?

Jen  51:01

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Pugh  51:02

It’s like a conflict between parenting as communicating security and parenting as communicating connectedness to others. And community basically, and who is your community kind of? And I am sympathetic to those who want to communicate security, especially in a world that seems just rife with insecurity. But at the same time I’ve seen the real costs, and what that does to the child’s emerging sense of who we are connected to and who is our community and who was the distant other.

Jen  51:40

Mm-hmm. I wonder if the answer is maybe imagining that our children can handle probably just a little bit more than we think they can handle or maybe that we’re comfortable with handling ourselves?

Dr. Pugh  51:52

Yes. I still agree with that. That is completely true. That is completely true.

Jen  51:56

It’s us that need to go out on a limb here. Not our kids.

Dr. Pugh  52:00

Exactly. And part of it again, there’s a gendered issue here that these are kind of women trying to do what they perceive as good job of parenting, you know, as best as they can. And we need to give them, you know, women are really disciplined for doing parenting wrong on so many different levels. And we need to give them a little more space. You know, there’s also an entire as I’m sure you know, entire kind of revolutionary movement in favor of free range parenting, keeping kids more space, and that’s not just about disciplining parents, it’s also about making our communities more kid aware. And that applies to not just affluent kids, but also low income kids like allowing kids in spaces that are not necessarily designated as kid only, not compartmentalizing kids but actually integrating them into our streets and our daily lives.

Jen  53:06

Yeah.

Dr. Pugh  53:07

And I actually for all I believe in that free range movement, I actually see the decrease in, you know, the fact that we’re having fewer and fewer children is making that less and less likely.

Jen  53:19

Okay.

Dr. Pugh  53:20

It’s not that visible in many places now because they’re compartmentalized in their universities kind of in the places that we’ve demarcated as kids safe.

Jen  53:29

Right. Yeah. In the gyms and music lessons and all that stuff.

Dr. Pugh  53:34

Exactly.

Jen  53:35

Yeah. Okay. And so I know we’re almost out of time here, but I just want to touch briefly on allowances because I know that you’re a fan of Ron Lieber’s work and I’ve read his work too. And so we actually do use this approach to allowances which is $2 a week in each of spend, save and give jars. And then of course, I read your book. And it wasn’t until I did that, that I’d fully articulated to myself, which is why I started the system which is because I got tired of the endless nagging to buy stuff. And so you summarize this neatly again, for me saying, “Like rules, allowances were a way to help children consume while also maintaining the ideal of restraint, similarly accomplishing this trick”, so that parents were ideally left out of the moment of compromise, which is exactly what I was trying to do. So are our children learning valuable lessons from allowances? And I guess, why do I keep asking you to judge my parenting? Is it wrong of me to put this artificial constraint in place basically to make my life easier?

Dr. Pugh  54:31

I totally hear you and I wrote that from the heart because I’m also a believer in kind of just stepping back and letting them.  You know, my view is no, you’re not wrong. I was just pointing out what we’re doing. You know, in my view, kids are in this consumer world. And it’s not a bad thing to give them more autonomy in it. And the notion that parents as kind of police figures that are going to constantly mediate their experience in this consumer world or in the world in general is, I think, not the way to go. I think better to give them small, safe kind of moments to practice, even though we’re not going to be that happy with what they buy. Kids don’t necessarily have the same taste as us. And they’re going to express that through their allowance. And by giving them an allowance, you’re letting them have a little bit more autonomy. So I’m actually pro allowance, even though I see it as a little bit of a cop out in terms of parents not kind of constantly having that tough conversation with kids about like, you know, what they do or do not buy.

Jen  55:47

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and of course, in reading some of your other work, where you talk about windfall child rearing, I realized that it’s my privilege to know that I’m gonna have $6 each week to put into these jars, right? Because not every parent has that luxury.

Dr. Pugh  55:59

No, exactly. That’s something I’ve seen again and again. That’s a totally different article, but it felt like a discovery to me. And that itself is a statement of middle-classness. But I just wanted to convey this to others that poverty is a problem like to be sure not having enough is a problem. But actually one of the things that make it worse is not how little you have, but how little control over when you have it.

Jen  56:27

Yeah.

Dr. Pugh  56:28

So when you’re living quite close to the poverty line or under it, things feel like a windfall, you get that seasonal job at Walmart or, you know, your nephew suddenly comes into a gift from something or your child gets something from the grandparent or all of a sudden there’s a check from the government or you know, like whatever. Different things are not predictable and it makes this sheer unpredictability is the problem or is like kind of a major problem of poverty. That kind of being middle class gives you some protection from because sure, we might have the same kind of waves, but because we have a kind of more basic level of income, you don’t feel the waves as much. And you can pay for something like piano lessons or whatever like things that require a basic level of consistency. Like I know, I’ll have X amount next week. As you say, allowance is the perfect example.

Jen  57:24

Yeah, gosh, money’s such a hard topic, isn’t it? Thank you so much for helping us to walk through some really difficult ideas and for critiquing my parenting.

Dr. Pugh  57:34

I hope you didn’t feel critiqued.

Jen  57:35

Not at all. It was invited but yeah, for helping us think through this and make decisions that really align with our values as parents because I think it’s really easy to just kind of fall into something and as I so clearly have done so many times with allowances just being one example and then afterwards, oh, realizing this is what I’m doing here when I’m doing this and so thanks for helping us to tease that out and make it really explicit.

Dr. Pugh  58:00

Oh, it’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Jen  58:02

So, just as a reminder to listeners, all the references for today’s show along with a link to Dr. Pugh’s book which is called Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children and Consumer Culture can be found at YourParentingMojo.com/Consumerism.

References

Auty, S., & Lewis, C. (2004). Exploring children’s choice: The reminder effect of product placement. Psychology & Marketing 21(9), 699-716.

Buijzen, M. (2008). Associations between children’s television advertising exposure and their food consumption patterns: A household diary-survey study. Appetite 50, 231-239.

Buijzen, M., & Valkenburg, P.M. (2003). The unintended effects of television advertising: A parent-child study. Communication Research 30(5), 483-503.

Buijzen, M., & Valkenburg, P.M. (2003). The effects of television advertising on materialism, parent-child conflict, and unhappiness: A review of research. Applied Developmental Psychology 24, 437-456.

Coffey, T., Siegel, D., & Livingston, G. (2006). Marketing to the new super consumer: Mom & kid. Ithaca, NY: Paramount Marketing Publishing.

Cook, C. (2004). The commodification of childhood: The children’s clothing industry and the rise of the child consumer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Cross, G (2010). Valves of adult desire. In D. Buckingham & V. Tingstad (Eds.), Childhood and Consumer Culture (p.17-30). Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.

Elliott, S., Powell, R., & Brenton, J. (2015). Being a good mom: Low-income, Black single mothers negotiate intensive mothering. Journal of Family Issues 36(3), 351-370.

Mayo, E., & Nairn, A. (2009). Consumer kids: How big business is grooming our children for profit. London, U.K.: Constable & Robinson.

Opree, S.J., Buijzen, M., van Reijmersdal, E.A., & Valkenburg, P.M. (2014). Children’s advertising exposure, advertised product desire, and materialism: A longitudinal study. Communication Research 41(5), 717-735.

Nairn, A., Bottomley, P., & Ormrod, J. (2010). “Those who have less want more. But does it make them feel bad?”: Deprivation, materialism and self-esteem in childhood. In D. Buckingham & V. Tingstad (Eds.), Childhood and Consumer Culture (p.194-208). Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nairn, A., & Fine. A. (2004). Who’s messing with my mind? The implications of dual-process models for the ethics of advertising to children. International Journal of Advertising 27(3), 447-470.

Pugh, A.J. (2009). Longing and belonging: Parents, children, and consumer culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press

Pugh, A.J. (2004). Windfall child rearing: Low-income care and consumption. Journal of Consumer Culture 42(2), 229-249.

Pugh, A. (2002, May). From “compensation” to “childhood wonder”: Why parents buy. Working Paper No. 39. Berkeley, CA: Center for Working Families.

Pugh, A. (2001). When is a doll more than a doll?: Selling toys as reassurance for maternal and class anxiety. Berkeley, CA: Center for Working Families.

Rozendaal, E., Lapierre, M.A., Van Reijmersdal, E.A., & Buijzen, M. (2011). Reconsidering advertising literacy as a defense against advertising effects. Media Psychology 14, 333-354.

Jen: 01:28

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today, we’re talking about a topic that parents have been asking me about for ages and that is how to support children who are experiencing anxiety. Now, it’s not super hard to find research on anxiety and on treatments for anxiety, but the hard part is finding someone who doesn’t just see anxiety as an unwanted behavior that we need to extinguish using reinforcements and who actually sees anxiety as a potential cause for behaviors like having a bad attitude or lacking impulse control that we might typically think of as bad behavior rather than being caused by anxiety. So, we have a special guest today who’s going to help us move beyond this view of anxiety and that’s Dr. Mona Delahooke. Dr. Delahooke is a licensed clinical psychologist with more than 30 years of experience caring for children in their families. She’s a member of the American Psychological Association and holds the highest level of endorsement in the field of infant and toddler mental health in California, as a Reflective Practice Mentor. She has dedicated her career to promoting compassionate relationship-based neurodevelopmental interventions for children with developmental, behavioral, emotional and learning difficulties and has written a book called Beyond Behaviors: Using Brain Science and Compassion to Understand and Solve Children’s Behavioral Challenges. Welcome Dr. Delahooke.

Dr. Delahooke: 02:43

Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here.

Jen: 02:45

Thank you. And we have another special guest here today as well. We’ve heard about her, we’ve heard her words and now we’re going to hear her very own voice. Today, we have with us listener, Jamie. She’s not listener Jamie to us. She’s Jamie Ramirez in real life and she and her wife are the proud parents of now 11-month-old daughter Elliot. Jamie struggled with anxiety for a good deal of her life and has also read on this topic a lot. And she was the one who suggested that I read Dr. Delahooke’s book and so when Dr. Delahooke agreed to an interview, it was only natural to ask Jamie to join me as a co-interviewer and she enthusiastically agreed. Welcome Jamie.

Jamie: 03:22

Hi.

Jen: 03:23

Yey, you’re here. All right, so let’s start kind of at the beginning I guess by talking about how Dr. Delahooke’s thinking about anxiety is different from the way that most researchers and psychologists think about it and treat anxiety and children. So Jamie, I wonder if you could start by reading one of your favorite passages from Dr. Delahooke’s book and then perhaps we can contrast this with the more common view on anxiety. So do you want to go ahead and do that?

Jamie: 03:48

Yeah.

Jen: 03:49

Okay.

Jamie: 03:50

“The truth is that we scrutinized children’s behavior from the time that they’re born. “She’s such a good baby”, we might say of a newborn who is easy to care for, doesn’t cry too much, sleeps through the night and whose moods are predictable and easy to read. Without realizing it, we are betraying our cultures understandable bias toward valuing behaviors that we can easily understand and that make our own lives easier as caregivers, teachers, or other providers. As children reach school age, we lavished praise in good grades on those who are good listeners, follow directions and can sit still and perform well on tests. We often reward these good behaviors with positive recognition, not realizing the messages we are sending to children whose natural tendencies fall outside of the easy child profile, particularly in the educational arena e.g. those who can sit still are better than those who cannot. Quiet is better than loud. While these messages may well serve the purposes of group education, they ignore the importance of understanding and appreciating and not judging the range of children’s individual differences demonstrated through their behaviors.”

Jen: 04:57

That’s such a powerful passage. I can see where it resonated with you. Yeah. And so Dr. Delahooke, I wonder if you can contrast that as sort of the way that you view anxiety with the way most psychologists think about anxiety. What do most psychologists think anxiety is?

Dr. Delahooke: 05:13

Well, the way I was trained and really I think the predominant thought still amongst most psychologists is that anxiety is understood as a disorder. And maybe we can understand that through understanding that the DSM, are you familiar with the DSM?

Jen: 05:35

Yeah. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Just for listeners.

Dr. Delahooke: 05:38

Yes. For listeners, it’s kind of the dictionary, so to speak, for labeling and diagnosing individuals along a set of criteria. So one shift that’s happened in the last kind of less than a decade starting in 2013 was that the DSM that Tom Insel, who was the head of the National Institutes of Mental Health announced that the national institutes were going to be diverting funding away from straight DSM criteria and more towards looking at underlying causality. So the short answer to your question, the way many of my colleagues, I believe view anxiety is as a DSM disorder and the American Psychological Association defines anxiety as an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts and physical changes like increased blood pressure. So anxiety is defined kind of loosely in a way as something that if you have a certain amount of characteristics or symptoms, then you have anxiety.

Dr. Delahooke: 06:51

And that’s kind of how it’s viewed now as a thing, as an actual like, oh, your child has anxiety. Well, there is no blood test for anxiety. Right? So it’s not exactly like your child has diabetes, you know, your child’s blood sugar level is above 105 or whatever. Anxiety, the way I was trained, I was really in my education in the 80s was that it seemed like anxiety was this thing that you treat with a certain protocol such as cognitive behavioral therapy and medication if needed. And that was what would help it go away. But what I wasn’t taught was what’s underlying all sorts of anxiety. Well, there’s all these different subtypes and so it’s really exciting to me that the shift is now not just looking at a symptom checklist, but looking at the brain circuitry and the domains, the dimensions of functions rather than these categories. And it’s a really exciting shift.

Jen: 08:04

Yeah. And I just want to delve a little deeper into a couple of things you mentioned, you mentioned medication and cognitive behavioral therapy, and from the research that I’ve done, it seems as though each of those are effective in about half of the children that are treated. Is that right?

Dr. Delahooke: 08:19

Well this, yeah, generally speaking with the research you might find different percentages, but some percentages are about a third. Some go up to a half.

Jen: 08:29

Okay.

Dr. Delahooke: 08:31

But you think about half, that still leaves another half.

Jen: 08:35

Yes, it does. Yeah. And so what are some of the challenges of treating this anxiety in children?

Dr. Delahooke: 08:42

Well, now that I have a different protocol, I’m finding much way fewer challenges that I think that early in my career when I was using the standard protocols is that I found that for example, cognitive behavioral therapy, trying to talk to a child and help a child actively change their thoughts and their cognitions come up with the ways that their brain can help them shift their thinking and feel better. Right? Which are great ideas, super great ideas. But I’ve found that for many children that fall fell flat on its face. And that’s when I went to look for answers as to why. Why would some children be able to shift their thoughts? And why would others just not have that capacity, especially in the heat of the moment? And that became one of my biggest clinical questions.

Jen: 09:39

Okay. And so just before we get to that, I want to briefly mention the study that came out of the Yale Child Study Center that got a lot of press, I think it was about within the last year or so and it found that a new program that teaches parents how to use reinforcements to treat their child’s anxiety was as effective as traditional cognitive behavioral therapy. So again, it’s working for about the third to a half of the people who are being studied. And so I’m just curious about what you make of that particular approach just because it’s something that parents have probably heard of recently.

Dr. Delahooke: 10:10

Right. Well, first of all, parent involvement is fantastic. We know that parent involvement, parent-based treatment is really makes most sense from a neurodevelopmental perspective because the way human beings regulate their emotions and eventually their behaviors is through co-regulation, meaning other human beings who attuned to them and we develop our emotional capacities in our ability to self-regulate emotions through relationships. So, parent involvement is great. Now, I glanced at this study yesterday, but I think you said Jen, that it uses a behavioral paradigm.

Jen: 10:54

Yup. Yup.

Dr. Delahooke: 10:56

Okay. Okay, so here’s where I think the research coming out of the lab of Jonathan Green is way more impactful and will have more efficacious results and that is because it’s not based on the paradigm of behavioral reinforcement essentially. Now the idea of reinforcing behaviors we want to see and ignoring or punishing behaviors we don’t want to see is a paradigm that was developed in the last century.

Dr. Delahooke: 11:28

And it started with studying animals, you know, in the lab. And it was exciting back then because you could figure out how to alter rats and dogs behaviors through reinforcement schedules. This was picked up to work with humans. And specifically one population that it was picked up on was for individuals, children and teens who are self-injuring at the University of Washington and later on at UCLA with Ivar Løvaas. So the science then was to protect and to try to of course try to help children improve their behaviors. But what is missing in my opinion and perhaps why the Yale study didn’t get more than a 50% improvement rate so it equaled cognitive behavioral, is that it involved the paradigm, the older paradigm of reinforcing surface behaviors. And we now know that behaviors aren’t the tip of the iceberg. So once you locate what is happening underneath the child’s behavior, then you have a pathway to really helping them gain behavioral control and deal with their anxiety or their worries or their, whatever concerns they have that is much more natural and much more sympathetic with brain development. So essentially what this study apparently did not, it had–okay, the good part was that it was parent-based, but it was still along the lines of cognitive behavioral therapy because it involved the assumption that children’s behaviors are deliberate and purposeful. We might think of that as willful and we can talk to them about it or put them on a reinforcement schedule for it. But to me that’s the problem because not all behaviors are due to reinforcement.

Jen: 13:31

Yeah. I love this ‘cause it’s a bridge from where we’ve been to where we’re going. So what I’m hearing you say is that the reason the study was as successful as it was was because of the involvement of parents. And maybe this helped parents to attune to their children a little better than they were before, which helped them to better support their child. And the reason it didn’t work better is because we were using reinforcement.

Dr. Delahooke: 13:54

That’s a yes. Again, I’m not a researcher, but I’m going to go back and read that study. Yeah, I think that’s a good guess because once you involve parents and especially if the parents have a gentle way with the child and look how were the parents doing the reinforcement, right? Was it gentle? Was it soothing? Was it calming the autonomic nervous system? Likely the artifacts of the study and the variables that they didn’t measure may have been just as important as the reinforcements.

Jen: 14:27

Yeah. Okay. All right, so now I understand a bit about where we’ve been. Jamie, do you want to kind of take us forward from here and delve into some of Dr. Delahooke’s ideas a little bit?

Jamie: 14:35

Yeah, sure. I wanted to spend a good chunk of time drawing out your thinking on the idea that when we see behavior that is problematic or confusing, the first question we should ask isn’t how do we get rid of it, but rather what is this telling us about the child? And I’d like to do this using a case study from your book of a child named Matthew.

Jamie: 14:54

So to summarize, Matthew was late to start speaking and was diagnosed with autism. You observed him in a session in school when he was trying to get the attention of his aide who was next to him. When she didn’t respond, he touched her arm and then she followed his IEP or individualized educational plan, which says she wasn’t supposed to respond to non-preferred behaviors. So she moved away from him. He continued to try to get her attention. So she moved behind him and when he leaned back in his chair to see her, he fell over. So then the aide took Matthew to the calm down room, which was a small closet with a padded floor and you watched him through the one way window looking really flattened sad with his aide ignoring any interaction with him. So let’s talk about what’s going on here. What do you think that the teacher and the aide are seeing in this situation? And do you think that they see Matthew as being in conscious, volitional control of his actions?

Dr. Delahooke: 15:48

Thank you for reading that Jamie. And it just brings, every time I hear it or listen to it, it brings me back to that moment to that classroom where I was sitting in the back of the room and using the lens that I now use. It felt like I was watching a slow moving car crash. So the answer to your question, did I think that they saw Matthew as being conscious and having volitional control of his actions? Absolutely. And let me just say that I have so much compassion for the teachers. I did and I do. And if anyone’s listening today and you’ve heard me talk before, you know that this is a no blame, no shame space for me. I don’t intend to have anyone feel bad about what they have done or the ways they approach children because it’s in our cultural DNA to view behaviors on the surface.

Dr. Delahooke: 16:47

So I’ll just say that out front I don’t mean to offend anybody with what I’m saying. I just need to add a layer of understanding to our current approaches. So when I looked around the room, when I saw that Matthew, his initial bid for attention, which was to try to grab the arm of his aide, that was viewed as a bad behavior because she was wanting him to listen to the teacher who was giving the lesson. But this was a child who had individual differences that compromised his ability to easily ask for things he did not have the words to do that and his motor system was also kind of roughly connected to his intention system, so the very best he could do was swat at his aide. And I saw that as a brilliant adaptation to him letting her know he needed something.

Dr. Delahooke: 17:47

He either needed help or he was feeling uncomfortable or he needed to move. And when she moved away so that he couldn’t touch her, I just thought, Oh wow, there we go, the behavior is being viewed as bad because it’s noncompliant or because it’s poorly understood. And what I wanted to do with that moment is say, let’s celebrate that behavior. He needs you. Let’s find out what this child needs at this moment. Anyway, as you read, when he started to increase his ability to grab her, then he’s trying to grab her, which meant to me that his nervous system, his fight or flight system was engaged and he was actively trying to seek social engagement to feel better. She moved where he could not see her or touch her and he fell over and then they brought him to, it was called the calm down room, but it was really a timeout room.

Dr. Delahooke: 18:45

There was nothing soothing about that room. So when I looked around the room I expected to see, or I guess I hoped to see adults in distress going, Oh my gosh, this poor child who can take him out and see what he needs. And instead what I saw was everybody ignoring the situation, which was how they were trained. It was on the child’s IEP to ignore non-preferred behaviors. And so I believe they absolutely saw Matthew’s behaviors as volitional and that he had control over them. And what I saw was a stress response that started off slow, what I call the light green zone like he was still in social engagement. He was looking at her, he was trying to touch her and the aide was trained to understand that as a noncompliant behavior and it went south very fast and he ended up being punished for trying to reach out and that’s why I put that story in the book.

Jamie: 20:01

So, you wanna share a little bit about how things improved with him after your intervention?

Dr. Delahooke: 20:08

Yes. I hope I can now bring everyone up. Now that I’ve brought everyone into the room as it was powerful moment, I’ll never forget it and it’s actually when I decided that I was going to write Beyond Behaviors. So when we got together, my approach with teams mirrors my approach with parents and children and that is that we connect first. So we held a team meeting with the parents and the providers. Unfortunately, the aide was not allowed in the meeting. We have some weird rules here in California. Sometimes aides aren’t allowed into an IEP meetings. But anyway, when we met, I respectfully explained that I had done an analysis of an evaluation of Matthew’s individual differences in his sensory processing, which were causing him to not be able to say, help me please, but rather grab somebody.

Dr. Delahooke: 21:10

So I reframed the grabbing as an adaptive behavior due to the way his brain was wired, his body-brain connection. And I invited the team to all look at his behaviors through the lens of compassion and his brain wiring rather than misbehavior. And it was amazing. There was an OT on the team and the teacher was very open to a new lens. In fact, she welcomed it because everyone knew Matthew was a sweet guy as a really gentle soul. And when we understood him better, when we understood that there was a reason. So we took out the iceberg and I actually have a blank one, so I wrote on top what his behaviors were and then on the bottom I filled in what I thought was contributing to his behaviors. So there were the motor system, his sensory system, and most of all, his feeling of not feeling interpersonally safe.

Dr. Delahooke: 22:16

He needed an adult to help him feel better. And once we put this all together, miraculously or not, he found ways to connect and the aide started to move closer to him. So over time it took several months, but over time the aide leaned in. She didn’t lean away, she leaned in, everybody leaned in to this child, and all of a sudden there wasn’t the need for him to have these behaviors because he had his relational and his physical needs met. We basically accommodated to what the child’s individual needs were with a lot of warmth and human engagement and the behaviors that they were so concerned about went away.

Jamie: 22:59

That’s amazing. So the proponents of the classic approach to treating anxiety where you reinforce behaviors you want and ignore behaviors you don’t, say, oh, if you respond to Matthew when he seeks attention in a non-preferred way, he’s just going to do it more. A lot of parents and teachers might feel a real tension between their desire to respond compassionately to a child like Matthew and what the experts say about encouraging his “bad behavior”. So can you share some thoughts on whether we should ever worry about reinforcing non-preferred behaviors by giving them our attention?

Dr. Delahooke: 23:33

And just another great question. I understand that question myself from a parenting perspective. I wondered about that too and I know there were times that I ignored things that my kids were doing because I just didn’t want to reinforce them. So I think this way of thinking is kind of, there’s some logic to it. And so I get that. I get the question. I guess my response to that question would be, we have to understand what we’re giving our attention to and where we focus our attention. So I want us to focus our attention on not on the behavior, but what the behavior signifies. So if a child is, say a toddler, is asking over and over again for something and we’ve said no, and we don’t know what to do about it, we don’t necessarily have to ignore the child and nor do we have to necessarily give in to that sixth cookie.

Dr. Delahooke: 24:42

We can very much still give our attention, but say no, we can provide a loving for boundary and still maintain our authority. So I just think that ignoring behaviors, if you think about the last time someone you love or someone you don’t love it, anyone ignored you. How that felt inside?

Jamie: 25:05

Awful.

Dr. Delahooke: 25:06

Awful, right? When someone that you are talking to or trying to communicate with you ignores you, it goes against this basic human need for social engagement and it feels awful. So, I really think we can improve. There are ways to improve without worrying about if we’re going to make the behavior worse.

Jamie: 25:29

That’s awesome. So you just a little bit earlier mentioned the iceberg idea. Can you kind of describe that a little bit more for the listeners and kinda describe one as related to anxiety?

Dr. Delahooke: 25:44

Sure, absolutely. The iceberg, you know, the term the tip of the iceberg, that’s a commonly used phrase. And I use it as just a good visual for thinking about behaviors because the tip of the iceberg that’s above the waterline, it’s usually 10 or 12% of that big chunk of ice, so I use it to show us that behaviors are what we see. And then what we don’t see, 90% of that big chunk of ice is underneath the waterline. So those are the things that are more invisible and that we can look for to find out what’s actually going on. So in my developmental iceberg, we have the kind of what’s going on on top? What we can see with the behavioral challenges? What the child’s doing? The obvious, we can see that. But underneath we have the causes, the triggers, the internal processes in the child. So those could be things like sensations that are processed in the brain and body, emotions, the ability for motor planning and executing actions, subconscious memories, Oh, that’s a big one like triggers to things like smells or sounds and developmental capacities and processes. So the richness comes from really looking at what could be contributing to this child’s behavior.

Jen: 27:09

I love that approach and it takes me back to thinking about parents. And when I think about interactions that I have with other people, I see that I get triggered sometimes and I see some of the causes of those triggers. And I think of myself as a sort of a full rich human person. But I think there’s this real tendency to look at our children and think, well, it’s only about the behavior, right? We’re sort of applying this double standard. And another way I think that can happen is, we didn’t actually mention this in the setup, but in the book you tell us that Matthew has autism. And so as we were reading the book, we might think, Oh well, you know, the kid has autism, we’re going to give him a bit of a pass, but my child doesn’t have autism. And so maybe I’m not going to be as lenient with her and she should know better. And we sort of seem to have this idea in our minds that our children should be able to do certain things by certain ages and that what they need when they can’t do this is some tough love parenting or maybe some teaching to prepare them for what’s going to be a harsh world out there. So do you agree with this?

Dr. Delahooke: 28:08

First of all, I can say as a parent, I can relate to it ‘cause that is one of the first things I thought when I was disciplining my children before I had the paradigm shift is, honey, this is a tough world.

Jen: 28:21

And I’m not the toughest person in it.

Dr. Delahooke: 28:25

Yeah. I’m not going to be doing my job unless I get you ready to be in the world. And if you do that behavior out there, you know, good luck. So I have a lot of compassion for that belief and it’s pervasive. I really believe that the worst a child’s behaviors get the more adults feel pressured to step it up. And again, I experienced that myself. And I think that our culture, does it. Think about the, well, I think it’s one of the causes for the school to present pipeline because oftentimes some of our children who have had a rough history, like our foster children who’ve had trauma histories, they get stepped up in the behavioral approach and get more and more isolated and more and more disconnected from other humans because their behaviors, which were adaptations to survival have been demonized. So a couple of thoughts as to what you just said.

Dr. Delahooke: 29:21

I purposefully don’t always use labels. So for Matthew, yes, he was diagnosed on the autism spectrum. But the principles we talk about about behaviors cut across any sort of individual difference. At any moment, a child who have no obvious differences in terms of being neuro-typical or whatever that is, if there is such a word, could experience a traumatic moment and have a behavior that is a big explosion that we really need to understand. So the idea that we need to set up a child for success in the world by containing their behaviors and teaching them how to do better. Yes, that is true. But we have to wait until a child is ready to be taught and a child isn’t ready to be taught until they have emotional and behavioral control in their brain-body development.

Jen: 30:22

Yeah. And it seems as though a way that we try and get around that is using rewards. And I interviewed Alfie Kohn last year and he hates rewards, but even he can see is that you can sometimes get temporary compliancies in rewards. So why does this work? I mean the behaviors approach essentially says that children probably don’t care that much about our values and goals. So if we want them to follow us in our values and goals, we have to give them something that they do value like candy and stickers and praise. But I mean the whole of human society managed to integrate children into the way we operate. Before there was candy and stickers, which implies that children you kinda do want to do this and can become functional members of our society if we can support them in the right way. So I’m wondering what you think about where is the support lacking today that makes it seem as though we have to go in with the stickers and the candy and the praise to fill that gap?

Dr. Delahooke: 31:15

That’s just such a great question. And we are so obsessed with stickers, candy and praise. I mean, okay, let’s separate them. Praise can be a connector, right? And candy and stickers are things. So I think what is missing, what is lacking today when you said, what is lacking? Here’s what I think is really lacking. It’s the understanding that social engagement is the most magnificent reinforcer in the world. And I don’t mean by faking it. I mean by when we are in a flow of a loving back and forth with the child or with another, with our partners, nothing feels better to humans than the love and connection that you get from being in a joyful, playful flow. So here’s where the, again, where the approaches to managing human behaviors kind of got hijacked by the excitement of reinforcement schedules. Again, I understand that was really big news in the 50s and 60s and on, but what we know now is that the main engine that drives human social and emotional development is relational joy and play actually, and play happened millions of years ago. Right? And before all this happened with toys and reinforcement schedules was that animals played together, children, humans, we play together, we go back and forth and that is the best way both to build the health of what we would call executive function, the ability to have cognitive control over our behaviors and emotions. And that’s what we consider a neurodevelopmental or a bottom up approach that we build the skills through engagement rather than we try to artificially manipulate, incentivize little humans to cooperate. Does that make sense?

Jen: 33:29

Yeah, it really does and I think it’s sort of setting us up for Jamie’s next question about how we actually move forward to use some of these tools that you recommend. But just before we do that, I want to close out this loop by one more thing that parents may have heard or may have thought to themselves that I should do if my child is experiencing anxiety, is to reassure the child that the thing that they are fearing isn’t really a threat. Does that work?

Jamie: 33:52

What do you think?

Jen: 33:55

Well, you know, I have my suspicions, but isn’t it tempting? Right? There’s a plane going overhead and your child’s afraid of it and the chances of it falling out of the sky in that moment are fairly slim and you feel as though you can safely reassure your child that nothing’s going to happen.

Dr. Delahooke: 34:08

Yes, yes, and it’s kind of a default. It’s our natural way of reassuring. Right?

Jen: 34:13

Right.

Dr. Delahooke: 34:13

But let me give you an example of two different ways we can reassure a child. I was talking to a parent yesterday whose child has extreme difficulties when the parent’s driving the car and the child is thinking that the car is going to crash, and so the child would be saying things like, Oh no, you’re getting too close, there’s another car, you’re getting too close and start to have these really worried thoughts and starting to fuss and cry and distract the driver, which was the dad and the dad’s solution, he was, of course, trying to keep everybody safe and he’s so nice and logical, but he was saying things like, “it’s okay, we’re not gonna crash. Everything is okay. We’re not gonna crash. It’s okay.” And so we played with it a little bit and I kind of modeled for him that we can add something to that because it’s really not for a child who’s upset like that, it really isn’t our words.

Dr. Delahooke: 35:05

It is our connection, our emotional co-regulation. So I kind of, here’s another way of doing it. The child saying, Oh no, I think we’re going to crash, the car is too close, Oh no, no. And daddy would be go like, “Oh my goodness, this is, Oh, you’re scared again. Oh my goodness. Here honey, I hear you. I hear you. Here, get a little bit closer or I’m right here, let’s try to work through this together. I’m going to start to dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” The difference, hopefully you heard, was that there was inflection in the voice, there was a connection with the child. It wasn’t saying just okay, we’re safe. And of course the dad flustered of hearing the child say this over and over again.

Jen: 35:46

But instead of discounting the fear and saying it’s not real.

Dr. Delahooke: 35:52

He kind of join the child and we can say it’s not real but the two things that are super important, one is the prosody of our voice because before we register actual words, our neuroception registers safety. So the tone of the human voice, oftentimes the tone, the prosody, the rhythm of a voice can help a child calm their anxiety. So remember that your voice matters. And number two, your facial expression. So these two things, our facial expression and our tone of voice are nonverbal ways to help our children feel safe. And that’s where I think we’re going with a lot of treatment for anxiety, in my opinion, is once a child is ready, we go to talking to them about their fears, but there’s so much backfill we need to do before we can do that. And that’s probably why 50% of the time, cognitive behavioral therapy doesn’t work. It’s because the child’s not ready for it yet.

Jen: 36:55

All right, Jamie, you want to move us forward?

Jamie: 36:57

Yeah. So I wanted to go back and talk a bit more about emotional co-regulation because it seems like your approach is rooted in this relationship based model of co-regulation. I think it’s easy for parents to grasp when their child is an infant. We’re told that our calm presence is what helps a child to calm themselves when they’re a big ball of screechy mess. But it seems like pretty early on, perhaps before they’re ready, we see our presence as a crutch that we want to pull out as quickly as possible so the child doesn’t become dependent on it. Can you share your perspective on whether this is the right way to think about helping children, not just in responding during moments of high anxiety, but also reducing the likelihood of the child’s brain and body resorting to anxiety for the rest of their life?

Dr. Delahooke: 37:41

Yes. And that question kind of goes back to the other question about if we reinforce something will this kind of create a pattern for our child of dependence or of using strategies that aren’t helpful for them in life. So I think it’s absolutely worthwhile talking about. So one, this idea of co-regulation, maybe I can just explain what that is because it sounds kind of like jargon and basically when a person is self-regulated, it means that I can stay calm in my mind and in my body through strategies, either consciously or subconsciously where I am able to maintain, learn, be alert and calm and all those good things that teachers would love to have for all of their students. And we forget that what’s important is that self-regulation is built through co-regulation and that is just as we talked about with Matthew, babies, toddlers, young children, and depending on your own timeline, we need that loving attunement whereby our emotions are seen by our caregivers to start to develop our own self-regulation.

Dr. Delahooke: 39:08

So that’s why co-regulation is important. Now when we pull that too soon, we may see challenging behaviors. We may see what we would think about as anxiety. I like to think of anxiety as a stress response. So we may see stress in the child for example. Sometimes we see this with toddlers who are going to daycare for the first time or going to preschool, you know, you’ll see that. And then we go back. So the answer is to go back and do the emotional co-regulation that the child needs and then pull that slowly, pull that away as the child is comfortable. So I don’t think we need to worry about overdoing co-regulation. Now there’s another piece to this though and I think it’s really important also to think about how do we develop hardiness in our children. Hardy like H-A-R-D-Y, you know, like strength and resilience and hardiness.

Dr. Delahooke: 40:10

And so we want to make sure we have a lot of awareness of our own regulation because sometimes if we’re a little anxious ourselves as parents, we don’t realize that we are using our child to co-regulate ourselves. And then we may hang on a little too long. So that’s why I talk about a lot in the book I talk on, I think it’s chapter four. I really talk a lot about our own taking care of, our own emotional house of emotional development. And if we’re taking good care of our own emotional house, we can help develop our children to experience resilience and hardiness on their own because that’s really our goal, right? One day we want our children to be able to be successful out there in the world without us.

Jen: 40:55

It reminds me of a workshop that I just finished running a few weeks ago. It called Taming Your Triggers and it helps parents to uncover the true sources of their triggers. And surprise, you might think it’s your child behavior, but it’s not your child’s behavior that’s triggering you.

Dr. Delahooke: 41:08

Oh, that’s wonderful, Jen. Yes, that’s great.

Jen: 41:11

And so the whole workshop is about managing those triggers and using tools like nonviolent communication to find solutions to problems. And so what you’re saying there about being so important that parents kind of have their own house in order first makes me think, okay, well, I mean there are so many parents going through that workshop who have so many triggers and years of anxiety experiences of their own. What support, what advice, what information can we offer to those parents or maybe some reassurance that, you know, you’re going to be able to raise a child who is not crippled by anxiety here?

Dr. Delahooke: 41:44

Yes. Well, hope is the key and sometimes in my field, if we go back to why I’m glad we’re moving away from the DSM labeling and medical disorder model, which I call disorderism, is that it takes away hope and when we have a relationship-based strength lens to look from, we can assure parents that there is so much hope. And so I’ve worked with parents who have their own trauma histories for example, and there’s always something to do. I have been so impressed with, I’m sure you’re familiar with the massive amount of research on mindfulness and mindful self-compassion work of Kristin Neff and Chris Germer and others that they’ve done work with PTSD, with war veterans and with parents of children with many, many needs who suffer a lot and who are burdened with lack of sleep and the constant demands. But once we realize that there are things that each of us can do as a parent to calm our own nervous system down and to be there for their kids, there’s a lot of hope.

Dr. Delahooke: 43:02

So you know it’s not easy and it takes a little bit of time, but I think I described many different pathways starting from mindful awareness, just this moment of mindfulness when you can actually pause, take a breath. If you need to take a longer exhale, just take a breath and if you’re able to label what you are feeling in the moment, you know, it can just make all the difference in the world. It can prevent us from doing something to our child or saying something to our child that would dysregulate them even further.

Jen: 43:38

Wow. It’s like you’re giving a little infomercial for the Tame Your Triggers workshop. These are exactly the things that we worked through.

Dr. Delahooke: 43:46

Fantastic. Thank you. And I need the information so I can send my [Inaudible] [43:50].

Jamie: 43:53

Awesome.

Jen: 43:54

Jamie did you want to ask another question?

Jamie: 43:55

Yeah, sure. Okay. So, you know, obviously some anxiety is caused by things that happen, interactions with parents, school environment, etc. But sometimes anxiety just seems to exist in the child. I can definitely say for myself, I have, I describe it as having a hairpin trigger for anxiety like I’m startled easily, things like that. So as parents it can feel beyond our control, especially if we’re that way and maybe our child got that from us. So how can we support children who have this experience and prevent it from becoming chronic toxic stress?

Dr. Delahooke: 44:33

What a beautiful question. And that speaks to really the idea that some of how we experience the world is in our constitution, right? And some of this is in our genetic makeup or in our constitution, how the way our sensory system understood the world as a child was met with our relational environment. So it sounds like from what you were describing, that you are one who has extraordinary contact with the world and experiences it deeply. And so I think that once we have this lens on not demonizing these startle responses that we may see coming up in a young child, for example, and it may be similar to our own especially if you share the same genetics, maybe it’s coming up, that this compassionate lens of understanding that there is a way to view our sensitivity to the world and begin to explain it to the child and experience it with them as not as threatening as we did it as parents.

Dr. Delahooke: 45:48

So, I’ll put myself into the equation. I was a very anxious kindergartener and my mother described like when I went to school, I would just stop talking and at home I was a motor mouth, but at school I would not talk to anybody and it would have been so wonderful for an adult to come alongside me and just, you know, cozy up and start chatting with me a lot, you know, on the side, I know I would’ve probably opened up and felt more comfortable because I had some social anxiety, but now I know that’s a label. It wasn’t social anxiety. I was very sensitively wired to being in a large space with a lot of people. And there’s no shame in that. But instead what happened is that I got sent for psychological testing as a kindergartner.

Dr. Delahooke: 46:41

So what we can do for our children I think is to model that these differences aren’t something we need to necessarily be afraid of. We can embrace them and we can nurture ourselves. We can develop our children’s ability to get what they need from the adults around them as early as toddlerhood. And so I think there’s a lot of opportunity to shift the lens from a negative kind of slant to a very self-compassionate, loving, nurturing stance. Whereby we build our strength and we see ourselves as strong and sensitive and not as anxious and weak.

Jen: 47:21

Wow. What a powerful perspective. Really locates the power with the parent and the child. And I know we’re almost out of time here. One thing just came up for me as you were talking and I remembered a listener who had emailed me asking, you know, should we avoid triggers of anxiety? If it’s something like going to the beach and all of a sudden your toddler is afraid of the water should we just not go to the beach for a while or should we go to the beach and try and do the self-regulation there or the co-regulation?

Dr. Delahooke: 47:48

Yeah, great question. I get that all the time too and my general answer to that is I don’t think it’s necessarily in the child’s best interest if we avoid things like that because the world is filled with opportunities to get dysregulated. And if we start to narrow our world, but the most important key to remember is that co-regulation piece so that we would do very low and slow. We would titrate it to what the child can manage. Even if, say if it was going to the beach and the child would sit in the car and then you’d play with a little bit of sand right outside the car. I mean it would be the idea of exposure and just throwing a child into it. That’s another technique that psychologists use that I personally go, is that we could do it through co-regulation. So I say to parents, generally, of course you have to make up your own mind for that situation, but if it’s somewhere that you enjoy and you think your child would enjoy doing or going to, or experiencing that if you go super slow with emotional co-regulation, oftentimes that helps just expand a child’s horizons rather than avoiding it, which at some point kind of narrows the child’s world.

Jen: 49:04

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Dr. Delahooke: 49:06

Is that what you do?

Jen: 49:07

Yeah, we’re lucky that she’s not currently experiencing a lot of anxiety, but yeah, I think in general we do try to not avoid things because we’re experiencing this. So yeah, I appreciate that perspective. And as we wrap up, I’m just wondering, are there any books that you recommend for reading with children that can really better help them understand what’s going on in their own minds as we work on helping them to manage this?

Dr. Delahooke: 49:29

Ah, yes. Let me think here. I have a–there’s a book–a children’s books you’re talking about?

Jen: 49:35

Yeah. Yeah. But we have your book for the parents, right?

Dr. Delahooke: 49:38

Yeah, I would recommend my book for the parents. That’s why I wrote it. There’s a precious book that I just read. It’s called Listening to My Body and it’s by Gabi Garcia. Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s about sensations and listening and getting in touch with my body’s sensations. And I really feel that the way children and adults get in touch with their emotions is by starting to begin to be mindful of sensations. So that’s one book I recommend. And then there’s another one that’s just came out, I’ll look here on my bookshelf and it’s a mindfulness and gratitude and self-compassion book by Jennifer Cohen Harper, and it’s called Thank You Body, Thank You Heart. And it’s just lovely for all different age ranges, but it’s lovely and it just allows the child to notice different parts of their bodies and be thankful for them. And I think that for anxious children, for children who have a lot of stress responses, if we can help them recognize when the stress starts coming on and what it’s like, that is a great pathway to helping them develop coping skills early in life so that they will be able to maybe even reduce the likelihood of later on having strong anxiety and shifted into something that they can manage.

Jen: 51:11

That’s fantastic. I know we’re out of time here and Dr. Delahooke I just want to say thank you for sharing this with us. I think this is going to have such a profound impact on so many families that are listening to this. Thank you so much.

Dr. Delahooke: 51:21

Oh, I’m so thrilled to be here and yes, stay in touch. I’m Mona Delahooke on Twitter and Instagram and on Facebook. I love to hear from families and I’m just so grateful that you had me on.

Jen: 51:33

Awesome and thanks so much Jamie for the introduction and for coming on the show today as well.

Jamie: 51:37

Thanks for having me.

Dr. Delahooke: 51:39

Thank you so much Jamie.

Jen: 51:42

And so, Dr. Delahooke’s book Beyond Behaviors: Using Brain Science and Compassion to Understand and Solve Children’s Behavioral Challenges, there’s a link to that in the references for today’s episode as well as the children’s books that she had mentioned and the other studies that we’ve talked about today and you can find all of at YourParentingMojo.com/Anxiety.

References

Beesdo, K., Knappe, S., & Pine, D.S. (2009). Anxiety and anxiety disorders in children and adolescents: Developmental issues and implications for DSM-V. Psychiatric Clinics of North America 32, 483-524.

Delahooke, M. (2019). Beyond Behaviors: Using brain science and compassion to understand and solve children’s behavioral challenges. Eau Claire, WI: PESI.

Lebowitz, E.R., Marin, C., Martino, A., Shimshoni, Y., & Silverman, W.K. (2019). Parent-based treatment as efficacious as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for childhood anxiety: A randomized noninferiority study of supportive parenting for anxious childhood emotions. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Porges, S.W. (2007). The polyvagal perspective. Biological Psychology 74(2), 116-143.

Wood, J.J. (2006). Parental intrusiveness and children’s separation anxiety in a clinical sample. Child Psychiatry & Human Development 37, 73-87.