Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We’re mid-way through an extended series of episodes on play at the moment.  The first in the series was an interview with Dr. Stuart Brown of the National Institute for Play on the value of play, both for children and for adults.  Then we followed with a look at the research on the benefits of outdoor play, followed by an interview with Dr. Scott Sampson who wrote the book How to Raise a Wild Child, which had tons of practical advice for getting kids outside more, as well as getting outside more with your kids.

Today we move on to the topic of risky play.  We’ll define it, and discuss its benefits and drawbacks, as well as things we as parents can do to encourage more risky play if we decide we want to.

Before we get going, I want to acknowledge that this episode rests heavily on the work of Professor Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter (I hope I’m pronouncing that somewhat accurately) at the Queen Maud University College of Early Childhood Education in Norway.  We’ve discussed quite a bit of research lately which relies on a single researcher’s work – I’m thinking of the Mindset and Grit episodes, and I’m also familiar with the take-down of the Power Poses research by Dr. Amy Cuddy, which is the idea that if you stand up straight and spread your arms out wide in a really physically open position before you do something scary like going to a job interview or giving a presentation, your performance will measurably improve.  After another study failed to replicate the findings of the original one, Dr. Cuddy’s own co-author ended up publishing a statement saying she didn’t believe that Power Poses were real and had any benefit.  What those researchers all had in common was a single paper or very few papers which formed the foundation for their work, and an incredible amount of exposure which, these days, is often measured in TED talk views.  Dr. Dweck of the Mindset research is the laggard in this group considering that her work has been around the longest, with only 7 million views; Dr. Cuddy leads the pack with 45 ½ million views.

On the other hand, Dr. Sandseter has not given a TED talk.  The majority of her sample sizes are pretty small; she also almost exclusively works in Norway except where she occasionally collaborates with researchers from other countries so her findings may not be applicable to people in other countries where risk is viewed differently than it is there.  She has a blog but honestly it’s pretty dry reading, with most of the updates consisting of notifications about papers she’s published, which non-academics can’t access anyway because the actual papers are behind the publishing journal’s paywall.  I also haven’t found any papers criticizing her methodology or her results.  My overall impression is that she is a scholar who has slowly and patiently built up a body of research over the last decade and a half, and she’s interested in being a resource to educators in Norway rather than being a celebrity – all of which is to say that I generally trust her work.

So how do we define risky play?  Dr. Sandseter tried to do exactly this in a 2007 paper, for which she followed 38 children aged 3-5 from two Norwegian preschools and also interviewed the teachers at those schools.  She selected the schools because of the variety of outdoor experiences available to the children in each of them – one of the preschools had a playground had what she calls a “typical” playground with swings, climbing tower, a play hut, switchbacks (she doesn’t say what these are) and a climbing tree.  My first thought was that I’ve never seen swings or a climbing tree in an American preschool playground because these are deemed too dangerous, so this paper is probably gonna be pretty interesting.  The other preschool was situated in a forest and had a typical playground as well as use of part of the forest that was surrounded by fences.  Both groups of students often hiked to nature areas like forests, the seaside, caves, and so on.  Dr. Sandseter observed six kinds of risky play that have since become the standard ways to define risky play – these are: play with great heights, play with high speed, play with harmful tools, play near dangerous elements like deep water, rough-and-tumble play, and play where children can ‘disappear’ or get lost.  I’m going to quote and sometimes summarize some of the parts of the paper that raised my eyebrows on some of these kinds of risky play.

Regarding play from heights, when a group of 4- and 5-year-olds arrive at the beach, one of them sees some cliffs that are 7-10 feet high and says “Wow, I wanna climb up here,” so he does, and his friends follow.  They explore the cliffs, which are steep and slippery; they keep climbing over the cliffs and back into the woods above the cliffs, come down to the beach, and do it over again.  While the teachers did later describe this kind of play as risky, they watched this incident without interfering, from 20-30 feet away – so, too far away to do anything immediately if something bad happened to one of the children.  The children also described climbing to the roof of the climbing tower and jumping off, even though this was forbidden by adults in case they got hurt.  One girl said “Yes, it’s a little bit scary, but it’s great fun – I often land on my bottom, and that hurts a bit – but it’s great fun anyway.”

The ‘play with dangerous tools’ section was particularly interesting – it reads “In both preschools the children were allowed to quite freely use tools that were potentially dangerous – for example, a knife for whittling, a saw for cutting down branches, or a hammer and nails for carpentry.”  Dr. Sanseter took field notes on three instances:

“The fire pit is lighted and the children are gathered around it chipping with a knife each on some wooden branches.  The children use knives freely and seem used to whittling on their own.”

“Alex, aged 4 and Tori, aged 5 have each got a hammer and nails and start nailing some wooden boats.  They have a great independence in their work, and the preschool teacher present seems completely relaxed even though they swing their hammers as they like.  Two younger children aged 2-3 years old also take part, and they get to play as equally independently as the two older children.

“The children participate in building a wooden climbing tower.  They get to use the saws and knives as they like.  One of the boys saws into his hand but is fine after getting a band-aid.  The children also participate in tying the branches together, and then climbing on the construction when it’s built.”

Sometimes the children were observed using an axe, although I was amused to see that the teachers did supervise this activity more closely than the others.  Overall, the teachers thought playing with these tools was somewhat risky, while some of the children agreed but some didn’t, although in a subsequent study Dr. Sandseter observed that the children were there quite closely supervised when playing with all kinds of dangerous tools, that the children tended to concentrate highly when using them, and also talked with each other about the importance of using tools correctly so as not to hurt themselves or others.

What these quotes and anecdotes reveal to me, of course, is not what these Norwegian preschoolers and teachers thought about risk, but the deep gulf between their perception of risk and the perception in a country like the U.S., where a knives, hammers, nails, saws, axes, and especially fire pits would NEVER be allowed within ten yards of preschool-aged children.  While Dr. Sandseter believes that allowing children’s use of dangerous tools in preschool is probably a Scandanavian phenomenon, I have personally seen twenty sets of pruning shears in a basket on the ground under the covered porch of a preschool in Reggio Emilia, Italy – I only saw the children indoors, but I can only assume that since there were enough pairs for a class full of children to use them, and they were sitting out right next to the wellies the children used in wet weather, that a class full of children probably did and do use them.

I’m reminded here of an interview with Professor David Lancy, the anthropologist whose work we refer to often on the show.  He says that parents in most societies don’t intervene when children investigate a sharp knife or stray near the fire.  When ethnographers ask parents why they allow this, the parents’ reply is often “this is how they learn.”  The interviewer asks “Do you think it’s wise to let children play with knives?”, and Lancy responds “I’ve found that there is a trade-off. If parents give their children such freedom, the kids may indeed get hurt, but serious injury is rare in village societies. Children there die most often of malnutrition and illness, not accidents. Meanwhile village children happily take the initiative in learning how to use common tools like knives, setting their own pace and keenly observing those who are more competent. If parents were to play a more active and protective role in their child’s development, the children might be safer from injury, but that sense of autonomy and ability to learn independently would be undermined. The children would cease to take the initiative to learn new things and instead wait for an adult’s permission, guidance, or instruction.”  To me, this says a lot about American society, where parents generally WANT their children to look to them for permission, guidance, and instruction.  We show them how to use toys, rather than letting them figure it out for themselves.  It’s almost as if we can’t fathom that they would manage without us, because we need to feel so central in their lives.

Back to Dr. Sandseter’s paper, the final issue I want to give examples on is play where the children can disappear or get lost – on one field trip a five-year-old says “I’m going to go on a walk all by myself!” and the teacher responds “That’s all right; go ahead!”.  Two other children join the first.  They walk for a short while, then one of them goes back to the group while the other two crawl through some dense bushes and announce to Dr. Sandseter, who has been following them: “Good bye!  We’ll be back at twelve o’clock!”.  While the children thought this kind of play was risky because they might get lost, they did it anyway because of the joyful fear they experienced and the teachers actually did not feel as though it was risky at all and felt in control of the situations.  Again, my mind was boggled – in the U.S., children generally aren’t allowed out of a parent’s or teacher’s eyesight in a fenced area like a playground, and when they are away from these fenced areas the boundaries become even tighter.

At the heart of all this is the idea of risk, and the type and amount and risk that children are willing to take, and that parents are willing to see children take.

While environments can be inherently more or less risky because a hill is more or less steep, and trees can have branches that allow small children to climb up or don’t, but there are individual characteristics associated with risk as well.  Children can choose to climb more or less high up the hill or not; they can choose to ride a tricycle fast or not; they can choose to focus and concentrate while playing or not.  Children make these choices based on the risks they subjectively perceive, and the balance between their abilities and their fears about those abilities moderate their actions.  Studies have found that there are differences between children’s tolerance for risk, a statement which perhaps seems obvious to anyone with more than one child.  Even I can see the difference in risk tolerance between my 3.5YO who thinks that jumping off the next-to-last step is pretty risky and exciting, and her friend of exactly the same age who loves to snowboard and wants to know why he can’t go on a zip line by himself.  A high activity level and a desire to engage in daring behavior are important risk factors for accident proneness and injury incidence, although perhaps the overall rate of injuries does not increase for these children as much as they otherwise might because they, too, understand what their bodies are capable of and use their abilities and fear to regulate their risk-taking behavior.  Children do tend to overestimate their physical abilities; one study that wasn’t done by Dr. Sandseter observed the link between extroversion, impulsiveness, daring, and carelessness, implying that there is a link between temperamental characteristics and childhood accidents.  The study also found that children who watched a video of another child doing four physical tasks taking a toy off a high shelf and moving under a wooden bar resting on two posts without knocking the bar off or putting their hands or knees on the floor were more conservative in judging their own abilities when the child in the video failed, rather than when the child in the video succeeded.  This implies that children get a lot of information about whether they can do something from whether their friends can do it, although this ability overestimation was more of an issue for six-year-old males and temperamental characteristics were more at play for 8-year-olds.  The study was pretty tiny – only 32 children, so it would be good to see if the findings were replicated with a larger number of children, and a wider ethnic and economic sample size.

We should also acknowledge that children aren’t always the best judges of what parents might describe as true risk.  One study in Denmark had a researcher follow 35 children aged 10-12 years old for 3 or 4 days a week for 8 months.  The researcher talked with the children about how they perceive risk.  One boy approached the researcher why he chose not to use a bike helmet.  He said “Just to let you know, I don’t use a bicycle helmet.”  The researcher said “why not?” and the boy said “I don’t need to, because I am really good at riding a bike.  If anybody should drive into me, I will just jump off.  There was just recently a bike that rode into me.  My bike was completely wrecked.  But I jumped off.”  Another boy reported a conversation he had had with his father, who was trying to get him to wear a helmet.  The boy said he replied “I don’t need to wear a helmet because I have very good reflexes.”  Then he told the researcher “One time I fell down the stairs over by the music room at school.  I fell down on my tummy and then I covered my head quickly (and he demonstrated by covering his head with his hands and arms).  Then I just did like this and I was not hit on my head but on all the other places (meaning his hands and arms).  The researchers note that a public service campaign in Denmark to “Use your head – wear a bicycle helmet” is unlikely to be effective, because it implicitly asks students to consider the risks of not wearing a helmet with the only logical conclusion being that they should wear a helmet.  But these children believe they have learned the only logical lesson from their own experiences which is that they don’t need to wear a helmet because they can manage the risk without one.

My purpose is not, of course to argue that children shouldn’t wear bike helmets.  There are some risks that adults perceive that children cannot yet know are important.  But children are exposed to many risks that are not life-and-death types of risks, and in these cases we need to prepare them to make better decisions for themselves.  Consider another anecdote from later in the paper – Robert and John are going to slide down a snow-covered hill on a plastic sheet; Robert goes first, loses his balance, falls and tumbles, but runs back up the hill to do it again.  John gets ready to go when Robert says “Wait John! Move a little bit to the left to avoid skiing into the brick wall.”  The boys did take a chance, but they judged their own and each other’s limitations and used their first run as a trial to judge the environment to stay safe.  Ultimately this is what we want children to do – to be able to judge risk for themselves, and if we never allow them a chance to practice in relatively low-risk environments when they’re young, they might not be able to do it themselves later when it counts.  Researchers conducting one study in Australia, which tends to be more like the U.S. in terms of sterilizing its playgrounds, even observed that children who are bored in an excessively safe environment sought out inappropriate risks to add elements of exhilaration, fear, and ‘being out of control.’

Why do children engage in risky play?  I would have thought that an adaptive response from an evolutionary perspective would be to avoid risk, much as children avoid new foods in favor of safe foods because the new foods might hurt you.  But it turns out that the picture is in no way as clear as this and indeed, children seem to need some exposure to risks.  Let’s look at Sandseter’s six categories of risk in turn.  Play involving heights helps children to develop perceptional abilities related to depth, form, shape, size, and movement – skills important both in childhood and adult.  One study also found that children who were injured due to falls before age 5 weren’t more afraid of heights later in life than children who didn’t, and children who were injured in a fall between ages 5 and 9 were actually less likely to be afraid of heights than those who weren’t injured in a fall.  A young child who doesn’t fear heights are more likely to behave in a risky way in high places, causing them to experience more serious falls which will desensitize the child to heights so they fear heights less later in life.  It’s possible that similar benefits related to spatial orientation also accrue to children who play at high speed, although we aren’t really sure why children enjoy feeling thrill and excitement associated with fast play because evolutionarily speaking, humans didn’t really experience high speeds in the same way that we do now.  The same goes for play near other dangerous elements like deep water – several studies have concluded that children are not more afraid of water if they have had some kind of traumatic event in water before age nine, and that playing near these dangerous elements can help children overcome their natural phobias and that these phobias do not arise as a result of accidents.  We also know that risky play is positively associated with physical activity and social health, and negatively associated with sedentary behaviors, which makes logical sense because children engaging in risky play are outside moving their bodies around.  There may also be associations between risky play and learned risk management, self-confidence, mental health, and independence.  I find this last one to be particularly ironic given the high premium that Western parents put on independence – it seems as though by reducing their opportunities to engage in risky play, we are reducing their opportunities to learn and practice skills that would benefit the independence that we so value.

Remembering that children don’t really see tools as being particularly dangerous, we should also keep in mind that many of the tools that we use today didn’t exist for our ancestors, so we didn’t learn to fear them.  Children’s interest in tools is less likely to be them trying to build a resistance to a phobia of tools and more likely to be an interest in them and their functions for hunting and gathering.

Rough and tumble play is found in cultures all over the world, and is also the most common form of pay in non-human mammals.  Researchers think that as well as providing great physical and motor stimulation, rough-and-tumble play enhances complex social competencies like affiliation with peers, social signaling, bargaining, and manipulating situations.  Boys engage in this play more often than girls, and learn about aggression, fighting, social competition, and experience in both dominant and subordinate roles even when they don’t actually intend to hurt each other.  Historically this play had enormous value, since gaining control over people and ecological resources was critical to survival and required a lifetime of learning and practice.  Even now, it’s possible that learning how to regulate aggression and real hostile behavior early through rough and tumble play is a critical skill for boys, although they may continue this play into adolescence and at that point it becomes more of a hierarchy-building activity.  Children often use fantasy play to signal rough and tumble play is coming; things like superhero play, play fighting (including wrestling), chase games, and protect and rescue games.  If we think back to the episode we did on gun play, we found a great deal of ambivalence among teachers about allowing gun play and the same seems to be true for rough-and-tumble play, which teachers more frequently redirect and stop than other forms of play.  Perhaps we should reframe our own thinking about this kind of play – instead of seeing it as “play that looks like fighting and might lead to fighting,” we could see it as play that supports children in answering questions like “who am I?” and “what am I good at?” that they might not yet have the vocabulary to address verbally but that they can explore physically.  Girls’ vocabulary tends to lead boys’ by several months, which may be why they tend to use relational aggression rather than physical – they are more likely to ostracize another girl who steps out of line rather than physical punishment.

Researchers believe that separation anxiety is a bigger issue for girls than boys because boys needed to stray further from the home to hunt while girls were creating a nurturing, safe environment for child-rearing, which is why boys tend to engage in more of the ‘wandering off’ type of play than girls.  I think the ‘nurturing’ part of that assumption represents a particularly western-centric view, and I’d love to see studies on this related to cultures that distribute work more equally although I haven’t found any yet.  Apparently children’s wandering off alone can act as a sort of anti-phobic behavior that helps them deal with involuntary separations from adults at other times.

So risky play serves an evolutionary purpose for children, but surely there must be another reason they continue to do it and seem to enjoy it so much?  Dr. Sandseter observed another small group of preschoolers over a period of several days as they engaged in various forms of risky play and found that the expressed both fear and exhilaration; often fear first, as they realized their play was becoming more risky and maybe too risky for their comfort.  Assuming the goal is achieved, fear is followed by a highly aroused sense of exhilaration, which the children expressed by jumping up and down, stretching their arms up in the air, or doing “show off” moves.  They often then wanted to repeat the play over and over again, and attain even higher levels of difficulty through new variations of the play.  Sometimes, especially in rough-and-tumble play, children showed both fear and exhilaration at the same time and maintain this balance by increasing the intensity of attacks on the other person, but by choosing play partners of the same gender and similar strength.

Dr. Michael Apter developed Reversal Theory to explain why people engage in behaviors, and unlike most theories that attempt to uncover hard-wired preferences, this one focuses on individuals’ changeability and flexibility.  Two motivational states relevant to risk taking are the telic and paratelic states.  In a telic state, a person is goal-oriented, sensible, cautious, and arousal-avoiding, while in the paratelic state the individual is playful, adventurous, thrill-seeking, and arousal-seeking.  In a telic state high arousal is an unpleasant emotion that we want to decrease, while in a paratelic state arousal is pleasant and we want more of it.  In the paratelic state a person may feel confident even though he perceives the risk he is experiencing, and may deliberately move as close as possible to the edge between danger and injury because this results in the highest possible level of arousal.  It’s called Reversal Theory because a person can move back and forth between the two states as a result of internal emotions like frustration or satiation, and by external events like sudden and new physical danger.  Some individuals do tend to spend more time in one state rather than the other, and when individuals spend a lot of time in the paratelic state she is understood to have a sensation or arousal-seeking personality.  When Dr. Sandseter interviewed four and five-year-olds about why they engage in risky play, many of them discussed the ambivalence of feeling both excited but also afraid at the same time, and their most common description of this feeling was that “it tickles my tummy.”

I do want to spend some time talking about how adults perceive these risks, because I think that is one of the main reasons why we don’t allow children to engage in more risky play.  Adults in Western cultures have attempted to reduce the risk associated with just *being a child* by standardizing factors like maximum fall height, how much impact a surface must be able to absorb, sharp edges, and the likelihood of being trapped, pinched, crunched, or struck.  Unfortunately we now engage in what is known as “surplus safety,” which refers to the excessive measures we take to prevent an injury from occurring, no matter how minor it is, whether or not any lasting negative effects occur (and disregarding any positive effects that might occur), and regardless of cost.

As we learned in our introduction to outdoor play and learning, the Centers for Disease Control reports that more than 200,000 children are treated in emergency departments annually for injuries sustained on playgrounds, but the rate of injuries is decreasing and the rate of both injuries and deaths remains tiny compared to injuries and deaths sustained on traffic accidents.  I was interested to see that Dr. Sandseter acknowledges a lack of supervision as a cause of childhood injuries in play, but she notes that supervising children doesn’t mean restricting children from taking challenges but rather allowing the children to take on appropriate risks and challenges.  The adults’ own reactions – whether they interfere with, constrain, or encourage risky play – also contribute to the potential risk in a situation.  Paradoxically, an adult can increase the level of risk in a situation by telling a child to “be careful,” as the child’s attention shifts from the challenge to the adult, reducing her focus on the challenge and thus increasing the potential for an accident.  There is mixed evidence about whether parents respond differently to boys’ versus girls’ risk-taking; some studies show that parents expect more independence from sons, while daughters receive more cautions about safety and more offers of assistance – but other studies found no differences in the way parents treat daughters and sons.

And even Norway may not be immune to the overall trend toward promoting safety – Dr. Sandseter and a colleague published a study in 2016 with quite contrasting findings compared to her 2007 study where preschool teachers chatted off to the side while four-and five-year-olds climb low cliffs, and granting them permission to go exploring by themselves in the woods above the cliffs.  They sent a survey to all 6,469 early childhood education setting in Norway and 32% of them responded, which isn’t an amazing response rate and may not be a representative sample.  The managers said that things had changed dramatically over the last decade or two; in some ways risky play was still more permissible than in the U.S. – for example, “climbing with trees is accepted but only up to a certain height and always with adult supervision,” and “we are more careful in regard to climbing trees with rocks below, where you can fall down and hurt yourself.”  My favorite example was “As a result of worries among parents, balancing on the fence that surrounds the institution is not allowed unless there is deep snow underneath,” although there was no mention of putting tape on the fence to be sure the snow is deep enough.  But in other ways, early childhood play settings are coming to mirror those in more conservative countries as new rules on playground equipment define what is allowed in the outdoor space and equipment that was built by parent volunteers is removed, local authorities cutting down trees, and in one case young children being kept off the playground when large puddles have formed.

Dr. Sandseter worked with several colleagues mostly in Australia on a paper that defined ten ways that children’s risky play is restricted, and highlight some of the implicit and explicit assumptions that adults make about children’s play.

Firstly, we assume that adults are the best people to manage children’s risk taking, in spite of the fact that children learn quite effectively how to manage these risks themselves from the moment they start moving around their environment.  When a young child falls upon encountering a steep slope she isn’t just learning about how to navigate slopes, but also how to gather the relevant information to make a decision to solve the falling problem, which may involve crawling down the slope next time she meets it.  If we stop allowing her to make these decisions for herself and just put her on her hands and knees at the top of the slope, she misses the opportunity not just to learn about slopes, but to learn how to learn about navigating her environment.  The same goes for older children – yes, sometimes they fall.  But they need the experience of evaluating risk and sometimes failing to get better at making judgments about risk, but also about learning how to learn about risk.

Secondly, we assume there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ playground surfaces, when as we can imagine given what we now know about how children learn about navigating their environments, uniform playground surfaces can really only be seen as a limitation on children’s learning.  I was surprised to learn that studies are actually not in unanimous agreement about whether rubberized flooring makes playgrounds safer – some studies say it does, while others argue that falls from height cause the most significant injuries and rubberized surfaces are most effective at attenuating falls from standing height, not from the top of a playground structure.  Further, children might engage in, more risky play because they perceive that they are safe due to the presence of the rubberized floor.

Thirdly, we prioritize regulation over pedagogy in early childhood education centers, which is another way of saying that we attempt to legislate specifications and indicators of potential injury rather than trusting the people who are most intimately familiar with our children to use their professional knowledge and judgement to keep children safe.  This training turns out to be critical – one study done in Vancouver that Dr. Sandseter actually wasn’t involved with took two playgrounds in early childhood education centers with few affordances for high quality play and gave them cheap makeovers, spending a total of $8,000 across the two centers for items like tires, bamboo poles, simple wooden walls to create a “house,” and paint, as well as lots of “loose parts” like sand and sea glass.  The playground in one center had a greater potential for change than the other and in that one there were marked increases in play with natural materials as well as decreases in antisocial behavior at that center, there was no change in the amount of risky play that the children at each center engaged in.  The researchers hypothesized that the teachers at the centers were not trained in any way to change their approaches toward risky play, which means that simply providing the equipment won’t necessarily lead to changes in children’s play if the adults around them are still telling them to be careful and not do things the adults think are dangerous.

Fourthly, we assume that restrictions on play are necessary in a modern Western environment.  These restrictions must be necessary because children are incapable of judging risk for themselves, and childcare professionals are incapable of judging risk for children, and public transit isn’t safe for children and neither is walking on the sidewalk, really, so children shouldn’t take field trips to a fire station or a store or even the post box to mail a letter.

Fifthly, we assume that some children are injury-prone when actually there is limited evidence for the genetic basis of injury-proneness and most of the variance in injuries across children was due to environmental factors, and particularly factors associated with socio-economic disadvantage where children play in places like driveways of apartment blocks rather than in a play space.

Sixthly, we assume that toddlers and preschoolers just can’t walk.  We push them in strollers and we drive them from our garages to their daycare, so they are essentially divorced from their community because they don’t get to interact with anyone or anything in between the two.  Yes, it takes longer to walk with a child.  And yes, in some places it just isn’t safe and we need policymakers’ help to make streets places that are welcoming to pedestrians.  But I can speak to the benefits of ditching the car, which is our primary method of getting our daughter to and from daycare.  She still gets dropped off at daycare by car because my husband drops her off on his way to work which he has to drive to, but when I’m between projects at work and I can leave half an hour early in the evenings I walk the two miles to her daycare and we take the bus back up the hill.  We get to talk about bus schedules and making sure the number on the front of the bus matches the number of the bus we need, and what all the signs say on the bus, and she has struck up conversations with people on the bus several times.  Just today we had to perch on a little informal seat on a crowded bus and she said “can you sit next to me so I can have a hug because I love you and I like your hugs.”  I certainly wouldn’t have gotten that on a car ride.  Because the bus stops several blocks from our house we walk the last part and she picks flowers and we watch the cherry blossoms bloom as their leaves develop, and a few days ago after the farmer’s market she walked five blocks up a hill with a stretch so steep it has steps, without any complaining.  Her stamina is definitely improving, and she’s getting the idea that we walk places which is going to be huge for us when we’re on holiday in Taiwan, where we’ll probably already have been by the time you hear this episode.

Seventh, we’re convinced by the statistics that we must find a way to avoid all hazards in the playground, even though it’s statistically more likely that the child will die in a vehicle accident on the way to the playground than while engaged in play.

Eighth, we assume that parental guilt leads to good outcomes for children, and we aren’t shy about applying that parental guilt.  Just today as I’m writing this, Professor Peter Gray whom we interviewed a while back on what motivates children to learn published a blog post on Psychology Today about the benefits of risk for children’s learning, and after he posted about the article on his Facebook page someone commented: “I can remember the raised eyebrows and looks of disapproval from other parents at the park when I would encourage my toddlers to climb higher on the monkey bars, or swing independently on the non-baby swings.  My toddling twins derived pure joy from these basic moves of freedom, but the other parents observing this play only saw the risk and perceived danger.”  The pressure of surplus safety that stifles parent-child interactions also extends to the early childhood education settings, as both teachers and administrators are afraid that their careers and maybe even their entire program could be jeopardized by a lawsuit if they used professional judgement rather than surplus safety to guide their decision-making about safety.

Ninth, we design our neighborhoods without considering children’s right to play.  We put big houses on tiny lots with backyards that are designed for adults’ socializing rather than children’s play.  Houses are designed so people can roll up their garage door, drive inside, shut the door, and then go straight into the house, so opportunities to interact with neighbors are fewer, and since few people are out walking either there’s little opportunity for communal monitoring of children’s safety.  If we’re lucky, a small playground might be incorporated into the community – with the standard equipment and rubberized flooring, of course.  If we’re to move beyond this, we need parents, urban planners, transport planners, education departments, and policy makers to work together to overcome these issues – a tall order indeed.

Finally, we assume it’s good to help children to ‘get ahead,’ and that the best way to do that is to stimulate them with extra activities, which means they have to be driven around to all of those extra activities, which reduces children’s opportunities to engage in spontaneous outdoor play, some of which is risky play, with whatever friends happen to be around.  Dr. Sandseter and her colleagues observe that our individualistic view of safety lies at the heart of many of these problems – we are looking out for our own child’s well-being and safety, and if we instead looked out for all children, we might choose to enact policies so children can walk safely in cities by themselves, instead of keeping our child safe by driving him everywhere.

So what are we to take out of all this information?  Firstly, I think we can say fairly conclusively that children need to be exposed to risk and learn how to manage risk when they are young, so they can learn how to do this when the stakes are low and better manage risks when they are older.  Encounters with risks can have both positive and negative outcomes.  Yes, children can fall, hurt themselves, break bones, and possibly, in the worst of circumstances, die.  But there are also positive outcomes to risks as children gain confidence, determination, skill, and learn how to manage or avoid risks they don’t want to take.

Secondly, a thought on how to manage risk: I’ve realized that one challenge I face in parenting is to adjust my approach as my daughter gets older and is capable of doing new things.  I tend to find something that works and I get into a habit of doing that, even when my daughter becomes capable of doing more by herself.  One survey of parents found that parents adjusted their perceptions of what activities were risky as their children got older, which is great.  But based on my experience, I do wonder how much of those results were the parent responding to a survey in a situation removed from any risk and thinking “yeah, I probably would let my child play fight with sticks,” an action that researchers deemed moderately risky, but if their child actually started play-fighting with sticks they might see it as fighting, or be afraid of what other parents might think, or put a stop to it for myriad other reasons.  So do give a moment’s thought to whether the things you’ve consistently said ‘no’ to are things that your child could actually now do for himself.

Finally, we should acknowledge that risk and anxiety about those risks are socially constructed.  People in different cultures have different experiences with and expectations about risk that determines what kinds of risk they are willing to tolerate their children being exposed to.  Many families try to manage this risk by developing a minimum level of expectations or boundaries around what is acceptable, and the older children get the more they attempt to negotiate these boundaries particularly when two parents have different expectations about risk that children can potentially exploit.  I’d encourage you to examine your beliefs about risk and how important you feel it is to a child’s development, and then try to align your beliefs with your actions so you’re not thinking that one thing is important but actually sending a very different message to your child through what you allow him or her to do.  You may find you need to conduct a mini-intervention with yourself, as some researchers did with parents and teachers at several schools in New South Wales, Australia.  Their process took two hours and included a number of exercises like visualizing the adults’ own favorite places to play as children, to compare their childhood play with their children’s childhood play, and listening to stories about a girl climbing at a park who shifts from confident to fearful in response to her mother’s panicked voice.  Sadly the study failed to measure whether these parents actually followed through and let their children take more risks but the process seems psychologically valid – the intervention aimed to shift parents out of a ‘fast thinking’ model where they use heuristics to make decisions.  A heuristic is a rule of thumb that develops over time, kind of like how a lot of parents say “be careful” without really thinking about it as soon as their child takes a tiny risk.  Instead, the adults were encouraged to engage in “slow thinking” – to weigh the potential outcomes before making a choice and consider whether the potential gain is worth the risk of possible loss.  This obviously requires more effort, and is a process we usually reserve for complex decision making, but the researchers argue that this is exactly what is needed if we are to reframe the way we think about risk to encompass ideas of uncertainty, opportunity, and challenge that may yield positive outcomes.  From a practical standpoint, I think the easiest way to do this in real-time is when your child asks if they can do something, try to have your default answer be “yes” unless you can articulate a clear reason why they shouldn’t.  And if you see your child doing something you think might be dangerous, just pause for a second before you shout “be careful” or “don’t do that,” and see what happens, and consider whether the benefits might outweigh the risk.  You might just find that most of the time, they do.

Thanks for listening – all the references for today’s episode can be found at yourparentingmojo.com/riskyplay

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We’re part-way through a series of as-yet undetermined length on play at the moment.  We kicked off with a conversation with Dr. Stuart Brown on the overarching topic of why play is important not only to children, but also to adults.  Today we’re going to talk about outdoor play, and this is such a big topic that we’re going to split it up a bit.  Today we’ll talk about why outdoor play is so critical for children’s development, and then soon we’ll talk with Dr. Scott Sampson about realistic ways that real people can really get their children outside more (and, preferably, get outside more with their children).  Hopefully after that we’ll also look at risky play, and maybe even imaginary play…but let’s take things one at a time.

The way we have defined “nature” and “wilderness” has changed a lot over the years.  Park Ranger Jen is going to come out for a few minutes here – perhaps it won’t surprise some of you who have seem pictures of us in my fortnightly newsletter grubbing around in the muck that I used to want to be a ranger for the National Park Service – and preferably at a park in the middle of nowhere.  A lot of days I still do, but you have to be realistic when you marry a guy who works in advertising.

European settlers of the New World were familiar with wilderness even before they got here because at that time there was still quite a bit of wilderness on the continent.  The most notable idea they had was that wilderness is something different and alien from man, something that civilization can and should and must struggle against.  Judeo-Christian tradition is filled with this kind of symbolism, and it had an enormous impact on the settlers.  “Good” land is flat and fertile; “good” trees produce shade, or fruit, or preferably both; water is plentiful, the climate is mild, and animals live in harmony with man.  Picture the Garden of Eden – it’s a fecund place where branches are drooping with fruit, there’s no need to be afraid of any animal, and Adam and Even don’t need to do any work to survive – but after they sin in the garden they are driven out into the wilderness.  This view of wilderness in the Judeo-Christian religion is in stark contrast to the way wilderness was viewed in other places; many of India’s early religions, including Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism emphasize compassion for all living things because man is a part of nature, not apart from it.  The ancient Chinese sought out wilderness in the hope of more clearly understanding the unity and rhythm that they believed pervaded the universe.  Japan’s first religion, Shinto, was a form of nature worship that actually preferred mountains, forests, and storms over the fruitful, pastoral scenes so important to Westerners.  We grew intermittently softer and less-soft toward wilderness over the years until the 1960s and ‘70s, when the terms “environment” and “ecology” became household words.  For the first time in a long time we started to see ourselves as being a part of nature, although it’s a neater idea in theory than in practice.  We increased the pace of setting aside lands for conservation purposes, signing the Wilderness Act in 1964 which specifically provides for places that are “untrammeled by man.” This makes wilderness areas unlike the national parks which had been created sixty years earlier, because in parks people and nature had always uneasily coexisted, at least – White visitors and nature had, because all the natives had to be kicked out before the park was created.  Some of us now view wilderness as a place to go to feel renewed, but then we want to go back to our technology-centered lives and we sort of forget about wilderness until the next time we want to feel renewed.  Many children these days understand why we should recycle and can tell you about endangered species and climate change, but have no physical experience with nature themselves.  I’m going to argue today that if we can reframe the way we see wilderness and nature and see it as part of our everyday lives, rather than ‘that amazingly cool thing over there that we only visit very occasionally,’ that both we and our children will benefit.

I also want to try to carefully acknowledge – without unintentionally stepping on anyone’s toes – that there are a lot of issues related to colonialist, industrialist, capitalist that we should acknowledge when we talk about nature and our relationship with it.  Indigenous and First Nations communities in many, many places around the world see a spiritual connection to nature as just part of how life is lived, as inextricable from human life.  While these cultures have this idea of a connection to nature in common, they are each unique in the way in which they express that connection – the cultures may have commonalities across them but they are not monolithic.  Colonization has obviously had what we can politely call a negative impact on native peoples in the U.S. and in many other countries, and I think we should acknowledge that for years now we’ve told indigenous peoples that their way of life is wrong and that they need to live the way we live and adapt to our customs and practices, and now we’re seeing that their cultural practices and the way in which they see themselves as a part of nature actually has a great deal of value, and that we should somehow try to understand these practices without appropriating them like we’ve appropriated things like dreamcatchers and headdresses and Pocahontas.  I’m the first to say that this is not my area of expertise and am not exactly sure where this line of appropriation lies, or whether we might cross it by accident, but I at least want to acknowledge that the line exists and also that, as usual, the vast majority of research on children related to the outdoors has been conducted on White children by White researchers, and the perspectives of people from non-dominant cultures are not well represented.

It won’t be a surprise to anyone who has read – or even heard of – Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods that children are spending less time than they were even just a generation ago – a LOT less time.  A raft of studies shows children spending less time outside, more time in front of the TV and computer, and a dramatic increase in the incidence of childhood obesity.  We’re beginning to understand why that is – nature is filled with inherently fascinating scenery which attracts our attention in a gentle, general way.  Urban environments (and digital media) demand our directed attention so we don’t get hit by a car, or so we can get better at whatever is the hot video game app this week, which is mentally tiring for us.

A generation ago, children found nature everywhere – in vacant lots, in fields, in ditches – as they roamed with friends for hours at a time unsupervised.  Journalist Hanna Rosin wrote her seminal article The Overprotected Kid in The Atlantic in 2014 that when her daughter was about 10, her husband suddenly realized that in her daughter’s whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult.  Not 10 minutes in 10 years.

In the U.K., the area in which children roam without adults has decreased by almost 90% – half of all children used to regularly play in wild spaces a generation ago, and now it’s less than one in ten.  Children don’t walk to school alone any more, or play outside by themselves – instead they’re indoors and if they’re aged between four and nine they spend on average over 17 hours a week watching TV or playing video games.  The Outdoor Foundation (which is funded by the National Park Service and outdoor retailers) found that participation of all people over six years old in outdoor activities (not including organized sports) declined between 2006 and 2016, but the participation rate of 6-12-year-olds declined the most – 15%.  Most of that decline happened between 2006 and 2009, and it’s been pretty much flat-lined at around 62% of children participating for the last several years.  Journalist Florence Williams reports in her book The Nature Fix that two thirds of schoolchildren do not know acorns come from trees, and while she doesn’t source that particular nugget and I couldn’t find it independently, the overall feeling is one that is echoed in other reports.

At the same time, academics are being pushed ever-harder in schools, in the name of helping individuals to ‘get ahead’ so companies can sell more stuff and our GDP can rise ever-higher.  As we see often in parenting, when we prioritize one thing we inherently de-prioritize something else – just because we can’t pay attention to everything.  If we prioritize academics, we de-prioritize spending time outdoors and engaging in unstructured play.

There are, of course, exceptions to the rule.  There are more than 1500 forest kindergartens in Germany – some have a kind of ‘home base’ structure for bad weather but others just shuttle the children to a park on public transit, and keep them outdoors whatever the weather.  Children don’t play with toys, but with sticks, rocks, leaves, and whatever else they can find.  Far from being wild, uncivilized children who struggle in schools, forest kindergarten graduates have a “clear advantage” over the graduates of indoor kindergartens, outperforming their peers in cognitive and physical ability, as well as creativity and social development.  The Wild Network, an organization that tries to increase the amount of nature in children’s lives, has identified several barriers to what it calls Wild Time, which are categorized into four groups.  In the fear category are stranger danger, a risk-averse culture, and dangerous streets.  Time constraints include time-poor parents, a lack of nature in the curriculum, and a lack of unstructured free play in nature.  Spatial issues include vanishing green space and the commercialization of childhood seems to be lumped in here as well, while the rise of screen time is the primary technological concern.  It’s too simplistic to say that too much of all of these things is always terrible – for example, technology can be a great enabler of the outdoors.  My 3 ½-year-old is getting into geocaching, where you use a map on a phone to locate a small hidden object – I mostly use the technology at the moment but I’m sure she’s going to want to do it soon.  I would argue that our children can handle more risk than most of us let them experience, but how much is the right amount?

As I mentioned earlier, part of the problem of getting children outside is that their parents have a perception that danger lurks around every corner, which is why playgrounds in Western countries tend to consist of a play structure, some rubberized flooring to prevent injuries, and a fence around the outside to keep people who aren’t supposed to be playing with their children out.  In the 1960s, children were safe wandering around New York City because neighbors and shopkeepers kept a collective eye out for children as they played.  Today that collective responsibility has been replaced by governmental actions (for example, putting signs on playgrounds saying that adults may not enter without a child) and quasi-governmental organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which aims to safeguard children but also contributes to the feeling that stranger danger is a real thing.  In reality, children are almost never kidnapped from playgrounds.  Family members are usually involved when children are kidnapped, and even the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is refocusing its attention away from putting missing children’s pictures on milk cartons and toward child molestation, which unfortunately remains an enormous problem.

I only want to address injuries briefly, because we’ll cover them in greater depth in the episode on risky play, but I do want to make the point that while the Centers for Disease Control reports that more than 200,000 children are treated in emergency departments every year for injuries sustained at playgrounds, this number has remained steady as the population has increased and most of the injuries treated were minor with the child being sent home without being admitted.  40 children died on playgrounds in the eight-year period between 2001 and 2009, mostly from either strangulation related to swings, jump ropes, dog leashes, and the like, or falls.  While these deaths are tragic, we should put that into context: the same number of children are killed on our roads every two weeks.  The result of the focus on reducing injuries is the standardization of play equipment, which is why you can walk into pretty much any playground across the country and see the same bog-standard equipment – a metal pipe climbing structure, a slide, as few moving parts as possible, and a sea of rubber mat flooring.  I’m probably going to do an episode dedicated to risky play in this series so I won’t get into it too deeply here, but I do want to mention that the type of outdoor play that most Americans think of with the standard playground structure surrounded by a fence and with rubberized flooring underfoot isn’t really very interesting or challenging for children.  This model has developed through parents and cities trying to remove all risk from playgrounds and while playground standards have been effective at reducing death from strangulation which used to be much more common, they have also removed most of the challenge that gave children a reason to play there.  The research provides cautious evidence supporting the idea that risky play encourages children to play more, and promote social interactions, creativity, and resilience, and accident rates per 1,000 hours of risky play are much lower than when children participated in sporting activities.

Some researchers think that excessive predictability of playgrounds leaves children unable to cope with anything that doesn’t fit that mold.  They lose the ability to judge risk, and then they get hurt when they come across something different.

Personally, I think that a large part of the problem here is that it’s hard for anyone to make money off playgrounds that are locally manufactured out of locally-appropriate materials – it’s a much better business model to have a standard set of offerings that recreation department managers can select from a catalog.  There are some exceptions – the Natural Playgrounds Company builds locally-appropriate playgrounds in a way that invites children to interact with materials in a challenging and yet inherently safe way.  Their website says a contractor estimated a cost of $100,000 to build a 22,000 square-foot natural playground which has soooo many things in it – a rain garden, a labyrinth, an amphitheater, a big sand play area, a fairy village, a stream, caves, combing elements, a slide built into a hill, fruit trees, benches, a discovery path, and so on – this is apparently about the same as the cost to build a 3,000 square foot traditional play structure with rubberized flooring – a fraction of the size of the Natural Playgrounds one.  I was also amused to note that this is approximately the same price as I was quoted a couple of years ago to do some minor relandscaping of our garden in Berkeley which measures about 300 square feet.  Needless to say, that plan is on hold for the indefinite future – and as a result of doing this research I’m in the process of installing a mini adventure playground for our daughter.  Stay tuned for more info to come on that in future episodes.

I’d also like to spend a bit of time talking about technology and outdoor play, since this intersects with other ideas we’ve studied – notably on raising children in a digital world, and the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines on screen time.

So what are the impacts of technology on children’s play, and how is this linked to outdoor play?  The famous psychologist Jerome Bruner theorized that the first type of cognition to develop comes through doing things that children love to do – rolling balls, climbing steps, pouring water, rolling down hills, digging in dirt or sand, help them to understand how the world works.  This becomes a building block for the stage where one object can ‘stand for’ another, which is how a play structure becomes a pirate ship.   In the third stage children further develop their use of language and other symbolic codes, which rides on what they learned in the previous two stages.  Doris Bergen, Professor Emerita at Miami University, was at the forefront of research on technology and play until her recent retirement, and was concerned that if children don’t get enough time in that first stage of active, physical play because they were sedentary, spending time with technology, that they won’t be able to develop the cognitive structures they need to fully engage in the subsequent levels.

Another view on the topic of technology comes from theorists who say that things in a child’s environment have inherent qualities that say how they can be used.  These qualities are grouped into categories – transparency, challenge, and accessibility.  Transparency is about whether you can immediately see what to do with an object when you see it – children don’t need to be trained how to use a ball because its shape suggests what they should do with it.  Transparent objects may have more than one use – a child could run down a hill or slide down it, or they could stir up a muddy puddle with a stick or jump in it.  Technology may have different levels of transparency as well – anyone who has witnessed a two-year-old manipulating apps on an iPhone knows they can find their way around if they need to, but may technology-based tools come with specific instructions because they can only be played with in one very restrictive way.

The second category, challenge, is about how many different possibilities there are to play with an item.  Blocks, clay, and water can be played with in many different ways.  Some outdoor toys like slides and swings are minimally challenging for children so they make their own challenges by standing up on the swing (or jumping off it), or going down the slide on their stomachs or head-first.  Indoors, children may combine elements of different kinds of toys to increase their challenge, but it is difficult to change the challenge level of a technological toy because they are designed to do one specific thing.  When a toy is transparent and easy to figure out, it’s usually a one-finger kind of operation, not a whole body experience.  Further, the child doesn’t get to ask their own questions and find problems that they want to solve; they’re presented with a problem that the technology designer created.

The third category, accessibility, is about whether the item invites interactions with other people (even though I’m not exactly sure what accessibility has to do with interactions).  Many things that are found and played with outdoors invite or require more than one person’s participation, which learning theorists like Lev Vygotsky think is critical to children’s development.  If that name sounds familiar, he was behind concepts like scaffolding, which we covered a looong time ago on the show, and his work also underlies much of the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education – we did an episode on that too.  Some technological toys invite cooperation but this often occurs virtually, and when two children in the same room want to play with a technological toy one often has to play, while the other watches and waits (and probably agitates for his turn).

Researchers who have studied children’ interactions with technological toys invariably seem to find that the amount and quality of interactions with parents or other children is more limited than when what’s called the “target child” plays with a non-technological toy.  This finding has been replicated across a variety of toys and situations – for example, children playing with a fire truck toy spent most of their time trying to figure out what the toy was supposed to do, and when they went beyond this their play was fairly routinized.  When parents and children interact with a talking book, most parental speech becomes about the function of the book rather than on the content of the story, and when they play with a fancy shape sorter toy, parents used less spatial language and less variety of language than when they played with the non-technology-enabled toy.

Technologists are in the process of trying to bridge these worlds by designing virtual worlds in which we can go for a walk in the woods, although journalist Florence Williams described found herself getting more motion sick than relaxed when she tried it out, a sensation apparently experienced by around 30% of people trying it – sounds rough to me.  Other researchers have developed sensory tiles that light up when a stepped on and which can be installed in playgrounds – picture the Dance Dance Revolution video game from the ‘80s, but without the screen.  These researchers are excited about the “body-brain interplay” that “promotes children’s physical play and experimentation” – although once again, the games that can be played with these tiles are ones that have been designed by the researchers rather than the children, and the children might get more out of a flat area of open dirt and a stick that they could use to draw a hopscotch court.  I’ve yet to see technology-enabled play equipment that conclusively provides more benefits than just playing outdoors with natural materials.

So let’s talk about the benefits of outdoor play, because it turns out that there are a lot of them.

Many studies have looked at the relationship between play and cognition, or how the child thinks.  There are two main arms of this research – looking at impacts on creativity and executive function.  Taking a brief look at creativity first, the biggest study on that front looked at the scores from more than 272,000 children between kindergarten and 12^th grade on a test of creative thinking.  The children were from all over the U.S., although no data was available on socioeconomic status.  The major finding from that work was that there has been a decline in children’s creativity between 1990 and 2011.  We can’t be sure of the reasons for this, but researchers speculate that the focus in schools on a narrow range of academic abilities and reduced time for play, including outdoor play, may be partly to blame.

The other aspect of cognition that has been well studied is called Executive Function, which is the set of skills that controls where we put our attention and how we use that attention.  Executive Function development is critical for children because it has a strong relationship with the control we exert over ourselves in situations like paying attention to the teacher, staying focused in the classroom when Johnny is poking you with a pencil, and sticking with a task even when you don’t enjoy it.  It also has a role in factors beyond school like obesity, criminal activity, and drug use.

We don’t exactly understand the mechanism through which play benefits executive function, partly because play takes so many forms that it can be difficult to understand the relationship, and partly because the gold standard for experimental studies requires a highly controlled situation that doesn’t really reflect how children actually play.  This means you’re likely to end up with a finding that “if children play in this highly contrived way then they experience x benefit” – but no children actually would really play like that.   Studies that don’t follow an experimental design often find a benefit from outdoor play as well (one recent one found a positive relationship between time spent outdoors in preschool and children’s working memory, as well as an inverse relationship between time spent outdoor sand inattention-hyperactivity symptoms) but because these kinds of studies aren’t experimental we can’t be *sure* that it’s the time spent outdoors that causes the effects.

What does seem clear from the collective research is that executive function is very malleable in childhood – if children are supported in developing their executive function then this development will likely occur, but if children don’t get that support then their executive function development will be hampered.  There are a number of ways of providing that support, including through specific social and emotional learning interventions in school that can be moderately effective.  Other researchers argue that rather than training children to develop executive function skills it would be much cheaper and just as effective to enhance the quality of their play, by providing more and better opportunities for outdoor play, which have a host of other potential benefits as well.  Researchers think play supports executive function development because play makes heavy cognitive demands on the brain as the child sets a goal and then works toward achieving it, that making complex motor movements also requires a lot of cognitive load, and that exercise creates physiological changes in the brain.  I should caveat, though, that a lot of this research involves play where the researcher says “now go and run around for 10 minutes and then we’ll give you a test” rather than the kind where the children play freely.

Yet ANOTHER benefit of outdoor play is the affordances it offers for children to develop social and emotional skills.  The textbook I mentioned that I’d picked up earlier had tantalized me with a statement from a teacher at a forest school in Denmark who said that “We are one of three institutions that feed into the local school. The teachers there are all very happy with our children. They say all the pupils are socially more advanced and are the most ready to learn,” says Grandahl.”  I confess that I was a bit disappointed to find that the source for that statement cited in a textbook was none other than an article in the British newspaper The Times, hardly a model of peer-reviewed research, but in the course of research for this episode I was lucky enough to find corroborating evidence.  Most of our indoor environments are highly controlled by adults – home is controlled by parents, and school is controlled by teachers – we might say that school exists for the benefit of the children, but really children have very little say over what they learn and how they learn it.  By contrast, outdoor spaces have a more ambiguous identity with nobody fully ‘in control,’ which allows children to try on different ways of being and experience agency, which is the idea that you have some power to affect the outcomes of your own life.  Because adults don’t exert so much control over outdoor environments, children get a chance to try to solve problems for themselves, to see what efforts are successful and how they might need to modify their approach next time.  They get to practice negotiation and socially cohesive behaviors, which – as the preschool teacher in Denmark noticed, gets them labeled as ‘socially advanced’ once they get to school.  I do think it’s ironic that it is in adults stepping back and allowing children to do their own thing that children learn a key skill that makes them ready for learning later in life, and that this is more effective than children spending more time with adults being forced to sit still and memorize things like letters and numbers.  We do have to acknowledge, though, that children do sometimes use this freedom for nefarious purposes.  One group of researchers in England had children wear little felt bags containing audio recorders around their necks as a way of capturing children’s interactions without the presence of adults causing the children to change their behavior.  One boy was playing with a doll-house near others who were engaging in boisterous play and another child began to taunt this boy with homophobic slurs which were unobserved by adults, a situation that is obviously undesirable.  On the flip-side, playing outdoors gives children a chance to create cohesive play groups on the basis of shared interests rather than because a child looks like them, which is how young children tend to judge whether or not people are like them, and thus, make good playmates.

Research does indicate that rather than spend more time on academic activities to improve our children’s outcomes in school, it would actually be better to spend less time on these activities and more time outdoors playing, doubly especially preschool settings which are nominally preparing children to succeed in school but which may actually – by focusing on academic activities rather than on play – be hampering children’s executive function development.

Richard Louv has a lot to say about the relationship between academic outcomes and being outdoors.  In his book Last Child In the Woods he cites a report that was published in 2002 called Closing the achievement gap: Using the environment as an integrating context for learning, which was the summary of a decade-long working group consisting of the education agencies from 12 states in the U.S., which studied the benefits of using the environment as an integrating context for learning.  This is also known as place-based learning, and it’s basically the idea that children find it really interesting to learn more about what’s around them.  You don’t have to convince a child to be interested in the local park or woods or wetland because they are inherently drawn to these places.  Children lose interest in science over the course of their school careers because science doesn’t have any meaning in their lives.  When they learn about dry concepts about like leverage from a textbook, they have no use for the information and don’t retain it.  When they need to learn about leverage and mass and pulleys to get some materials across a stream because they’ve volunteered to help local park managers to build a trail, they figure it out pretty quickly and they retain the information.  And it’s not just physics – students in the classrooms that were piloting place-based learning performed better on standardized tests in reading, writing, math, and social studies; they had fewer disciplinary infractions in the classroom, they had increased enthusiasm for learning, and greater pride and ownership in their learning accomplishments.  With results like that, it’s hard to believe that I had to learn about place-based learning in an obscure textbook I happened to pick up while on my layover day in my backpacking trip at the Environmental Education Center in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state, and not as an integral component of the Master’s in Education that I currently have underway.  In fact, the concept has not been mentioned even once, in any of my courses, and each time I sneak in a mention of it my professor says “great stuff!” and I get a great grade, and I’m thinking “why do I have to learn about this stuff on my own time and work it into my papers, rather than the other way around?”

But the crux here, of course, is that it’s not just about increasing the amount of time spent in the outdoors.  I can’t tell you to make sure your child spends 20% more time outside and all of a sudden they’ll get better grades in school.  The report didn’t just look at taking regular lessons outside, they looked at a wholesale shift in how teaching and learning happen.  In an ideal world, teachers stop asking the questions – a radical concept, I know, and then the students start asking them.  And when the students ask the questions, they become invested in finding out the answers.  This kind of learning can happen inside a classroom, but it tends to work best when it happens in a place students actually care about, which tends to be outdoors – where they can run around and get filthy and where learning looks about as far from a classroom environment as it’s possible to get.  The Closing the Achievement Gap report was published in 2002, and aside from some gains in outdoor-based education for preschoolers, and a rise in the number of schoolyard gardens in which students get to spend an hour every few weeks, not much has changed.

There is some debate over the type of access to the outdoors that parents and teachers can and should provide to children, and what kinds of activities should be encouraged when they are there.  One researcher in New Zealand followed a group of children at a preschool for six months on their weekly visits to a small local woodland.  Three of the group’s teachers were very hands-off in their approach, and waited for the children to come to the teachers with observations and interests, and made no attempt to modify the natural environment.  Another four of the teachers were much more hands-on, and created new experiences for the children – a fire pit where marshmallows could be toasted (imagine that happening in a preschool in the U.S.!), a bridge across the stream consisting of a rope to stand on and another to hold onto (imagine THAT happening in a preschool in the U.S.!).  These teachers directed the children’s attention to the suitability of different sticks for marshmallow toasting, and the way the tension on the ropes changed as the children crossed the bridge.  The researchers didn’t believe that either method was necessarily better than the other and indeed, the children seemed to gain something different out of each type of experience.  What parents might want to try to do is to find a balance between calling children’s attention to things the parent finds interesting, and allowing time for the children to follow their own interests and also just have free play time that might seem not particularly goal-oriented to adults.  When children have ample time for self-directed learning activities in their indoor lives as well, there’s certainly no harm in introducing ideas in the outdoor setting.  Other researchers suggest, though, that when children spend a lot of time in environments where they don’t get to choose what they do that it can be especially valuable to children to use their time outdoors for self-directed, rather than adult-directed play.

Another thing that is implicit in the New Zealand study and that I hope to look into more in the future is the value of knowing one place deeply.  The children walked to the same piece of woodland every week, with occasional visits to another woodland a bit further down the same road.  I know that people like Jon Young, who have written books about tracking wildlife and becoming really connected with nature advocate for deeply knowing a place by visiting it many, many times in all weathers and seasons.  I assume there is also value in knowing other places and how your special place fits in with other special places as well, although I don’t have any research on that either way.

So you’re a parent, and maybe you haven’t spent so much time outside with your child beyond the traditional rubber-floored playgrounds, and maybe you’d like to think about doing something a bit differently.  But maybe you’re feeling kind of overwhelmed because you don’t know much about *the environment.*  Well, we have an entire episode coming up for you on exactly this topic in the very near future, but in the meantime I’d like to leave you with the findings of another recent study, which found that knowledge about the environment was actually only very weakly related to what the researchers called “ecological behavior.”  A far more powerful predictor was connectedness to nature, which was defined as the closeness in relationship between an individual and nature.  What this means is that it doesn’t matter if you as the parent can identify twenty bird species or if you can’t tell a crow from a gull.  It doesn’t matter if you know which animals live where or why eucalyptus trees have that stringy bark or which plants are native species and which are invaders.  It matters far more that you get outside and just have fun playing in mud, dragging kelp along a beach (as my daughter loves to do), collecting leaves, noticing different things around you, and wondering about things that interest you and supporting your child in wondering about things that interest him or her.  If you and your child still want to know the answers to your questions when you get home you can find a book at the library or look up answers online, and maybe that will be the beginning of an investigation of trees or birds or who knows what.  You don’t have to know everything about nature to enjoy it, or for your child to get enormous benefits from being in it.

Listeners sometimes write and ask me to summarize episodes at the end in case they missed something important.  The summary here is: go outside!  Have fun!  Everything else will follow.

Transcript

Jen: [00:38]

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today I’d like to welcome my guest, Wendell Hanna, who is Professor of Music Education at San Francisco State University. Professor Hanna’s academic background includes a BA from the University of South Florida and a Master’s in music from Yale University in orchestral bassoon performance. After several years of teaching and performing in San Francisco Bay Area orchestras as a freelance musician, Professor Hanna then obtained her public school and teaching credential and taught elementary music in the Oregon public schools. Before obtaining a Ph.D At the University of Oregon. It was there that she shifted our attention to younger children and began researching and working musically with infants, toddlers, and preschool aged children. In 2002, she was offered a professorship at San Francisco State University where she researches and also teaches, early childhood musical development and local preschools. It was through teaching in a local corporate preschool that she encountered emergent learning and the Reggio approach. Now I discovered professor Hanna’s work not long after I heard a piece on NPR about the links between listening to music and learning grammar, so I was already looking for someone to talk with about the connections between music and child development, but today, dear listeners, we’re going to get so much more than that.

Jen: [01:49]

Professor Hanna has just published a new book called The Children’s Music Studio, a Reggio inspired approach and as soon as I read it, I knew that I had to ask her to do an interview with us because their interests coincides so neatly with my own. She brings a really rigorous evidence based view on the impact of music on a child’s development and she has also studied early childhood education in Reggio Emilia, Italy as I have done as well, and wants to bring that evidence-based view of music to Reggio inspired classrooms. Welcome Dr. Hanna.

New Speaker:  [02:17]

Thank you, Jen. Thank you for inviting me.

New Speaker: [02:20]

So I wonder if we can start kind of probably where parents already have had some exposure to information about music and related to child development. Can you tell us what is the Mozart Effect and how does what parents might have heard about it differ from what the study actually found?

Dr. Hanna: [02:38]

Sure, so the Mozart Effect was a research study and there have been many more research studies since the original one which was in 1993 in southern California, Rauscher and Associates and they, they looked at the effect of listening to a Mozart music and how that affected learning and their results were published in Nature magazine and they said that especially on spatial reasoning and a little bit on memory that listening to Mozart had positive effects on your ability to concentrate and learn. Fortunately, people got very excited about things, especially in my field of music education, we were like, Hallelujah. This is what we’ve been looking for. Scientific evidence of what we’ve always known to be true, and here it is. However, researchers, we were like, wow, let me look into this research, and then we discovered, wow, they listened to some Mozart for 15 minutes and then they became smarter. Hm, let’s replicate this just to make sure. And so it was replicated many, many, many times and the same results were not found and that’s a problem with research; it needs to be replicated in their same results, need to be found each time or most of the times it is replicated.

Dr. Hanna: [04:02]

So that was a problem. Many people have really jumped on. The idea of Mozart makes you smarter because it feels true. It just feels so right.

New Speaker: [04:14]

It’s so esoteric, isn’t it? It must be making me smarter.

Dr. Hanna:    [04:19]

So it’s actually fascinating from a researcher’s point of view that something that you know is right, you just haven’t been able to prove yet. And so that’s really what the Mozart Effect was about is just pure listening. And so there’s been a ton of research…neurological research and other types of research about this and so I would say the take-home point is that the Mozart effect is really likely to be an artifact of just arousal because you’re listening to the music and it makes you feel better. It heightens your mood. So that’s probably what the Mozart Effect is. You feel happier when you listen to Mozart and you feel a little more alert in your brain is a little more stimulated.

Dr. Hanna:  [05:07]

So those effects that were tested are likely because of that and have nothing to do with our dear friend, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the many other types of light and happy music that would have that same effect on your short term effect.

Jen: [05:26]

And so this study was also done with college students, right?

Dr. Hanna: [05:30]

It was done many, many times; people have been replicating it many different ways since 1993. Sometimes it comes out positive and but most of the time it doesn’t get strong statistical results because it just has to do with listening. And the real research is more when you’re doing active music making, especially playing instruments.

Jen: [05:55]

Alright, so let us all be warned about the dangers of reading one study and basing our entire approach to parenting on that. So okay. So if I’m a failure as a parent and I have not had my child listening to Baby Mozart for the last couple of years, I’m curious about how children approached music. If nobody’s teaching them about it, do they have some kind of innate sense of rhythm and a desire to produce music or are these things more culturally learned?

Dr. Hanna:  [06:19]

Well, yes. Children have an innate ability in music, just exactly the way that they have an innate ability to learn language. So there’s a really interesting study that came out of the Child Study Movement in the early 20th century called the Morehead and Pond study was done between 1937 and 1948. And it’s fascinating because it’s more of a longitudinal – not that long, but pretty long for a study. And they had children go into a room with beautiful musical instruments and by themselves with other children. And they videotaped, I guess they videotaped… Did they have that then? Anyway, they observed and they analyzed what the children did and they found that these children were understanding music without any adult supervision. They were creating music, they were understanding form. They were interacting, they were improvising, they were singing, creating their own original compositions and some pretty amazing stuff. So I would say that’s a real seminal study and there’ve been many others that have shown that children left to their own devices are extremely musically naturally musical.

Jen: [07:34]

Mmhmm. And where do you think that comes from?

Dr. Hanna: [07:37]

Well, it’s evolution.

Jen: [07:39]

And what what purpose does it serve?

Dr. Hanna:   [07:42]

Well, there’s a lot of theories on that. There’s definitely…. Music is definitely kind of brings the tribe together. It makes you feel more secure and protected. It gives you…and this answers your, your second part of the question which is about cultural learned. Whether music is culturally learned, but it. It helps you identify with your culture and children. They have an innate nature to respond to music, but there is a natural development that is occurring and that natural development can be further enhanced with exposure; parents exposing them to wide variety of music as well as direct instruction, so it’s kind of there’s an innate ability and children can do it on their own, but if adults give a very rich environment and exposure to music and some direct instruction, then that is really, really heightened because there’s so many neuronal connections in the brain for all kinds of learning and as we’ll talk a little bit more, language learning and music learning really out as one in the same in a baby, and then it splits later on. So if you’re encouraging language development, you’re also encouraging musical development and if you’re encouraging music development, you’re also encouraging some language development.

Jen: [09:12]

Okay. I’m wondering what my daughter is learning from the Maroon Five music that she has a preference for at the moment.

Dr. Hanna: [09:22]

I’m sure she’s learning a lot!

Jen:  [09:22]

I am sure she is. I hesitate to imagine what. So you mentioned a couple of times as you were explaining that, that if parents provide direct instruction as well as exposure to different kinds of music, what do you mean by direct instruction in that

Dr. Hanna: [09:35]

format? Well, purposeful interaction for music’s sake, if you take them to a, a child parent class and the Music Together classes are very popular here in the bay area and I think all over the country now. And those are wonderful classes, but there’s a variety of music. The children are playing instruments, you know, it’s tactile; it’s locomotor… They’re jumping up and down and they’re moving and they’re, they’re singing and they’re just participating in music with others and with adults and not passive, not just listening to music in the background.

Jen:  [10:11]

Okay. Okay. Alright. So now really starting to dig into the research here. I want to try and untangle what some of the research says on the benefits to children of being involved in music because I read through a bunch of abstracts of papers on this topic and you kind of get the impression that music is absolutely incredible at promoting children’s cognitive development. But then when you dig into the methodology and the results, you find things like children who attend music classes are able to look at a pattern of beads and replicate it from memory more effectively than children who didn’t attend classes and that kind of skill does have good implications, visual memory and chunking of information, both of which are very important in reading, but there was also no difference between the two groups on the other five subtests of a well known intelligence test. But the abstract to that study says “this study suggests a significant correspondence between early music instruction on spatial temporal reasoning abilities”. So I’m wondering, based on what you know of kind of the totality of the literature and not just honing in on one study’s results, is there a benefit to a child’s development from making music and what kind of music does the child have to do to gain this benefit?

Dr. Hanna:  [11:22]

Well, I would really recommend this wonderful book. It’s very easy to read by Daniel Levinson. He’s a neurologist up in Canada and it’s called This is Your Brain on Music and it really is fantastic. And what he really says is that when anyone is participating in music, every area of the brain lights up in what he terms as a neuronal symphony. And so the phenomenon of music is incredibly complex. Even though, from our first person perspective, we just like your music and go, oh, I want to tap and I want to dance and makes me happy. And that’s how children enjoy and understand and appreciate music. It’s a very simple natural response that, I mean, you’ve seen with your own daughter, I’m sure he put on a little music and…

Jen: [12:13]

Even a little Maroon Five!

Dr. Hanna:   [12:16]

Right? And even if a child can’t walk they’re bobbing, and they’re holding on to something and they’re moving. I mean this is, they call that entrainment. And so we just naturally entrain where the no other creature does this type of entertainment other than humans. And so this is just a wonderful natural thing to do. But when you look from a third person perspective of a neurologist and you actually look at the brain and you say, well, what’s going on? Then it becomes extremely complex and you see that there’s this complex coordination of neural systems almost everywhere in the brain because there’s… Each aspect of music and I go into more detail in my book about these different aspects of music use a completely different specialized area of the brain process that and then for it to all come together as one holistic experience of what we consider music. It takes a lot of coordination from all these different brain processing parts. So melody information is processed in one area.

Dr. Hanna: [13:19]

Rhythmic information is processed in a completely different area. Timbre is processed in another area. I mean these are not. These are all over the brain and so it’s the form of the music, the meaning, the referential meaning of the words of the song, you know? Then the limbic system is processing certain emotional aspects of the music. So there’s so much going on. So what evidently has been observed in some of the latest research is that children who study music, especially a musical instrument, usually it’s most noticed before the age of nine if they start. But you look at the adult brain and the corpus callosum, which is the the white connective tissue between the right and the left hemisphere is much thicker in people who studied music at a young age and so that I think is because there’s so much interconnectivity between the hemispheres and between the different parts of the processing of music that’s almost like a muscle because you’re working out so much interconnectivity that this corpus callosum builds up like a thicker muscle and it stays throughout life.

Dr. Hanna:  [14:40]

So it’s hard to say that this one thing is benefited by early involvement in music. It’s more like your brain is just overall more fit, especially in anything that’s auditory in nature because music is mostly auditory, but it’s also psychomotor. So anything that have to do with your brain and your hands interacting or like language, which is, you know, it has to do with ability to listen and process sounds. Those in particular, they’ve tested through research that adults who studied music seriously as a child do much better on those types of tasks throughout life.

Jen: [15:21]

Okay. And so I just wanted to give back to something you said about the corpus callosum and, and how that tends to be thicker in people who studied music as a child and I’m wondering if there has been caused an effect established there or if it could be that people with thicker. I don’t know what the plural of corpus callosum is, the corpus callossi? Are more inclined to study music. Has caused an effect been established so we can say with directionality, which thing proceeded what?

Dr. Hanna: [15:50]

Well, I mean a caveat for all of neuroscience is that it’s so new. Yeah. And everything is coming out fast and furious. So I don’t think you can say once and for all. But from what I’ve looked at, yes it is definitely a cause and effect from what they’ve they’ve studied.

Jen: [16:10]

Okay. All right. And so I’m just kind of drawing links between learning music and learning other subjects and people are listening to the show regularly, will remember that I developed a course recently to help families decide whether homeschooling could be right for their family. And as part of doing that, I interviewed a really cool math tutor and I’ll put a link in the references to where people can actually go and hear that because I technically did pretty well in math. I actually got an A in my high school exit exam in England, but I’m only good at math as long as the problem that I’m presented with looks exactly like the one that I was taught. And so I was thinking about the way that we teach math, which is basically to say, I know you don’t know why I’m teaching you all these components and skills, but trust me in the end, you’re going to be able to use these to get into college and maybe one day he’ll solve a problem using these skills. And what occurred to me is I realized that traditional way of teaching music is very much the same. And we teach children how to read music and how to play each note. And we sort of say to them, trust me, in the end, we’re going to teach you skills. And these are gonna help you get into band. And one day you might even express yourself using music and the way that you’re describing teaching music is very different and we’re going to get more into kind of what is a constructivist approach to education and music education, and children can start expressing themselves right now today, right? It does the same parallel strike you.

Dr. Hanna:  [17:35]

Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is why I’m so excited about the Reggio approach because it really is a educational approach that people are very excited about and I think it’s a wonderful parallel to music education needs to look at this idea and there is a growing faction of the music education field that really feels that the old school methodology of band, orchestra, choir, traditional piano lessons where you have to practice and show your teacher how well you practice what they gave you each week and then they, they critique what you do. That’s a very passive. The child is a empty vessel, a passive learner, and the teacher is an expert and they tell the child what they need to do. Yes. Circle the flat and measure for you. Missed it. Don’t miss it again. Now that is not a very creative methodology.

Dr. Hanna:  [18:40]

Luckily we have these new…I know the common core is a very touchy subject, but the arts new common core art standards are really actually moving in a more creative direction, less passive area. So I have some hope that we’re moving in this direction and the Reggio Children Research Division, uh, I don’t know when you went?

Jen:  [19:05]

It was about a year ago.

Dr. Hanna:  [19:05]

OK, but this was a big thing when I went in 2016 Okay. Yeah, and I think that you’ve probably heard this too, they’re very, very interested in expanding beyond preschool into elementary and secondary schools. So the Reggio approach is not considered an approach that is only appropriate for babies and toddlers and preschoolers.

Jen: [19:28]

Yeah, I think Italian education had been very traditional heading it and they’re just now starting to think about what it might look like to expand this idea that the Italians are pretty much in love with too, right? Yeah. So, okay. So we’ve sort of alluded to this a number of times then, and so listeners may remember that I actually interviewed Suzanne Axelson specifically about the Reggio Emilia approach in preschools. So if you’ve got the time to go back and listen to that episode, I highly recommend it, but I wonder if Wendell, you wouldn’t mind helping us to just briefly understand what are some of the main tenants of the Reggio Emilia approach to learning?

Dr. Hanna: [20:02]

Sure, of course. I’ve been very focused on the arts element, but, and I’m not an expert in the Reggio approach per se. I’ve just kind of dug into more the artistic aspects of it. But what I would say is that the Reggio approach is a learning environment. It’s not a method, a curriculum or a technique. That’s one of the reasons why you can’t “do Reggio.” You can’t be certified in Reggio because every single environment is different. The children, the parents of the municipality is different. And so it’s an approach that you bring to your own unique learning environment. So why schools are said to be inspired by the Reggio approach, but they are not Reggio schools. But that said, I’d say there’s three really important aspects to that and one is focusing on the child. The child is very, very central to the Reggio approach.

Dr. Hanna:  [21:04]

So the belief is that the child is an active constructor of knowledge, so they’re not an empty vessel, they’re a fully powered ship moving through waters, they’re not. You know who poor innocent things that need to be helped. They’re very powerful learning beings and they’re also social creatures. They don’t learn in a vacuum. They really need to be working with other people to learn. That’s an important aspect of how they learn and that a big part of the Reggio approach is the children have rights. It’s not a privilege to learn. It’s a right to be provided with as much opportunity and materials as possible. So that’s the child. And then the role of the teacher is very different than the traditional teacher role. The teacher is not an expert; they are a collaborator. So being an expert, they’re a. What I say in my book is there a co-learner.

Dr. Hanna: [22:07]

They’re learning alongside the children now at the same time, they’re adults. You’re an adult, do no more than children. So you are a guide. You’re a guide because you do know you’ve been down these roads before, so you don’t just completely let the children off on their own, and you’re there to facilitate. So that means you know, you want to provide materials and structures and resources for the children. And then the most unique aspect I would say, of being a teacher in a Reggio environment or a parent that wants to instill that environment in their own home would be that you’re a researcher. Which I think is really interesting because I think most of your listeners will know about Piaget. One of the most famous early childhood researchers who didn’t stick children into laboratory. He just observed his own kids at home.

Jen: [23:06]

His sample size was a little suspect, wasn’t it?

Dr. Hanna:  [23:10]

And yet that was a long time ago and nobody’s really refuted what he observed in his own children. And so I think this is such a great thing. I mean, you, you’re a researcher. You’re looking at the unique learning that is occurring in your children and, you know, you don’t have to have a phd to observe and research and help your child learns. So as an adult you’re a collaborator with the child, you’re not an expert. And then the other aspect is that you may have heard of emergent curriculum and that is an aspect of the Reggio approach. So the idea is that knowledge is emergent through socially constructed discoveries and that this knowledge, this emergent knowledge is very diverse. It comes from many different areas. So it’s not just math and, or I’m doing science now or it may involve many different areas all coming together.

Dr. Hanna: [24:12]

And so with all these different areas coming together, then you get this meaningful whole. So it’s a little bit messy because traditional education, you know, you can say, oh, they’re learning math, they’re learning science, they’re learning reading, you know, they’re learning music. But really Reggio approach says that, you know, it’s, there are no boundaries between learning areas and that everything can kind of interweave and commingle within this type of approach. But the part that I like the best is that the Reggio approach really emphasizes the arts. And so this is what fascinated me; unfortunately it has focused for last 40 years, primarily on the visual arts. So their adage is that a child has over 100 languages and those of you that know the theory of multiple intelligences, which is Howard Gardner’s theory from Harvard Education Graduate School, he was very good friends with Malaguzzi and traveled to the Reggio schools.

Dr. Hanna: [25:20]

And so there are actually a lot of parallels and I think they really came together with this thought that the arts in particular are very rich and deep and creative and complex way of understanding and expressing the world because there’s emotion and there’s nonverbal content within the arts. So that’s my favorite part of the Reggio approach. And so my research has been, okay, how can we look at what they’ve done with. I mean the things. And as you know, you’ve seen the work of these children in the art studios which are called the affiliates that are so sophisticated and you’re just like, preschoolers could not have possibly done this work. And it’s like, wow. And so for me, I’m like, well gee, in their philosophy they say that, there’s a over 100 languages, so music should certainly be one of those languages even though it hasn’t really been developed to that extent. So my research has really been, you know, how could we look at what the Reggio approach is done with visual arts and then apply it to music.

Jen: [26:28]

Okay. Wow. You said a lot there was so interesting in that piece. I want to go back to something that you mentioned…you talked about Piaget and. Yes. Nobody has really sort of said that what Piaget found was not accurate. Although I will say that I think there’s a general agreement that children tend to reach stages earlier than Piaget might have acknowledged. So I just want to put that out there. But tying together a couple of points that you mentioned. You mentioned this concept socially constructed knowledge and separately from that, but related to it, the idea that the teacher is not necessarily…doesn’t have to be an expert, which I think can be very empowering for parents who are thinking about music and thinking, well, I don’t know anything about music, you know, speaking personally, I took piano lessons when I was seven and and I can play the recorder pretty well. I can still play Christmas carols, but I don’t really know anything more about music than that and I just want to kind of bring that full circle and say that is it right that because the Reggio approach sees knowledge as socially constructed that that is okay and that I still bring something useful and valid, but also my daughter brings something that’s useful and valid. Can you help us think through that a little bit?

Dr. Hanna:  [27:42]

Yeah, sure. I mean we were all once children, right?

Jen:  [27:47]

I think so, yeah.

Dr. Hanna:  [27:50]

I think sometimes we overthink you know that we have to sing well or have taken piano lessons or have some background, but children don’t really care if you’re singing in tune and they don’t really care if you know every ballet step or can read Shakespeare and understand it. They just want to experience music and explore and interact. So many adults just feel like, oh, that ship’s sailed. I quit piano lessons when I was eight…why did i do that? Why didn’t my parents make me? I should have done it, and now I could play Mozart…

Jen: [28:22]

And then my kid will be a genius!

Dr. Hanna: [28:34]

So they feel like, you know, that that’s over for them and it’s not over. We can always learn music. Right. And the children are really programmed just as they are to learn language, their program to learn music and there’s a natural development that occurs. So if you just follow along with. So if your child is into Maroon Five.

Jen: [28:57]

Yes it is. You don’t sound like you’ve heard of them. I’m shocked at this lack of knowledge on your part of an essential component of the musical Canon…

Dr. Hanna:  [29:05]

I am shamed. You are right. Yeah. She’s interested in that. Now in traditional music learning. We would steer our children away from that because it should be Motzart…it should be proper…it should be children’s developmentally appropriate music. But the Reggio approach would disagree with that. Your daughter is into Maroon Five and so you want to explore that with her. So you would put the music on and ask her some questions. You put on your researcher hat and say, wow, what do you like about this? Tell when you listen to what she says, and then maybe she says, because it makes me dance like a rabbit. Okay. I don’t know what. What does she say? Have you asked?

Jen:   [29:51]

I have not asked her that. Actually. I wonder, and I noticed this, when I was reading your book that sometimes you acknowledged that when you asked a child a question about music, they didn’t always give you an answer and I wonder because when you read the books about Reggio, the children are always amazingly eloquent and they always have some kind of answer to the question you’re like, I don’t think my kid would say that, but you actually acknowledged that you didn’t always get announced. So when you ask a child about that, and so I haven’t asked to be honest and I wonder what I would get and what would you do if she didn’t say anything?

Dr. Hanna:  [30:27]

I would ask a different question or I would suggest, oh, why don’t we put on, you know, why don’t we make our own music video; what types of costumes shall we were, and you’re always opening up avenues to find out how they’re thinking. So if one door doesn’t open up you, you suggest another. So that’s where the researcher hat really comes in. You’re guiding, but you don’t know what the answer will be and if there is no answer, the new guide in a different direction and see if, if it happens and if, say for instance she says ‘I’m very interested in the bass guitar for some reason, right?” And you’re like, what’s the bass guitar? And then you know, you could bone up on that and maybe learn more. Maybe find something that’s like a bass guitar. She was fascinated with that and then bring those materials in and then explore that area. So it’s really letting the child be the leader and you’re learning along so maybe you don’t know about something that they’re interested in. Then you can learn. You’re learning along with them so you don’t have to be an expert.

Jen: [31:33]

Yeah, and as you were talking through that, I was thinking about something I remembered actually that I saw while I was in Reggio Emilia and just thinking about parents who say, “but I can’t even read music.” How am I going to support my child’s interest in music? And the children, I guess they were probably aged around for in this particular classroom that we watched in the video were inventing their own musical notation and so they would draw squiggles on the page and the whole thing was a line from the start of the piece to the end of the piece and where it got squiggly they would introduce a certain kind of music and they would draw a stop sign to indicate and everybody would stop for a second and then they would start playing again and the line kind of meandered slowly around the page until it got to its endpoint in the lower right corner.

Jen:  [32:18]

And I think they might have played it differently every time they went through it. But they probably got more consistent as they went through it again and again. And they had the opportunity to kind of redraft it and give new interpretations to it. But I as a parent who have the vaguest recollection of musical notation from elementary level recorder playing could probably figure out how to draw music in a squiggly line on a page, right? And so the, the absence of that kind of knowledge, I think that parents should not see that as a limiter, right?

Dr. Hanna:  [32:53]

Oh no, of course not. Of course not. I mean, what’s interesting about that, because I’ve observed the same thing when I was in Reggio Emilia, Italy, the children have been so adept at visual arts and they’re so able to express themselves with drawing, with using visual arts materials that they’re very able to translate what they hear into drawing something. What I would love to would be to say the opposite, you know, could they read something or see a picture and then translate that visual thing into music. So that would be the other side of the language. I mean, you really want children to master all of these, what they term as languages or abilities and conceptual understandings. And it’s not to become a prodigy, it’s just to have that ability to be able to express in that particular modality as well as every other type of modaililty.

Dr. Hanna:   [33:52]

I mean, you want the best for your child and you want them to be able to express their understanding and to communicate to others. And artistically I think art is very cathartic, right? I mean that’s what’s so wonderful about music is that it has this affective modality. And so in my book I talk a lot about the particularly, and I think this relates back to what I was talking about earlier about this is your brain on music. It’s very complex there. And I talk about these three different learning modalities that when you’re working with your child, you’re, you’re working in… And the aspect of modality is to me the most accessible for the youngest children.

Jen:  [34:35]

And what you mean by that is how does it make me feel?

Dr. Hanna: [34:37]

Right, right. And so when you play a fast music in generally it’s exciting and slash or happy slow music is generally calming. Softer music is a little more intimate; it brings the child in and these are all biological aspects of music that create a lot of different aspects and it’s, that’s just just that one aspect. The affective modality of music is just absolutely fantastic. And then there’s the temporal modality of music. So that’s such a unique aspect because you’re listening to a piece of music and so it’s new and you’re kind of remembering that like twinkle and then you get into the next twinkle, twinkle and you’re kind of remembering that the first two twinkles happened. Now these next two twinkles are happening that you’re thinking, oh, but now there’s that star part. So you know, it’s this evolving experience, a temporal modality within time that you were experiencing music. So you’re experiencing the past, the present, and you’re anticipating the future. And it’s one of the fantastic things that the brain is processing. It’s almost like juggling multiple balls in the air at the same time. That’s one of the reasons the brain is so stimulated, you know? And then beyond that, you know that there’s a complete song that there’s going to be an end of the song that the song will be over and you could do it again if you want.

Jen: [36:08]

And we do do it again, many times…

Dr. Hanna:  [36:11]

And it had an end. So there’s this temporal aspect of music that is just absolutely fascinating. And then the third modality is the spatial modality. And I think this one may be why some of the research that has shown that spatial reasoning tests is often a much higher after playing instruments or musical intervention classes and things like that. So spatial ability, what is that like imagining a cube, multiple sides and space or I don’t know, what is your understanding of, of the way now, how that would benefit you in the real world?

Jen:  [36:48]

Oh, for sure…Map reading.. all kinds of things.

Dr. Hanna:  [36:51]

So in addition to that, that holding music within the span of time, you’re also holding it within space. So twinkle is a little bit lower in pitch twinkle is higher. And then little, it’s just a little bit higher than that one.. Star… And then how I wonder what you are is going down, so you’ve got this up and down that you’re processing in the brain and then how far up in how far down or is it the same, and then you add another tone and then you’ve got not only that, the relationship between one tone to another, but then you’re bringing in harmony and then you’re bringing in different instruments, the flute and the tuba and electric guitar, which brings different textures into it. So this kind of explains why the brain is like working overtime when you’re lists, it seems like, such as just this twinkle, twinkle little star, you know, and Oh, and then let’s do the motions. The finger play with it. Now we’re now we’re using our modality for, for movement, our motor cortex and our sensory cortex, which is a huge part of the brain on both sides of the hemisphere, of the brain. So yeah, there’s a lot, a lot of stuff going on that really is happening when you work with children musically. So I went to more detail in the book with that.

Jen: [38:15]

Yeah, just a little bit more so I want to get to that. So the first half of the book is on kind of the research behind what’s involved in music and how it affects children’s development and also about the Reggio Emilia approach and the whole second half of the book is a series of what are called “studio proposals” and they show how children can respond, perform, create, and connect with nine different qualities of music like dynamics and tempo and beat and rhythm. And these aren’t so much lessons to be taught as examples of how a teacher can explore a topic with a child and it doesn’t have to be a teacher, it can be a parent. And so I actually, I tried one of them.

Dr. Hanna:  [38:54]

Oh, did you?

Jen:   [38:54]

Yeah, I did. I, uh, my, one of my daughter’s favorite books is called I Will Love You Anyway. And it’s about a dog who in conventional language we would probably say is not very good. It’s not a good dog. And it keeps running away. And in the middle of the story there’s a thunder storm and I thought a thunderstorm, that’s a really dramatic thing. I wonder if there’s music… I wonder if there’s something in Wendell’s book about thunder storms and it turns out there is! And so her birthday was recently and so our preschool, which is Reggio-inspired, has a thing where the parents usually go in and do some kind of activity on the child’s birthday and so I looked up the piece of music that you recommend that has a piece in it that’s about a thunderstorm and it sounds like a thunderstorm and we put a big piece of butcher paper down on the table that all the children’s sit around and we played the music on a phone and we just gave each child a crayon and said, what do you hear?

Jen: [39:45]

Can you draw what you hear? And they start drawing these incredible dark squiggles for the clouds and the music builds and and I say, wow, it sounds like it’s raining. And they all start going, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap with the crayons on the paper. And the teachers are just sitting there absolutely gobsmacked. And it was such a powerful… And I’m just sitting there with my eyes wide open thinking there’s no way I could have predicted this would happen in your book. You sort of go beyond that and you extend it to well, how could we could do three or four different drawings within the piece of music and we can actually arrange them as a piece of music. And one of the teachers said, you know, I would totally go back and do that again with a smaller group sometime. And so, you know, if, if parents are listening to this thinking I don’t know anything about music, I don’t know if I can do this. All it takes is look up a piece of music on YouTube and Wendell gives you these prompts for ways that you can engage a child and ask them questions and find out what they’re thinking about it. And you don’t have to know everything or even very much to make this incredibly successful. So I guess this is sort of a little infomercial for your book, but it was a powerful example for me.

Dr. Hanna: [40:56]

That’s wonderful. And I have some examples of popular children’s books and ways you can incorporate music into that.

New Speaker: [41:04]

Okay. Were they in the book and I don’t remember them or can you share them with us?

Dr. Hanna: [41:07]

They’re in the book.

Jen:  [41:08]

Okay. Okay, great. And so what, what should parents look for?

Dr. Hanna: [41:11]

Like, you know, like if you’re talking about tempo, there’s some books about the tortoise and the hare or clocks; if you’re talking about the beat. There’s lots of things about clocks and things like that.

Jen:  [41:24]

Yeah, I loaned my book to the preschool so I don’t have it. Right. But my daughter is really interested in clocks as well and is starting the rudimentary elements of telling time. So I bet she’d be super interested in that.

Dr. Hanna: [41:36]

Yeah, I mean I think the main point for the parents is this is a socially constructed approach. So sometimes the kids are so self-absorbed in coloring or whatever. They’ll sit by themselves for hours and color and draw and stuff. And I would encourage you not to do that with the music. I mean, I think it’s great to, to let the kids listen to music of course, but to really have the most learning, the parents should be playing alongside them and interacting and not, not just say here, sit here and listen and do this on your own. It really is about a social experience.

Jen:  [42:16]

Yeah. So I can see this being so, so relevant as children are younger and don’t necessarily have, you know, maybe the kind of coordination to play formal instruments in a formal way. And I’m wondering how shifts over time as they get older and as they start becoming interested in playing an instrument. Well, and I’m thinking about how the art teachers in Reggio Emilia, I will teach a child to use slip, which is like a wet form of clay to bind two pieces of clay together so that the children can broaden the repertoire of things that they can make using clay. And that seems sort of similar to teaching a child how to read music and play notes correctly. Except that with clay, you sort of have this two minute, you know, here’s how you wet the clay, here’s how you stick it together and then you get the whole world of opportunities. But in music it’s sort of, it seems to be a very time-consuming process where you get an hour of lesson and then endless practice and then maybe you can play something that you are really interested in. So how can you apply this constructivist approach or can you as the child gets older and becomes really interested in deepening their knowledge and skill with an instrument.

Dr. Hanna:  [43:20]

Right? Like we discussed earlier, that is the old fashioned, old school way, but I would say you can do the practice and instill creativity at the same time. So let’s, let’s go with twinkle twinkle.

Jen:  [43:34]

While we’re at it

Dr. Hanna: [43:36]

While we’re at it. Okay. So I mean the old school way would be say the child has a violin and [makes sound of violin playing Twinkle Twinkle].

Jen:  [43:44]

I can play that.

Dr. Hanna: [43:44]

Now, play that again. Okay. Whatever. So over and over and over until it’s perfect. But let’s say instead you show them how to play twinkle twinkle on whatever instrument is and then you don’t keep practicing that twinkle twinkle over and over. You use that as a template. So then you might say, hey, you know, you just learned how to play twinkle twinkle, what other song could we learn, you know? And then they, you know, the wheels of the bus. Okay, so see if you can find that on there. And then so then they use that and then you can use the template. Well they learn how to play twinkle, twinkle, maybe not perfectly, but then you might say, oh, so twinkle, twinkle, oh that was, that was a big distance or was that a small distance?

Dr. Hanna: [44:28]

Oh it was a big one. Okay, well let’s try it out. And then you know, they would trial and error and they’d figure out the wheels of the bus, and maybe they wouldn’t learn the wheels on the bus, but they would learn about directionality in a melody that it Kinda goes up and down like a rollercoaster as they’re figuring that out on their instrument. And then you might say, oh, well would you like to make up your own song? You know, we don’t have to just play songs we already know, what should we make a song about? So I would say that’s a more constructivist approach. You can start with twinkle, twinkle, but you don’t want to stay there until it’s perfect. You just want to expand in different directions that the child is interested in. Yeah. And like we said, I think that this approaching, even though it’s for preschool, I really believe that it’s such a wonderful, powerful approach. Even though it’s slow, slower education, we always want to know right away the benefit and the right to approach is slow education it, it really is.

Dr. Hanna: [45:29]

But I believe these constructed, this approaches can go on through middle school and even through high school. And I even have the. My last chapter talks about how you could use constructivist approaches and music classes and middle and high school.

Jen:     [45:43]

So just bringing it full circle. I guess back to the research, I know that research has shown that there are some benefits to a child’s development as a result of participating in music, not just listening to Mozart, but the vast majority of the research on this topic seems to achieve those findings by dividing children into two groups and giving both groups an intelligence test and then providing one of them with music instruction for 20 minutes a week and then giving them another intelligence test and seeing if the two groups are different and I’m curious as to whether children might see the same kinds of benefits using a Reggio-based approach where they aren’t really so much directly shown how to play an instrument. They, they do a lot more figuring out for themselves, but then sort of following on from that, I’m wondering should we care about such a reductive approach to understanding something is holistic as a child’s experience of music? What do you think?

Dr. Hanna:   [46:32]

Well, that’s a good question and that’s always talked about in my field. You know, shouldn’t music just be for music’s sake, art for art’s sake, you know, why do we always have to have it in the service of better mathematical intelligence?

Jen:     [46:48]

So they don’t cut our budget!

Dr. Hanna:   [46:52]

Right, exactly. And so, you know, why can’t we just enjoy the aesthetic aspects because it’s beautiful, it’s a part of being human. But all of these approaches, I mean all these subject areas can be considered beautiful. Right? And that’s what the Reggio approach is all about. It says the arts shouldn’t be compartmentalized as this aesthetic approach and math shouldn’t be considered a hard learning area. I mean, now what is it that STEM versus STEAM debate?

Dr. Hanna:    [47:26]

Right. And the Reggio approach would say, you know, everything should be arts look at math, like it is an art look at everything as an art and the ateliers might be in Reggio, you know, might be doing regular academic learning, but they do it in an aesthetic and beautiful way. So yeah, Via Vecchi, who’s the main atelierista for the Reggio School, she said “boundaries are as thin as smoke,” is what she says, and she says, you know, you can’t, it’s all should be beautiful and it should all be incredibly meaningful and academic at the same time. So yeah, I mean we’re used to the reductionistic approach, you know, what if I do this, I get this result. So I would say you get both. It’s aesthetic and it’s hardcore learning.

Jen:    [48:21]

Alright, and on that note, we shall leave it today. Thank you so much. This has been such a fun conversation. I’m so honored that we got the chance to learn from you.

Dr. Hanna:    [48:28]

Oh, thank you. It’s been a delight.

Jen:    [48:30]

So Dr. Hanna’s book, The Children’s Music Studio, a Reggio inspired approach can be purchased on Amazon and you can also learn a lot more about the book before you buy it by visiting Reggio music.com where you can follow windows blog. Her latest posts was actually a comparison of the Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio approaches to music and as always, the usual references for the show can be found at YourParentingMojo.com/Music.

Transcript

Jen:   [00:27]

Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is called Is a Reggio Emilia Preschool Right for My Child. So this is the third in our mini series about different approaches to preschool education and today’s episode is going to be a little bit odd for me because I actually know a fair bit about the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education, but I went out and found us a real expert to talk with and I’m going to pretend like I don’t know very much so that we can ask the kinds of questions that people here are new to Reggio Emilia might ask. Our guest today, Suzanne Axleson received her master’s degree in early childhood education at Sheffield University in England, where she specialized in Reggio Emilia language and communication and documentation as a tool to aid memory and deepen children’s learning. She has 20 years of experience teaching in a variety of early years settings including traditional Swedish preschool and Montessori. Suzanne recently worked at Filosofiska, which I hope I’m pronouncing correctly, Sweden’s first preschool with a philosophical profile where she developed an approach to use philosophy as a pedagogic tool for young children, but she recently decided to spend some time collecting her thoughts in preparation for writing a book on how to use listening to improve pedagogical outcomes. Welcome, Suzanne.

Suzanne:    [01:39]

Thank you.

Jen: [01:40]

Thanks so much for joining us today. I wonder if you could tell us about how you first learned about the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education and what about it spoke to you?

Suzanne: [01:49]

It was round about 2007 when I was working in a preschool and there were teachers talking about that this is a new approach to this preschool should take and we looked into it so we realized this was something we were going to do and so I looked more into it and realized it spoke to me because it’s more or less what I’ve been doing all the time. It was about observing the children and listening to the children and making sure that the learning was happening appropriately for them. So it felt like a natural contraction of how I was working as an educator but to deepen that, to learn more about it.

Jen:     [02:27]

Okay, and what specific elements of the practice were you referring to there?

Suzanne:   [02:32]

When working with projects the children will find something of interest and then you will go into their interest and deepen their understanding of this by if for example, it was dinosaurs, it would not just be looking at everything that was dinosaurs and learning facts about dinosaurs. Why was it they were interested in dinosaurs and quite often it was finding out more about their fears and finding out more about how they themselves build things or created things or drew things and interacted with what was scary or it was different depending on the group of children, so dinosaurs was never – I’ve done it many different times, but he’s never been exactly the same.

Jen:  [03:13]

Hm. And is never exactly the same because the children are never exactly the same. Right?

Suzanne:   [03:18]

They all have their different approaches. Some children have been – they’ve wanted to be paleontologists, so they wanted to go and pretend that we’re finding fossils and it’s all been about the bones and connected to the bones in their own body, so it was like an exploration of their own body through the dinosaur bones while others, It’s been definitely the fear. There’s something was those big scary teeth was what was fascinating them. There were more of the fear exploration during that time.

Jen:   [03:45]

Okay.

Suzanne:   [03:46]

It’s always been an interesting way to… It gives us the opportunity to look at, to, to discover what children are learning, but they give me a new perspective on the same thing. So I never go and see dinosaurs and exactly the same way.

Jen:    [03:59]

Mm. Yeah. Okay. Um, so I wonder if for somebody who’s never seen a Reggio classroom before, can you walk us through what one looks like in your mind? What does the room look like and what are the children doing and and how do they move through their day?

Suzanne:   [04:13]

In my mind, the classroom would be one would inspire learning now look around and I would know the children were interested in and know what they’ve been doing recently because there’d be documentation on the wall and that everything would be accessible for the children or most things will be accessible for the children because sometimes you can’t have everything out all at once. The children will be busy. They will be engaged. It would have freedom, freedom to move around and the classrooms from what I’m used to, when I’ve observed classrooms in the U.S. Have been more like a classroom while I’m used to the children being exposed to a whole series of rooms that they can move in and out of, so they have even more freedom here in Sweden and then what they do in the US, so um, aesthetic, it would be beautiful, but then what beautiful is, is can be quite different from preschool to another preschool because you’ve got to include your own culture and your own context.

Suzanne:  [05:17]

I think when I’ve observed schools in the US, they’ve had an awful lot of things on the walls while here in Sweden and not quite so many things on the walls, so there’s huge differences in how Reggio is being interpreted, but it’s not just the beautiful classroom is not enough is how the classroom is designed to create interactions with the teacher, with the materials, with children, with each other. So it’s not so much about a beautiful looking classroom is it’s very much about a room that is created with consideration for children and consideration for their interactions and consideration for the interests and learning of the children.

Jen:    [06:07]

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I am a member of a couple of different Reggio-based groups on facebook and I think that especially the teachers who are newer to it tend to get hung up on the beauty of the classroom and it tends to be a lot of wood in the classroom and a lot of wicker baskets and I think sometimes think that if they were doing the wood and the wicker baskets, they’re “doing Reggio” and I think it’s important to remember that the beauty of the classroom is sort of a way of grounding us, but it’s not what. It’s not what Reggio is, right?

Suzanne:  [06:38]

Absolutely.

Jen:    [06:40]

Yeah. I wonder if you can help us understand a bit about the origination of the Reggio approach because this is… When I’ve spoken with in a Montessori and Waldorf educators this is the point in the interview where I normally talk about certifications and school accreditation, but that, that doesn’t exist for Reggio, right?

Suzanne:    [06:56]

Not in the same sense, no.

Jen:    [06:58]

So can you. Can you help us understand that?

Suzanne:   [07:01]

It started as an approach because at the end of the Second World War, they basically wanted a kind of education for their young children in Italy, the city of Reggio Emilia that would allow a more critical thinking, a more democratic approach that you wouldn’t just follow leaders blindly, they would actually question so that the children had the ability as adults to choose the right direction for their lives and not just follow. So it was always an approach. Malaguzzi was a very young man; and it was kind of surprising, I think he was only 24 when he started it

Jen:   [07:37]

Oh, I didn’t know that!

Suzanne:   [07:38]

I know; it kind of shocked me. This was a man who was very humble in his approach because he understood that he only knew a certain amount, so he wants to learn together with the children. So it’s always been this approach of learning together with the children and the children would be his teacher and he will be their teacher.

Suzanne:    [07:56]

And we would be co-researchers. So it’s more of an approach rather than a method. So it’s hard to become accredited in an approach, while a method is much easier to teach. Like the Montessori method, you learn the method of learning. Then you can apply this. While Malaguzzi really did not want to method because he felt this approach will be evolving all the time, like children, like society and culture is always evolving so we can’t have something that is fixed because if it’s fixed then it’s not going to be adjusting to the needs of our time and the needs of the culture that it finds itself in. A big part of why it appeals to me because it’s a pedagogy that is evolving rather than just this is the way it is and this is the way it should be.

Jen:  [08:47]

Yeah, and it also, in my mind, makes it more relevant to different cultures. I think when you go to Reggio Emilia and you talk to the teachers there, they’re adamant that you know, you don’t go in and look at their what they’re doing in their classrooms and take and take that home with you and aim to copy it in your classroom because it’s not relevant in your culture. The idea is to kind of extract the way that they’re thinking about the issue and then go and apply that in some kind of topic relevant to learning that is relevant in your culture. Is that right?

Suzanne:  [09:20]

Exactly. The view of the child not as an empty vessel to be filled with information but the child is competent and to reach their own potential and we’re just scaffolding that learning; they’re building their own education. So I also appreciate that we don’t see the children as something that we have to fill and we are responsible for in that sense, but we are responsible in supporting this child to reach their own potential.

Jen:   [09:51]

Yeah. Okay. So you brought up a couple of ideas there and I think one of those is the idea about constructivism, which is sort of the opposite of the way that school exists in the U.S., where you assume that the child is basically an empty vessel into which the teacher pours knowledge. Whereas Reggio views learning as a process that is co-constructed between two people and I think the example that you gave of Malaguzzi is great. You know, the idea that this person who was really the bedrock of the Reggio Emilia approach didn’t say, you know, this is my approach and I will teach it to you. He said, children, I will learn from you and you will learn from me. It seems as though that’s an awesome example of constructivism.

Suzanne:    [10:36]

Yes, yes.

Jen:   [10:37]

Yeah. And so the other, the other idea that you mentioned was scaffolding. Can you tell us a bit more about that? And I should, I should, I should mention to listeners, we did a whole episode back on scaffolding. I think it was about episode four or five. So if you want an in-depth understanding of it, go back and check that out. But um, can you help us understand how scaffolding is used in a Reggio-based classroom?

Suzanne:   [10:56]

Well instead of just telling the children how to do it or what to do, you’re asking them open ended questions to do that open problem solving. It can take little bit longer, but then the children’s learning is that own learning and they can be proud of how they achieve this. I think it’s very easy for us to fill in the gaps for them, but the idea is that the children make that leap themselves and we just kind of give them the tools to be able to do that leap, or create the safe space for that learning to happen.

Jen:    [11:29]

I wonder if you could give us an example of how that might work is there a situation that you’ve kind of scaffolded a child through recently that you could talk us through?

Suzanne: [11:38]

I think a lot of things with outdoors and climbing, for me. I will not lift the child onto a swing. I will not lift the child to a climbing frame and I’m quite happy for them to be and to look at me with angry stares as if I’m the worst teacher on the planet because I know that they can do it and I will give them the tools and I will give the encouragement to keep trying. I’ll ask another child come in, I know that you can climb up here. Can you show them that the technique that you’ve used to climb there and to be with that child and to help them through that frustration until they get there and they get to the top of the climbing frame and they have this enormous pride that they have achieved this themselves.

Jen:   [12:25]

Yeah. It seems to me as though you’re touching on a variety of different theories here.

Jen:     [12:29]

I’m thinking about Piaget who talks about the importance of the physical experience being so important to children’s learning and the idea that yes, you could plop the child on top of the climbing frame, but what does he really learn from that he learns much more by doing the physical process of the activity himself, right?

Suzanne:    [12:46]

Yes.

Jen:    [12:47]

Yeah. And then Vygotsky, you’re working with the social element and the fact that in a way, you’re refusing to help him, but you’re doing it in a way that encourages him to think for himself and consider his own resources first and also look around and see who else he can learn from to get to the right place.

Suzanne:   [13:06]

The children got really, really good at helping each other out because if they are too high because some of the frames, so they’re just too high up; they’re designed for slightly older children then they would work out how to lift each other up.

Jen:   [13:19]

Oh, really?

Suzanne:   [13:20]

So they didn’t need an adult to help them up. They could resolve it themselves and then they worked out strategies of how no child power could get to the get each other and support and how they had to take it in turns because if they wanted to get up then they’d have to lift somebody else up so it worked out in the most amazing strategies to be able to. And that’s because I took a step back. My idea was that as a successful educator, I’m almost to the point of being invisible. I’m only noticeable when they really need me and they’ll turn to me for advice and I can hopefully give them either a question or I can actually give their answer. So it depends, but I don’t want them to always answer every question they have. The question that I have to be… there has to be some kind of interaction on a normal level and not be over pedagogical.

Jen: [14:13]

Right. And so that kind of gets to a question that took me a really long time to get my head around when I was learning about this is the idea about, you know, correct answers because when I think in the Reggio approach, when a teacher’s working with a child and just, you know, an example from my life, they might be talking about where the moon goes when we can’t see it and maybe the child says it runned away, which is what my daughter says when she can’t see the moon right now. And so my understanding is that in a Reggio based environment, the teacher wouldn’t necessarily correct the child. Is that right?

Suzanne:    [14:46]

It would explore why the child thought it ran away, but at same time I am not as a teacher…me as a Reggio teacher, at least I’m not prepared for them to make wild assumptions that are obviously very, very incorrect. And I will guide them within this within establishing their own series. And it was a philosophy session that we had where the children were talking about who was the leader of the forest, what animal would it be? The leader of the forest. And they were talking about lynxes and bears and wolves and all sorts and given their reasons for why. And the reason for the bear being the leader of the forest was because it could write. And I was thinking, okay, maybe writing is okay, wait, maybe scratching and how would it write? Well they pick up a pen, I was told and they start writing.

Suzanne:  [15:45]

And so I broke it off for a moment and I said Let’s write like bears. So I gave them all pen lids to stick on the ends of their fingers so that they had like claws and they will not allowed to use the thumbs because no opposable thumbs like bears. And I asked them if they could write. And so they all tried to write to realize it was pretty impossible to write as a bear. So then I asked, well, do you want the bear to be a leader? Because it can write with a pen knowing that the bear can’t pick up the pen. No, but they still chose the bear as the leader, but they found other reasons which were closer to some kind of truth, but there was still a childhood fantasy in the in that sense it was still their thinking about it, but it wasn’t something out there going to go around in the future and say, you know, bears are rulers of the forest because they can write with pends.

Jen:   [16:34]

And the important part here, it seems to me is that you didn’t say Don’t be silly, bears can’t write!

Suzanne:   [16:41]

I gave them a chance to work it out themselves. I don’t want them to go round with untruths, but the same time I don’t want to burst this creative bubble at that creating that everything is possible because I think this is where we make the most amazing inventions in the future because we have the creativity. Everything is possible and you want to encourage that, but at the same time you want to keep a reality check on it as well and how can we take these impossibles and make them possibles in this universe that we live in?

Jen:     [17:17]

Yeah. Thanks for walking us through that. That was definitely something that it took me a long time to understand. I couldn’t, you know, I was watching in the classroom and hearing these conversations and thinking how do they ever get to the right answer, and sometimes it’s just, you know the teacher helping to provide and the experience the child needs to draw a conclusion by themselves rather than directly providing the answer. So yeah, that was a key learning for me. I wonder if you can tell us what are the hundred languages children?

Suzanne:   [17:50]

The hundred languages of children are the many different ways that children can learn. That they’re not just learning the one way that it’s taught in school with a very heavy focus on reading, writing and math and sitting down at the desk with all their senses they learn with. They learn with theater, with dance, through art, through mathematics, through reading and writing. Of course, these are just one language through listening. I think I talked a lot about listening. I think there’s very small focus on learning to listen and learning to listen to each other as children. I think there’s a big focus on children having to learn to listen to the adult, which is definitely the way you learn in school these days, but listening is more than just with ears. You listen with your eyes, you listen with your senses, you listen with your heart and your mind. So even just the listening is more than one way. So I think it’s giving every child their method or their approach to learning the opportunity to, to express themselves rather than this one size fits all learning that is in most schools around the world.

Jen:     [19:01]

Yeah. I think a lot of the 100 languages seemed very art based. And it’s interesting to hear, you mentioned math as a potential language. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Suzanne:   [19:12]

I feel that math is one of those languages that teachers are often very afraid of because it’s taught in a very right or wrong way in school and they forget to see the creativity of math. And you know, we never, we never really get the chance to express the language of math because it’s taught in such a horrible way.

Jen:    [19:36]

t’s funny that you use the word creativity around math. I actually interviewed a math tutor the other day for a project that I’m working on and he used the same word. How can you be creative with math?

Suzanne:    [19:49]

I think real math is about problem solving, which was all of the things that you need to be creative to solve problems. I think when I look at my children’s math books and how they’re solving problems now, it’s completely different to how I did it and even the Swedish system, they use different symbols from what I did as a child.

Jen:    [20:08]

Oh really?

Suzanne:    [20:11]

What does that mean, oh, that means multiplied. Let’s just a dot.

Jen:    [20:15]

Oh. Okay.

Suzanne:    [20:16]

So it’s all very. In that sense, it’s very creative because there’s many different ways to reach the same answer. And yet school is always teaching you this is the way to reach the answer. They forget that there are different ways. And then you’ve seen this wonderful things on Facebook about the Japanese ways of doing math, of adding complicated numbers together and you think, wow, that’s just sticks put together and cross crossing each other and that’s really cool and there’s so many different ways of doing mathematics that were never given an opportunity to explore. And I like doing mathematics when there’s lots of movements and when you getting down and you’re taping on the floor, are you hiding things in trees and they’re going round and catching things and adding things up and working out. That can be done creatively as well. It’s not unlearned creatively. And then explored creatively.

Jen:    [21:17]

That would have been nice in school.

Suzanne:   [21:19]

Wouldn’t it? How many people would like math is the math people disliked math because it was too restricted.

Jen:   [21:30]

Yup, totally get that feeling. So you mentioned a little bit already about the idea of documentation and and using what’s on the walls to understand what the children are working on and I know you studied documentation. Can you help us understand what documentation means and what it accomplishes for the child and the parents and the school and the broader community as well?

Suzanne:    [21:53]

I think in a way there’s two kinds of documentation. The documentation that’s on the wall and it’s just there, but then there’s the pedagogical documentation where the information that teachers are observing and recording and the photographs are being used by the teachers to learn more about the children are being used together with the children, for the children to learn about what they are doing and learning and again, the teacher to learn even more from the child and then again a way of learning together with the parents. The parents can then add comments and interact with this pedagogical documentation too and give what they are seeing in that home and adding another dimension to so it’s a whole child rather than the school child and the home child. A child never stops learning. They’re learning all the time, so documentation is an important part of that. The stuff that’s up on the wall is kind of a publication of the documentation. Now they put up on the wall and now we’re sharing our final thoughts. So this is what we’re doing at the moment. There’s not as much openness and what’s being that unless is being invited for the children to, to look at it and say, come and explore this with me. Can we talk about this?

Jen:     [23:16]

Yeah. I’m just thinking about some documentation that’s on the wall in my daughter’s preschool. I actually uh, went into the classroom recently because the children had been super, super interested in ice cream, as all children are. And on the playground there was a little window in the play structure and they’d been having their own ice cream store and they’d been selling it to each other and just pretend ice cream. So I thought, well why don’t we go and make ice cream? So I took some mangoes in and they helped us measure the ingredients and turn on the blender and turn on the ice cream maker. And so there’s a series of photographs of this process. And the reason that I love this idea so much is because it directly built on something that they were already interested in. And then after the class they actually made ice creams out of cotton balls and some cones out of paper and kind of extended their and their play through that. And it seemed as though it was a very, uh, sort of a way of extending their own interest beyond just play. It sort of brought it into the real realm. And the documentation helps us to remember that and look back on it and say, Oh, do you remember when we did this? And what was it like when the ice cream was churning and where you excited? And we get to talk with the children again and again about that. So that’s one way I’ve seen it work in a classroom is not just about, you know, we finished a project, we stick a picture on the wall, is it?

Suzanne:    [24:45]

Yeah, it allows the children to revisit rather than just remember that I remember is you kind of, oh, that’s what happened. But if you revisit, you actually go back with your emotions at the same time. I’ve had children who’ve looked at images like this and they remember that they weren’t in that room at that time. They were in a different room and they were doing this, that and the other so they could revisit the picture and work out what they were doing and how it related to that photograph. So it’s really interesting when you start analyzing more and seeing and giving children the time to revisit these images and even funnier when you read back to them what they said a few weeks ago they said “did I say that?!”

Jen:    [25:33]

We’ve noticed that as well. Coming home and in our documentation we get a weekly email of what the children have been talking about. Not every single thing, but the teachers will transcribe certain conversations and at Chinese New Year, which happened recently and the children were talking about noodles that I guess are traditionally eaten and they’re all talking about the different kinds of noodles they enjoy and my daughter speaks up and says “I like meat.” And I don’t deny she’ll probably remember that a few weeks, but yeah, it helps them to understand what they were thinking at the time. Right?

Suzanne:  [26:09]

Absolutely. Yeah. When I was doing last few sessions with my preschoolers, I documented every single conversation and dialogue that we had.

Jen:  [26:19]

Wow.

Suzanne:  [26:19]

Verbatim, so it wasn’t just a case of doing this and writing down their correct thoughts. It was getting old and mistake, grammatical mistakes, enunciation mistakes, so that I can see over this period of three years their language development. I can see their idea developments. I could see how they were interacting as well and the best part of it is going back because I would ask the same certain times of the year, like Valentine’s Day instead of doing whole Valentine thing, I would explore what is love, what does love mean to the children, and so I would ask the same question each year: What is love or what color is love, or what color is Christmas instead of actually what is these things. And then I would repeat to the children what they’d said three years ago, two years ago, one year ago, so that they could remember what they’d said and what they’d done and whether they still felt this way and why had they changed their minds and saying when it was really fascinating and the children thought it was absolutely hilarious. They had such great humor and generosity with their own thinking of. Because some of them was absolutely, you know, off the planet thinking at the time and you just accept it and then when the children go back to it, they kind of look at me, why did you let me think like that? But I said now you can see you’re learning. This was your idea then and then it was this and now you have this idea. You can see how you’ve learned and then kind of, Oh yeah, now I understand why you let me think like that.

Jen: [27:53]

That must be a very profound experience to be able to look that far back and have someone tell you what you said and understand in your own mind, how your thinking has changed,

Suzanne: [28:05]

Especially because some of the children went because there were only two when they first started having these philosophical dialogues and they always wanted to participate, but they couldn’t think of anything, so they would just describe somebody’s T-shirt on either side of the room and I would write in brackets what it is they’ve done so I could tell the child that this is why you said this is because the person on the other side of the room was wearing a bear T-shirt. So it’s definitely a powerful moment seeing the children, seeing that they catch on to their own learning and the more chance they are given to give the argument, which is very much this Reggio approach of coming up with ideas, sharing ideas, building on each other’s ideas that they then become very expert of arguing their case in a very respectful way. We have an outdoor museum in Stockholm called Skansen and the children wanted to go there and the reason we wanted to go was because time we’d visited, it’d been really, really windy so that the boat trip there, we got really, really wet because the waves splashed us, and one of the children was away, so they thought we need to go on this boat trip so that this child can get wet too.

Suzanne: [29:20]

And I kind of looked at them thinking, well, it was a huge excursion to go to Skansen. So I didn’t really want to do it, but I gave the children the opportunity. If you can find out a way, connect this to the learning and a good reason for going, I can change my mind. And so they all said, well, we need a thinking pause because that’s what I tell the children to do. If you to work on something, have a thinking pause. As one of them piped up and said, you know, at the moment we’re learning about Leonardo DaVinci and he learned about animals and how to draw them. So we need to go to Skansen to look at the animals that so that we can practice drawing animals like Leonardo DaVinci. And I thought, OK, sold.

Jen:   [30:04]

So you were convinced.

Suzanne:    [30:06]

So we went to Skansen and we drew with lots of paper and drew lots of images of animals so they could practice and they could see their own learning and getting better at drawing birds.

Suzanne:   [30:17]

So it was an amazing and they felt so empowered because I listened to them, but they had to give me a good argument. I’m not going to just listen and do something just because they’ve said it, but because they have a good argument, they can share something that’s meaningful

Jen:  [30:37]

Yeah, for sure. And did they get to go in the boat and get the other child wet?

Suzanne:   [30:41]

It was not a windy day.

Jen:  [30:42]

Oh no!

Suzanne: [30:44]

It was just as well, because that child did not like getting wet anyway.

Jen: [30:48]

So it worked out for the best in the end. So I wonder if you can talk to us a little bit about whether and how children learn to read and write in a Reggio based classroom reading and writing.

Suzanne:   [30:59]

I think this one of those paths of communication where there’s too much focus in the American school system and the British school system, and even in the Swedish school system that the children need to read and write, but when you look at communication as a whole, reading and writing is very small percentage of communication. The biggest part is listening and speaking. So the focus should be encouraging the children how to listen and encouraging how the children to speak so that they can build their ideas. They know how to communicate with each of those. And if you think about teaching children to write phonetically and they still haven’t got full pronunciation abilities in their mouth, how can they write correctly? Because phonetically there is that they’re not capable. I mean the, the sound is “th,” I think it’s six, seven years old before you actually fully capable of making that sound because the mouth muscles and not fully developed. So I think the focus in the beginning needs to be on allowing the children to learn through play, to strengthen their hands, to strengthen the mouth muscles so that everything’s ready. And as soon as they’re interested in reading and writing, you said giving them the little tasks and activities that will encourage it. I mean the fact that I wrote down all the words all the time and the philosophy sessions made the children always really eager to know what was being written and that their words that they were saying verbally became symbols on a piece of paper, a computer. So there was always this interest. It was literacy around them.

Jen:  [32:48]

Yeah. I think that’s a really profound understanding to get to, isn’t it? I. I visited one Reggio based preschool where they had a sign up sheet for the swing. There was only one swing and if a child wanted to use it and somebody was already on it, they could put their mark on the board, and obviously it didn’t have to be actual letters, but they would put their mark on the board and, and an adult we’ll keep an eye out for when the swing was available and look for the next mark. And, and so the child could understand, oh, making my mark helps me to get something done that I want to do.

Suzanne:     [33:17]

Yes. Children really, really wanted to make sure the parents didn’t forget something that we’re going to do something like go to Skansen. Parents can absolutely not forget we need a packed lunch with us on Thursday, so I would help the children write down messages to the parents so they wouldn’t forget because this was meaningful for them. It was also they the youngest children, because we have children as young as one and two in preschools in Sweden. That is…learning their own letters, learning that own names, and then suddenly finding those letters at their parents’ names begin with and suddenly all of these one and two year olds, they know every single name in that group and recognizing the word and also the names of all of the children’s parents, both parents and the grandparents and knowing which letter in the alphabet belonged to all of those parents. So children will do it if it’s meaningful and interesting, but just this idea of learning to read and write by rote. Then it’s not meaningful.

Jen:    [34:27]

Yeah. For the sake of reading or writing.

Suzanne: [34:29]

Yeah, I mean I as a British person who now lives in Sweden, it was kind of terrifying to think that my children would not start school until they were seven, so reading and writing’s not formally taught until the age of seven here, when they start first grade, which was kind of against what I’ve been brought up when you go to school at the age of four and five, but what I saw was my daughter started and they were reading and sounding out C-A-T in the August and by the time they got to the following June, one year in school, they were reading Harry Potter in both English and Swedish.

Jen:    [35:08]

Really?

Suzanne:  [35:08]

Yeah, because they were ready and it’s about waiting. There’s other children who you need to wait longer and you need to resist and say if you make my child read now they’re going to hate reading, but if you wait until it’s meaningful, then they’re going to actually be able to do it. And it is about waiting. It’s about not hot housing those poor children when they’re four and five. So that they can remember my children when they came back to the we came and did an excursion or weeks holiday in England for awhile, for a week, it was, and they spent a whole week in English, school at the age of 11.

Jen:   [35:49]

What kind of holiday is that?!

Suzanne:   [35:51]

You know, it’s what happens when your mother’s a teacher. They thought it was really exciting. The whole idea of wearing a school uniform and, and going to a school. We spent a week off and we spent a week at school and I observed schools and I observed the same school in the early years at the same time. But yeah, the girls were together with other 11 year olds who had started school at the age of five and my daughter started learning to read and write at the age of seven. And yet there were exactly at the same standard of reading and writing. There was no difference in their abilities except my girls could do it in two languages and not one. So doesn’t have a huge effect except for between the ages of five and eight to maybe. And then it all evens out, just close to doing it earlier, it doesn’t mean it’s better, it just means you’ve done it earlier and often you killed off a lot of learning joy that some children should have been busy playing just waiting until they were older and then it would have happened more naturally and they would have been a lifelong reader rather than a lifelong heater of reading.

Jen: [37:02]

Yeah, I, there’s a lot of research out on this right now and I want to let my listeners know that I’ll put a report in the references for this episode that specifically addresses the exact topic that Suzanne has been talking about, which is the idea that if you push reading too early it can have very detrimental effects on long term learning. And if you just wait, it does even out in the end there is, there is a scientific literature now that backs this claim up.

Suzanne:    [37:27]

And I’ve seen it with my own children.

Jen:   [37:29]

For sure. So I’ll be sure to include that in the references. So I wonder if you can help us understand, are there particular kinds of children that do well in a Reggio based school and are there any that might thrive better in a different environment?

Suzanne:   [37:43]

I think if the Reggio preschool is being run according to the real Reggio approach, then all children’s should technically thrive in this approach because you are meeting each child as they are, encouraging children to interact with each other in small groups and the large groups. The child is never just an individual. It’s how a child works within a group too which I think we all need that. So technically Reggio should be suitable for all children. The problem is are all Reggio preschools doing it in this way?

Jen:     [38:27]

And so I guess the logical conclusion there is that possibly not. And because there is no accreditation system for Reggio based preschools for the reasons we’ve already discussed, it can perhaps be a bit different difficult for parents to tell whether their school is doing it well or not.

Suzanne:   [38:45]

The best way is to go in and ask the teachers at each preschool what their attitudes towards ensuring each child is learning appropriately.

Jen:   [38:57]

What are some good questions to ask because I imagine if you asked the teacher what is your attitude towards learning that you might get a strange look back, so what are one or two questions that parents going to have to try and get to the heart of that do you think?

Suzanne:   [39:09]

I think they only need to ask questions about how what, how do they see in an inclusive environment and I think is not just about children with disabilities or maybe autism or other kinds of learning difficulties. It’s also about how to make an inclusive environment for all children, but all different learning approaches because if they were talking about and approaches focusing on 100 ways, hundred languages, 100 ways of learning, how are they incorporating that? Because if there is these hundred ways of learning, then there should be enough room for each child to learn in their own way.

Jen: [39:54]

Yeah, and the phrase hundred languages of children is a very, very common one; it’s the title of a book actually that is very widely read here in the U.S., and so I think it would be a good sign if, if the teachers and the administrators knew what the hundred languages of children were and could help to articulate what some of the ones are that they support in the school. Is that right?

Suzanne:   [40:17]

Absolutely. And I think if you ask them about the hundred languages and how they incorporate that into their daily routines, then I think you will find out very quickly whether the preschool is suitable for your child.

Jen:  [40:30]

Yep. Thanks for that. That’s really helpful. So I’m thinking about the transition from preschool into school and as far as I know, the only Reggio based school itself is the one that’s attached to the Loris Malaguzzi Center in Reggio Emilia. So I’m curious about how children transitioned from this environment in a preschool where they really get to think for themselves into a system, at least here in the U.S. where knowledge is held by the teacher and poured into the children’s minds. How does that work?

Suzanne:    [41:01]

I think we have to hope that the foundation has been given by a Reggio approach is broad enough to support the ongoing learning. There was…and I’ve forgotten his name now. There was a Nobel winner in, I think it was 2009 or something and he was brought up in Italy. He had an American mother and an Italian father and the father abandoned them, and the mother was arrested during the end of the Second World War, for her involvement in the resistance and so basically from the age of three, he wandered the streets and he was a street child from the age of three to the age of nine. And he was then found his mother, found him again at the age of nine. Then we went to America and the rest of his education happened and he got Nobel prize and he was asked how could you possibly get a Nobel prize when so many years of schooling were missed?

Suzanne:  [41:59]

And he said, well, my first three years was with my mother and she gave me the best foundation of learning that I could ever have. And I think is about this. If we give children the best foundation to explore and to discover all these voices, all these hundred languages, then they have that as their resources as like that extra pocket in life that when they get the chance to put their hand in their pocket and pull out these resources that they can do school maybe not giving them the chance but they will be there and once they do get the time. So I don’t think it’s wasted. I think maybe it’s a little bit frustrating for them in the beginning not to be able to continue to express themselves, but I think it will give them an upper hand in life that’s coming on because we don’t know what the future’s going to hold anyway. We need to give them the possibility to use all hundred languages because we never know which of these hundred languages is going to be the most useful, possibly 80 of them.

Jen:    [43:08]

Yeah. And that’s a really powerful thing to understand that even even though they’re learning in school is very different from the learning in a Reggio based environment that it can still be useful. And I think my personal philosophy is leaning towards homeschooling and why even get yourself into the situation where you’re in that very behaviorist based learning environment and the teacher is pouring the knowledge and, and why not just continue with something that allows for much more self expression.

Suzanne:     [43:37]

I would do that here, but it’s illegal in Sweden.

Jen:   [43:42]

Oh it is? Mmm. Yeah. I Germany is the only other place I know that it’s illegal. I’m sure there are one or two others, but we’re lucky in the US there are varying degrees of requirements at the state level. Some are more stringent than others, but it’s legal in all 50 states. So yeah, we are lucky in that regard. So. Okay. So as we wrap up here, I’m wondering if you can tell us maybe some of your favorite resources to direct parents towards who might be interested in learning more about whether Reggio Emilia could be a good fit for their family because we mentioned the hundred languages of children book, but it’s a little bit dense for the first time a readers on the Reggio approach. So I maybe wouldn’t recognize, recommend that as kind of a starter text,

Suzanne:    [44:19]

I think there’s a lot of web pages and blogs and things like that can be very interesting to read. But then there’s just going directly to Reggio Children; their actual page can tell you a little bit more about it. The NAEYC will tell you about the Reggio Emilia approach and there’s the North American Reggio Alliance. There’s were plenty of information on there from an American point of view because I read quite a lot of Swedish books and it was um, two Swedish women who went to read your million the beginning and started off the whole thing on it getting bigger in the world with the first study tour and exhibition. Not The wonder of learning; the first one that they had. It’s gone from my head. But there’s an awful lot. I mean they, the whole, I think going and googling and finding what is your own appropriate way of finding… Because most of my resources are in Swedish rather than English and there books and the other media kinds of approaching the Reggio Emilia approach, but definitely the North American Reggio Alliance website, parents should check that to see what they expect the teachers to be doing and what they expect and how they support preschools in America, I think it would be the most relevant.

Jen: [45:56]

All right. Well thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us today. I know it’s late in Sweden and getting close to dinner time, so I really appreciate your taking the time to talk with us.

Suzanne: [46:04]

Thank you.

Jen:  [46:05]

And listeners can find all the references for today’s episode on YourParentingMojo.com/Reggio Thanks so much for listening. Talk again soon.

Transcript

Jen:  [00:05]

Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is called Is a Montessori Preschool Right for my child? I sort of skipped the whole preschool touring and decision making thing. It turned out we had a nanny at the time and I had planned to actually to work with her friend the somewhat long term, but she decided to work with a family with a younger child. So we found ourselves rather abruptly in need of care and I’d been doing a lot of research on the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education at the time. And we were actually lucky enough to find a daycare that had space for her on short notice. And so we just kind of went with that. But I know a lot of parents are able to plan ahead and spend a bit more time choosing between the different options that might be available to them. And so to help with that process, I wanted to do a little mini series of episodes where we learn about some of the options that might be available in your community and today we’re going to learn about Dr Maria Montessori’s approach to early childhood education and what it’s like to have a child in a Montessori Preschool with Mary Ellen Cordis. Mary Ellen is the incoming President of the Board of Directors of the American Montessori Society and has over 40 years of experience as the head of a Montessori school in the San Francisco Bay Area, and as an advocacy champion of Montessori. Mary Ellen’s school was the first accredited Montessori school in the state. Welcome Mary Ellen.

Mary Ellen:  [01:43]

Thank you very much. It’s wonderful to be here.

Jen:    [01:45]

Thank you. So I wonder if you could first start off and tell us a little bit about how you learned about Montessori and what about it called to you and how you went through that process of becoming a leader in the Montessori movement.

Mary Ellen:   [01:56]

If I’d only had you in my life, I may not have had to do all the research that I did, but this is exactly how I got involved is I had a three year old and I was looking around for what type of program I might enroll him in. Although I had come from the Midwest and preschool wasn’t that popular. People went to kindergarten and then they went to elementary school and that was pretty much how it was. So when a neighbor came around and said to me, I’m going to send Kathy, my son’s best friend, to the Montessori school. I said, what’s a Montessori school? And that began this journey. So the school had just opened. There were six children. My son was now going to be one of them and I fell in love. I found what really I thought was exactly what children needed. I was working with abused and neglected children at the time, and so I walked into a place where children were honored and respected and treated well and it just made my heart sing, so that was really my beginning.

Jen:  [03:02]

Wow, that’s awesome. And so you’ve been at this for awhile now and I understand that there’s probably not one single Montessori experience, but I wonder for those of us who haven’t been to a Montessori school, can you kind of walk us through in your mind what it’s like to be in a Montessori classroom? What does the room look like? What are the children doing and how do they move through their day?

Mary Ellen:    [03:24]

Sure, absolutely. Because it’s what drew me when I saw them in action. So first let me tell you that there are different levels in Montessori education. So what I’m going to choose to walk you through is a three to six classroom and that’s ages three years to six years, which is typical because there’s multiple ages in Montessori classrooms. So when you first enter a classroom, I think what you’re struck by first is the beauty that has been very intentionally created in the classroom.

Mary Ellen:  [03:56]

The furniture is child-sized. There’s often plants or flowers on the table. The classroom is not cluttered on the walls with a lot of pictures of things. It’s usually tastefully done pictures, if they’re hung it all, are hung low enough for the children. It’s definitely designed for the children. There’s low shelves, often made of wood that surround the whole classroom and materials, that’s the usual, the working apparatus in the classroom are on those low shelves so that the children have free access to them. So what you would see in the classroom is children moving about the classroom freely, taking something off a shelf, taking it to a rug. The reason that you see rugs in the classroom is it just sort of defines a space for a child. There’s nothing magical about it, but because there’s usually 24 children or so in a classroom of mixed ages, it just helps define a space.

Mary Ellen: [04:53]

So they’ll take the material that they’re going to work onto a rug. They may work alone, they may invite a friend, you may look across the room and see a teacher sitting with five or six children doing a presentation. You probably would see a table with two children or three children sitting at it, having a snack and conversing amongst themselves. It feels very peaceful and when I hear people comment on what they see, when they see a classroom for the first time, they’re struck by the calm, and yet there’s a real energy because the children are working at their own pace. They’re taking things off the shelves as they want to work on them, and so it feels peaceful, yet you can feel the energy and the spirit of the children.

Jen:     [05:38]

Wow, that sounds really awesome. Is there a kind of a set structure of the day that they do certain things for certain amounts of time?

Mary Ellen:   [05:47]

So that’s an interesting question. So what you would often see is upon entry to a classroom, let’s assume that the class goes from nine to 12. That’s a three hour classroom. That’s very popular. You see it all over in many schools as well as full day classrooms, but say it’s a nine to 12. You’ll see the children arrive and there’ll be greeted at the door by the teacher. There’s usually two teachers in a classroom, but they would be greeted probably they would shake hands. They would say hello, just have a few words and the children would go put their things away and they usually would go right to finding something to do. Then after the gathering of the group has occurred, they would bring the children together often for a group setting so that they… It’s sort of what you think about circle time, that more traditional word that you think because community is vital to the whole process in a Montessori classroom, they build a community of children with these two adults in the classroom that’s spend often three years together because a child coming in at three would often stay with those same teachers and as they matriculate, if you will, into an older level. That would be the natural progression, but they often have the same teacher. So you’d see maybe group time, then they would go off again to do some individual work where a teacher may have a presentation for a particular number of children, not necessarily all the same age, but they might, they might be choosing all the three year old and they might be mixing it up because the goal is to work at your own level and so the day then would usually end at noon, usually transition time for young children is done in group setting. So you might have them together again at the end of the day and then the parents would come to pick them up. So there isn’t 20 minutes for math and 10 minutes for language. It very much is a flow.

Jen:    [07:39]

Okay. And are they typically half day programs? Or do they do full day programs as well?

Mary Ellen:    [07:44]

They’re both I think in the current culture where so many of our families are, both parents are working and they really need a full day of the majority of programs you see now definitely are full day.

Jen:    [07:56]

OK. Alright. So let’s talk a bit about certification and accreditation is, it’s not fully clear to me how this works. I think there’s a certification for Montessori teachers, but I guess probably not all teachers are certified and I think there’s an accreditation system for schools, but there are different organizations that do that accreditation. Right? Can you help us make sense of all of that and how parents judge the quality of a school that calls itself Montessori.

Mary Ellen:  [08:20]

Oh, now we have three questions. So yes, there’s many accrediting bodies for schools, the American Montessori Society… And please know that my underpinning is all the AMS, the American Montessori Society because that’s the thing organization to which I’m affiliated primarily so we do accreditations of schools and so we are able to send a team in and look over self studies, review the school and then you often can become an AMS accredited school. The school that was at when I was in northern California also had accreditation through the Western Association of Schools and Colleges are better known as WASC, just like many high schools, colleges, public schools. There’s also the California Association of Independent Schools; that’s another accreditation. The school I was at had all three of those and that’s pretty much that runs the gamut of what you would do. Now if you’re outside of the state, of course there would be other organizations that would accredit.

Mary Ellen:    [09:24]

So that’s the accreditation piece for schools. What you get when you look at an accredited school for the American Montessori Society is, you know, the standard has been met with teacher training that has, that’s checked that box, that’s a done deal. The materials are in the classroom, the school has gone through all of the standards that are set and so that does give parents comfort. Now there’s other things we’ll look at in a minute, but let me address the teacher piece of it. So there’s a credential that is given to teachers when they go through training, but it isn’t as simple as just getting trained to be a Montessori teacher. You get trained at a level. So if it’s an infant-toddler teacher or an early childhood teacher, an elementary teacher all the way through high school. So you have to be in the classroom at the level to which you were accredited where you got your credential.

Mary Ellen:   [10:23]

Teacher training programs are offered either in universities or colleges or sometimes in standalone programs. So both can can happen. The teacher training programs themselves are also accredited. The AMS teacher training programs are accredited through MACT, which is the Montessori Accreditation Council for teacher training, teacher education. So that’s another piece. Now, if I haven’t lost you totally by this time, one of your other questions that was the most insightful of all I think is the one. How do you tell when you’re in a really good school, and I say to parents who sometimes waffle in their confidence in their ability to choose the right school at that moment, they may have Ph.Ds on hanging on the wall, but they sometimes at that point worried that they aren’t going to make the right choice and I think you have to have the confidence that it sort of the gut reaction.

Mary Ellen: [11:23]

You walk into an environment, you see respectful interactions between teachers and children. You see them paying attention to the children in a way that feels very respectful and of course you do want the school to meet certain standards. You want to see the children engaged in what they’re doing, not staring off into space. Although everybody does deserve the opportunity to stare off into space for a few minutes. We can’t be busy all the time. So that’s sort of I say trust your gut, you know, walk into school and see how it feels to you and then do some of the research. Definitely sit in a classroom. Definitely experience what it’s like to watch the children because it’s different. It’s very free-form. Different than when we were children. I will say me not huge and because there were a much more rigid look to schools where you went in, you didn’t speak to the teacher unless you were spoken to. You often sat in desks that fased one way in a Montessori classroom, the furniture is all over the room. Children are sitting on the floor, they’re sitting on a chair, they’re sitting in a library looking at books quietly and there’s so….there’s all kinds. So that’s, that’s really a little bit of a bird’s eye view at 30,000 feet of accreditation and credentialing and how to trust yourself.

Jen:    [12:41]

Great. Thank you for that. So let’s, let’s go into some of the nitty gritty of what really makes Montessori Montessori and I know that one of the first things that I think of when I think of Montessori is the concept of work and the, the idea that there’s a correct way to use materials in it often in a progressive sequence. Can you tell us about that?

Mary Ellen:  [13:00]

Sure. This is one of those very challenging aspects of Montessori because it gets misunderstood a lot.

Mary Ellen:   [13:08]

So the, the materials are arranged in a sequence order in the classroom. Now that isn’t obvious to the children, it doesn’t have a number one for the first material you’re supposed to use because there are many areas in the classroom. There’s practical life, there’s sensorial, there’s cultural subjects, there’s math, there’s language, there’s all of those. The materials within those groupings are on the shelves left to right and top to bottom. You probably know because our culture reads left to right and top to bottom. That’s one of the very small indications of the deep thought that was put into this. The children begin to know, oh gosh, I moved through these materials sequentially. Now the reason you move through them sequentially is they build upon one another in terms of challenge. So the first thing, maybe a very simple thing, the next thing on the shelf would take what was on the first piece of material and then build on that to make it more complicated. There’s also something called isolation of difficulty. So children can self correct the materials themselves. They do not need to say to a teacher, did I get this right? Is this okay? They know because everything fit together perfectly. Oh, this was right. And that does build quite a bit of competency and confidence because you can self-correct. Now it may sound rigid, but it isn’t meant to be that it’s meant to help with the flow.

Jen:    [14:36]

Mhmm. Alright, so, so you said a couple things there that I wanted to tease out. I guess firstly, the, the idea that you move through this progression does the who decides that the child is ready for the next one? Do they know, Oh, I did number yesterday, even if it’s not called number one, but I did this one yesterday and I think I’m going to try this one today. Or how does that process work?

Mary Ellen:    [14:57]

Yeah. Um, this is where the teachers, magical match really comes into play where the teacher is observing the children all the time. That’s one of the hallmarks of Montessori teachers is they can observe children. They can begin to see, oh, I know what should be next for this child, or introduce something in a way that draws a particular child. For instance, if a child loves dinosaurs, they might actually create something in the classroom that could be counting dinosaurs or doing something with dinosaurs because a particular child really loves that. So there’s a lot of personalization that goes on within the classroom. The children do know; they model on the other children. Three year olds coming in can see four and five year olds already using the materials and they really model on those older children as their examples and their teachers because they can see how that all works.

Mary Ellen:  [15:55]

That’s the beauty of only having a few children come into the classroom every year and having the returning four- and five-year-olds be part of it, that whole process. So they do learn that they also will move into different areas. There’s something called a sensitive period in Montessori and that’s where children don’t develop every skill all at the same time. You probably see with our own children at home, they’re very interested in one thing at a time until they sort of master it. I think it’s true of adults too, you know, if you are, let’s say, something as, as simple as paint by number, you know, an adult who wants to learn that skill. They work at it and work at it and work at it, and then they feel like, I think I’ve mastered this and they move on to something else. It’s very much like that with children. They master something and then they move on. So you’ll see them sometimes spend a great deal of time in a reading or a math area or a cultural area, and then all of a sudden you’ll think, wow, look at that. They spent three months thinking about a couple of things and now they’re moving on. So that’s, it’s a very even and easy flow.

Jen:    [17:01]

Okay. Alright. The other thing I would just want to get back to what you said was the idea of there being a right way to do things and that the equipment itself kind of guides you towards a logical conclusion. I’m wondering what space there is in that environment for a kind of artistic ability and creativity and how does that fit in with the, the concept of there being a right way?

Mary Ellen:    [17:26]

Right. So the right way. That’s where we get tagged with a that name because there is a way to go from point A to point Z and wind up having it be a linear progression. But yes, there is room for children to experiment. The one thing that is really emphasized is respect for the materials. So instance, there’s a material called red rods and they’re a meter long and there’s 10 of them because everything in a Montessori classroom is based on based on, based ten if somebody wanted to use that as a sword, that would not be an appropriate use of the material because it’s not designed for that. Now there may be another opportunity to do something like that in another area, but materials are not used in that way. So there is a lot of opportunity. In fact, there’s an artistic area usually in the classroom where the media changes often.

Mary Ellen:   [18:24]

So they might do clay, they might do painting, they might do pencils and they might do a whole different range of things throughout the year. So definitely I think Montessori is misunderstood, is sometimes artistic versus creative. Children can be creative and it doesn’t necessarily need artistic and vice versa. So, um, we definitely are wanting creativity because we’re not asking children to do what we say at all times. In fact, questioning is a wonderful thing. Questioning the teachers, questioning one another question and maybe their parents. I always say, if you want a child who totally complies with everything you say, don’t send them to a Montessori school because we’re trying to create minds that say, I wonder why, or I wonder if that’s how it has to be.

Jen:   [19:10]

Okay, so let’s try and tease that out a little bit. So when I’m trying to understand is how you get from this idea of there being a way to use materials to a child who questions everything. How does that happen?

Mary Ellen:   [19:25]

Really, the teachers are masters at this. They will observe a child, they’ll see how they’re using something. They might introduce a different material that would be more appropriate or be able to take them to that new place that they want to go. They might go to a different area of the classroom, but there is within each of the materials, as I said, it’s a defined area where they definitely can accomplish…get to the end of this task by following, you know, so many steps. Does every child sit down and do one to 10? No, absolutely not. And in fact, you wouldn’t have a child go through every material in the classroom either because they make leaps and you have to be able to respect that. They would make a leap of knowledge that you’re like, wow, look at that. They moved on. So it doesn’t, it, it can sound rigid, but if you see it in action, you’ll go, oh, I see. It just really doesn’t feel that way at all.

Jen:  [20:22]

Okay, good to know. So I’m wondering about the social aspect of learning in a Montessori environment. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Mary Ellen:   [20:30]

This is one of the most important arenas in a Montessori classroom. Because the community is key to the success of the program. The children learn to be with one another; they learn to be with people who are different than they are. They learn to be with people who learn differently than they do. I’m from different cultures, from different economic backgrounds, the whole gamut. And it’s really important as we hope children become stewards of the earth and stewards of the community, that they learn to be together and they learn to talk to one another in a way that resembles a peaceful conversation. So you’ll see in a classroom, an area, in fact, the Peace Table where if children are having a conflict, the teacher will help them come aside and children at three and four and five don’t often have the language to resolve challenges. But with guidance and support, they can realize, oh, I misunderstood. That child looked to me to be aggressive and really what they were trying to do is get my attention and they did it in a way that didn’t really help me understand that’s what they wanted. So there’s ways to work this out and peace and care and respect for one another is key. In fact, when you take Montessori children out on field trips, often you’ll see people will say to you, what did you do to these kids?

Mary Ellen:   [21:57]

Where did you, what did you do? Did you give them Benadryl or something before you got here? Because they’re engaged with one another and they take care of one another and it’s really remarkable. It’s, I think, the only path towards a peaceful universe and that is something that we do strive for.

Jen:    [22:14]

Yeah. And when you say we strive for it, it almost seems like it’s a fairly central goal of the theory, right?

Mary Ellen:   [22:21]

It is, it is. Montessori began, began her work in war time and peace was something that she was very much seeking.

Jen:   [22:29]

Yeah. Yeah. Someone who has a child involved in a Montessori school sent me some resources from a parent’s evening at their school talking about, how to talk with your kids about issues related to peace and how to establish that kind of environment in the home and the school.

Mary Ellen:  [22:46]

And climate and the earth and water and all of those things that matter so much to so many people within the state of California at least. And I hope other places we’ll hope…cross our fingers.

Jen:  [22:59]

Yeah. Okay. So, uh, you, you mentioned the idea that there are children at different ages within the same classroom, and that’s actually one thing I wish I saw in my child’s classroom is a greater variety of ages. Can you talk to us a bit about what that means for children as they’re learning?

Mary Ellen:  [23:16]

Sure. For me, I don’t like to spend all my time with people, everybody my age. I like a mix because you and I would have a conversation that would be different than if we were both the same age and had the same experiences. It’s a richer environment, but my favorite analogy with this is think of yourself as the parent of quintuplets where all five children, have all the same needs virtually at the same time.

Jen:    [23:42]

I could not imagine myself in that scenario.

Mary Ellen: [23:46]

It’s much more challenging than if you have five children who might be three, five, nine, 10, you have, then you have the opportunity for older children to help the younger children to be role models. The younger children learn from the older children and it’s very inspirational for the younger children to be able to have that as well as the older children becoming role models and teachers to the younger children in a classroom, you will often see a five year old give a lesson to a younger child, so that’s definitely part of it. It also makes for a much easier classroom to manage. That wasn’t the goal, but you see people at different levels of needs and we all develop differently. It really helps if the children aren’t all needing the same thing at the same time and you can ask a child, would you be able to help that child go and find where the snack is today and they can. It’s really a confidence builder.

Jen:    [24:39]

Yeah, and it’s not just the young child that benefits is it. It’s not like we’re using the older children to babysit the younger child. From what I’ve read, it’s really powerful for the older child as well.

Mary Ellen:  [24:48]

It is, and if you take that beyond the early childhood classroom too an elementary classroom or a middle school classroom where you will see sixth year or seventh grade students, eighth grade students that might be doing advanced Algebra and other children who are doing geometry. I mean I’ve seen it all over the map where children are doing even AP classes and another child at the very same level is doing something different, which is okay. We all, you know, you’ll have a brilliant reader and maybe somebody who struggles a little more in math so it all becomes okay to grow at your own pace.

Jen: [25:29]

Alright, so let’s talk about something you mentioned briefly earlier, how it’s okay to stare off into space for just a minute. I think Dr. Montessori didn’t believe in the importance of play, which I know some other theorists on child development think is quite important and some theorists that I even call it for children should be bored some of the time and that seems to have been anathema to Dr. Montessori, why didn’t she think play is useful?

Mary Ellen: [25:55]

Well, really it wasn’t played. First. We have to get to the language in play. She what she was trying to emphasize is that children’s growing and their development is very important and when you call it play often we can decide that that becomes unimportant. Whereas sometimes in cultures, ours, I guess work is important and it’s something to be valued, so what the children are doing are growing and interacting and communicating and it really is play, but it’s looked at as a much more serious thing as if…it is their work play is their work and it’s what they need to do to progress. Now there are times in a classroom where a child does need to sit and and look at other children. Observation is okay. They can watch other children do things. They can also just kind of sit and think, which I think is important to provide for children. Now if a child sits immobilized for six months, I think we would kind of decide that isn’t appropriate. Something’s going on, but I’ve seen teachers have the capacity to allow for a lot of that kind of thing to happen in the classroom. So work is really the word that we use to value what they’re doing, but in fact it certainly is part of play; it certainly is just another word.

Jen:  [27:22]

Okay. And is there also a time for kind of unstructured, free play where perhaps the children go outside and run around with no agenda?

Mary Ellen:  [27:31]

Absolutely. In fact, it’s unfortunate that nowadays when children don’t have the option to go outside and play as much as they used to, I see parents put children into and please, no, none of this is negative, but there’s a violin lesson at four and there’s a soccer match and then there’s a taekwondo and you know, it’s like four or five, six, seven. Pretty soon you’re like, wow, this child is pretty programmed. So the opportunity to go out and really have a good time is important in every child’s day at home. And it happens at school too. There’s always time devoted to outside time. I don’t know if you’ve seen the book, Last Child in the Woods?

Jen: [28:07]

I have, yes.

Mary Ellen:  [28:10]

Okay. So that is, that’s really an important component to the whole development process.

Jen:   [28:14]

Okay, good. Alright, so tell us a bit about reading and writing, please. When does that happen in a Montessori environment, because it seems as though that’s a bit of a different process than in other environments.

Mary Ellen:  [28:24]

Right. So from the moment a child enters an early childhood classroom, there is a language area in the classroom and of course the first thing that children learn with languages, speaking to their parents, they have rich vocabulary that they hear at home, sometimes multiple languages that are spoken at home and that enriches the child’s ability to grasp language as they move forward in a more structured, if you will. Environment in the classroom there are opportunities for the children to learn letter sounds; there’s something called sandpaper letters and it is exactly that. Where a child can trace a letter, they can feel the letter, they can see the letter, they can hear the letter. So it’s also always, many modalities to get that through. They work on, usually soft vowel words first. There’s also vinyl cut out letters because a child’s ability to write contrary to where you see parents handing one year olds pencils, they don’t have the muscular ability to hold a pencil and to do that, but they are able to construct words with these movable alphabet or these vinyl cut out letters where you can begin to say, oh, look – C-A-T- I can spell that, and that’s cat.

Mary Ellen:   [29:40]

And uh, often there is a picture of a cat. There’s some, there’s always ways to capture that. So sometimes people say the children learn to write in a Montessori classroom before they learn to read. And the reason, the reason for that is what I just mentioned is they begin to build stories with these movable alphabets. But it is really interesting how the flow goes. Lots of opportunity for reading and writing. And it’s, it’s very, it’s similar to what you’d see in other places with consonant vowel, consonant rebuild from small. And then you develop the ability to do phonograms and to do all of more complex language.

Jen:  [30:21]

What age does that normally start?

Mary Ellen:  [30:23]

It’s available in early childhood classrooms. So at three, if a child you might be, sometimes you see children come in at three who are reading, now often they’re not sounding out the words. Some children have an amazing mental ability to see a word and remember it and they really sight read. That’s not as common. Most children learn sounds of letters and then begin to do that. So often you buy four or five, you will see them develop quite a bit of competency by six. Most children, unless there’s an issue, which is often when it arises, you begin to say, is there something going on that we need to get a little help with beyond what we’re doing here? Or being begin to identify some challenge the child might have.

Jen:   [31:08]

It seems pretty early reading. Most children reading by six.

Mary Ellen:  [31:12]

Yes. The majority of children have the simple reading skills by six.

Jen:   [31:18]

Okay.

Mary Ellen:   [31:19]

Very different than somewhere they wouldn’t even be introduced maybe till like seven.

Jen: [31:23]

Yeah. So I wonder if you can help me understand why it is introduced at an earlier age.

Mary Ellen:  [31:28]

It’s introduced definitely from the point of view of the child’s interest in it. You wouldn’t be force feeding somebody to learn language at three and four, but if they have an interest in doing that, then they certainly are able to do it. Sometimes they will just use the sandpaper letters. They’re tracing, not always getting exactly where it’s leading, but that muscle memory does come into play and they begin to put together, of course they see five year olds who are doing it then, you know, three year old love to see what five year olds are doing and, and six year olds, so, and they’re being read to. There’s a lot of that going on. So it’s definitely of the child’s interests for language and they often are drawn to it.

Jen:   [32:14]

Great. Can you tell us a bit about discipline in a Montessori school?

Mary Ellen:  [32:17]

Sure. Or discipline in any environment. That’s such an interesting thing. Discipline is at the core of, of a classroom because it’s respectful. Interactions are very important. Safety is one of the things that parents look to have the most. We like to bring our children a place where we trust the adults and we trust the children. And, and that often goes to discipline because if your child comes home with a black eye or you know, bleeding fat lip everyday, that doesn’t feel very good. So it’s really important to have the underlying respect for each other. And that really is the discipline. And once again, people will say to me, how do you get them to do this? But if you instill in them that we really do respect one another, we care about one another. If a child gets hurt at the hands of another, the child who did the injury is invited to come along and maybe get a little bit of ice for that child’s injury. They’re often asked to sit with them, maybe put their hand on their arm just to show the caring. But it’s all done with the children’s willingness. Nobody says, now go apologize to that child because it has to come from a true sense of, I want to be forgiven for this. Sometimes a child will be, will sit aside and watch how the community functions to get a sense of what it looks like to be in a harmonious, well developed community. And that’s really where discipline comes in because it’s all about self discipline.

Jen:  [33:54]

Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay. So I’m wondering if there are certain kinds of children that do really well in a Montessori school and whether there are other kinds of children that would just be a better fit in a different environment.

Mary Ellen:   [34:09]

Sure. This is a question that I think comes to parents a lot. They might enroll their child in an early childhood Montessori classroom and then when the child gets to six or seven or eight, they think I need something that feels more like what I’m used to. So the trust factor kicks in. In fact, I say, you know, the book Where the Wild Tings Are. When a child turns six, they become where the wild things are. They all of a sudden are developing their own sense of self. And it isn’t always what we saw when we looked at them as they’re charming little three year old selves. They have much more of a will of their own. So in a classroom, generally, as I said, don’t look for a child that you want to always do what exactly you’re telling them to do, turn the page, now it’s time to move on because the children that we’re developing are really self-motivated, self-regulated self-starters, which is why you see these companies that had at the start like Google and Amazon for two that were self-starting people.

Mary Ellen: [35:14]

That’s who we are working to develop. So in and when you see them move on to I’m more self directed or some less independent environments where the teacher wants to tell them what to do. It sometimes is a little bit of a challenge. I remember when my son went to high school, that was his first experience in public school and he went, I dropped him off at the parking lot and I said, why don’t you go in and get your schedule? And he came back to me and he said, they won’t give me my schedule. It’s apparently your schedule.

Mary Ellen:   [35:49]

So he was involved in a program that they respected him and gave him what he needed. So really children who are drawn to be self-directed, independent learners now, there’s also a lot of information available now about learning challenged children. That’s one of the things that we hear about a lot and the occurrence of more autism, more Asbergers, definitely more some learning challenged situations and we remember in the past, so sometimes they can be accommodated because the classroom was really designed by a physician who knew what children need to do. If you look at a map, for instance, of the Montessori classroom, the capital of the state is a knob that goes onto that place, so a child putting a state back in a map, holding onto the place where the capital is… That took a lot of thought and those kinds of things are in a Montessori classroom constantly, but generally very seldom do I see a child who isn’t able to be very successful in a classroom.

Mary Ellen:   [36:59]

When children have come into programs that I’ve been involved with at middle school. That’s more of a challenge because they’re coming into a program where children have been independent and self-directed for a long time and what you tend to see is very interesting. You tend to see a child who’s not quite sure a if teacher is their advocate or they’re an adversary, so they have to learn. We’re a team. We’re all working together for you. So I’d say to children at that age, this is up to you whether it works or not, it’s on you. If you want to come in and be part of this, we welcome you. If you need to be told that you have to do this at every moment, then you’re probably not a good fit at that upper level. But in the early childhood, most children do fine.

Jen:    [37:48]

Yeah, and I’m just. I’m just trying to tease this out for my listeners is there any chance a parent might say, well, my kid is just so high strong or you know, she’s really attached and she has a hard time leaving me in the morning. Or are there any sort of circumstances like that where a different kind of program might be a better fit as far as you know?

Mary Ellen:  [38:09]

I’ve seen it all. So, um, I do see there’s children that come to school and feel sad when they’re leaving their parents and it’s usually not about coming to school. It’s about usually leaving their parents because children love their parents. They feel that connection and feel very comforted by that. So it’s a process. Sometimes you’ll even invite a parent to spend a little bit of time if, if separation is a challenge. Have the parents spends a little time in the classroom, so slow rebate can withdraw and remove themselves until the confidence is there for the children. We’ve seen spirited children, we’ve seen not spirited children, we’ve seen it all. I think at the early levels definitely it’s, it’s all, it’s all fine. They really do succeed.

Jen: [38:56]

Okay. Alright. And then as we start to wrap up here, I’m just wondering about the parents’ role in a Montessori education. I did some reading that made it seem as though it’s very much centered on the relationship between the teacher and the child and the rhythm that the, the children move through their day. I know in some schools the parents are invited in and you know, talk about topics there that might interest the children are engaged in some kind of cooking activity or something. And it didn’t seem as though that kind of activity had a place in a Montessori environment. Can you talk to us a bit about what is a parent’s role in a Montessori education system?

Mary Ellen: [39:34]

Yes, of course. The parent is the first teacher for any child and it’s very important that there’s a three prong approach to any child entering a school. There has to be the child, the teacher and the parent because trust is built between all of those people. The parent has to have confidence that they’re going to be okay leaving their child with the teacher. Also, we invite parents to bring their expertise. You know, because I was in an area where there was a national laboratory, we had people, um, who were into astronomy or who did chemistry or did not so much the arts, I have to be honest because that wasn’t my environment, but if they did, it was wonderful or cultural things. If they could bring in what was important to them in there culture because once again, that develops the peaceful understanding of how people are different and yet at our roots we’re really all the same. We have the same needs, so it really is very important that the parent feel connected and can come and share what they know, come to conferences, come and observe, come be part of it, express their concerns. It can seem sometimes that the school can be standoffish or feel like the parent isn’t welcome, but that’s an important component. The parent is key. Sometimes even admission directors will make a connection with the parent and see if the match is there for the parent and the school. Nevermind the child. Because it’s so important.

Jen:  [41:02]

Awesome. Well thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us. Mary Ellen. I have learned a lot and I think that this is really gonna help my listeners who are trying to figure out what is the right option for their child. So thanks again for sharing your time with us.

Mary Ellen: [41:15]

Thank you so much. It was my pleasure.

Jen:  [41:17]

So I do want to direct listeners to the references for this episode there at YourParentingMojo.com/Montessori and I’ll list the books that I read in preparation for this episode and I’ll also direct to you too, Mary Ellen’s organization’s website, which is AMSHQ.org. That’s the American Montessori Society’s website and there’s lots of research resources on there on how to find schools and more about what schools are like as well. So thanks again for taking the time to talk with us and we will be back again soon with another episode.

Hello and welcome to episode 000 of Your Parenting Mojo – the podcast that aims to bring you rigorously researched information and distill it into a toolkit you can actually use to support your child’s development, and make parenting easier on yourself. I’m your host, Jen Lumanlan, and I originally recorded this episode in August of 2016 when the show launched. But by the time October 2018 rolled around I’d been recording for two years and a lot of the information in this episode was out of date so I decided to re-record, keeping the parts that are still relevant and adjusting the parts that had changed.
So in this episode, called Parenting Philosophy, I’ll share a bit about my background and what I believe about parenting, because I find that most people who put information out there make you do the work of trying to see how your beliefs and theirs fit together, and instead I want you to understand where I’m coming from and how this fits with your approach to parenting.
I never thought I’d be a parent, but it happened on purpose and not by accident. My daughter is named Carys, which means “one who loves and is loved.” She was born in June 2014 (in case I forget to mention how old she is in future episodes).
Before Carys was born I spent a lot of time on my birth plan, figuring I had 18 years to work out how to be a parent. When I finally got my act together I discovered the wealth of information about babies that’s available when your main concerns are related to feeding and sleeping, and our first year progressed fairly uneventfully. Carys slept through the night early, was not at all resistant to trying new foods, and after she got over some initial gassiness, was generally fairly easy to be around.
A lot of the advice on parenting an infant expires around age 12 months when the child is really mobile and interested in investigating the world and I was left feeling “now what?” So I started to do a lot of reading, and in the process of doing that reading and telling other people about it (but only when they asked me!) I realized I was having fun. So I decided to start a podcast so I could share what I’m learning with other people in a format that you can do while multitasking – commuting, working out, walking the dog, whatever – because goodness knows, you don’t need something *else* to read about how to be a parent.
Two principles underlie this podcast.
First – respectful parenting, also known as Resources for Infant Educarers or RIE. I actually held off on doing an episode on RIE for a long time because I didn’t want my listeners to think I was some kind of crazy hippy before I had many episodes out, but I did finally record two episodes on this – the first one is an overview of what RIE is, and since it actually wasn’t designed based on scientific research, the second episode takes a deep dive into what aspects of it are supported by the research base.
RIE’s advice officially runs though age 2, when most adults find it easier to treat kids with respect anyway – maybe partly because they can answer back. But even though I felt like RIE provided solid ground underneath me, what is above me? What is the universe of issues I need to know about and make decisions about?
This brings me to the second principle behind this podcast: scientific research wherever it is available. There are a lot of ways of knowing the world – for example, those related to our culture and our beliefs and even the things we know about ourselves and about the people we’re close to. But science offers us a LOT of information on parenting and child development, if we can read it critically and understand its limitations as well as its strengths. So in the show we call out small sample sizes and bias caused by sampling middle class White children and extrapolating the results as if they were applicable to children everywhere, and papers where what’s said in the conclusions section doesn’t match what’s said in the results section, which happens more often than you might think.
I also try to layer the importance of culture onto these two principles, which we typically do using anthropological studies on people outside of Western cultures in an attempt to understand whether the problems we face with our children are related to the way we raise our children, or whether they’re inherent to how children develop. As an example, encouraging artistic ability is a very affluent western cultural thing to do. It’s closely linked with individuality, which in some cultures is seen as less desirable than promoting group cohesion.
Increasingly we borrow from other cultures – baby wearing and elimination communication are two things that come to mind – without always fully considering the implications of how to incorporate these ideas into our lives. Traditional baby wearers come from cultures where lots of people wear the baby, not just the mother, and the baby has an attachment to many people, not one primary person. EC is practiced in countries where diapers are not available or affordable and where a five-year-old child may be the infant’s main caregiver. I’m not critical of any approach to parenting or anyone who uses a particular approach (actually the only thing I’m critical of is selling things that are “necessary” for a child’s wellbeing or development), but I do think we should consider the implications of our choices. Some mothers who try baby-wearing in places where there aren’t 10 other family members around to take turns can become exhausted. EC doesn’t always but can lead to chronic holding of poop. Why do we people from “western, educated, industrialized, rich democracies” (WEIRD) countries look to science and to other cultures for our parenting advice? I think it is in large part because we are so physically, mentally, and emotionally separated from our own parents and extended families. Nobody is telling us how to parent, so we have to figure it out for ourselves – and relying on the scientific approach seems like a good way to do it. Also importantly, I think many people of my generation don’t 100% agree with the strategies their parents used to raise them – probably much as our parents disagreed with our grandparents. So science can help us to understand our child’s development so we can support that process in a way that aligns with our values.
One thing I see is that there are SO MANY parenting books available, all coming from different positions, some supported extensively by scientific research and others formed by nothing more than someone’s opinions; how do I as a parent figure out how to integrate them? They often have tactics that might work, but I always need to keep in mind how the tactics relate to the strategy. And there’s so much research being done in the academic arena that never makes it to parents because it just sits in a journal unless it can be ‘spun’ by the media into something clickbait-worthy. To put a framework around all this research I decided to go back to school and get a Masters in Psychology, focusing on child development, which was still underway when I started the show but which I’ve now finished. The lessons I learned during my degree help me to make sure that I’m not missing anything major as I look to understand – and help you understand – the deep dive into the research that we do in each episode.
I did an episode on why we shouldn’t ban war play relatively early on, and the conclusion of that episode was that there are good developmental reasons that children engage in war play so I suggested, along with the expert whom I interviewed, that we allow children to engage in this type of play. Some time later I realized that it may not be safe for all children to engage in war play, and I was embarrassed to say that I didn’t consider that issue at the time. Since then I’ve made a much more conscious effort to consider issues related to race in my episodes, which can take the form of acknowledging when research results simply might not be applicable to how people from certain cultures raise their children, to noting when even the research questions that are asked don’t consider important cultural issues. I’m also planning a series of episodes on racial issues that intersect with parenting, starting with what it means to be a White parent in America and how we can navigate issues of race with our children. I’m the first to admit that I’m not an expert in this regard, so I hope that people of color will forgive any missteps that I might make as I attempt to cast a light on something that I think most parents of the dominant culture – myself included – haven’t given as much thought to as we probably should have done.
The show focuses on the period starting just beyond the infant’s first year, because most parents are concerned with eating and sleeping and pooping in that year and there’s a *lot* of advice already available on those topics. Information related to toddlers usually focuses on discipline and getting the child to do what you want – and I think there’s a much larger scope of conversation to be had than this. By now I have over 70 episodes on topics like building early literacy skills, encouraging artistic ability, how to tell whether your child is lying to you, how to raise girls with a healthy body image and how to raise emotionally healthy boys, and how you can do what’s called “scaffolding” your child’s learning.
My episodes are rigorously researched, with citations included on the show notes page of each individual episode on my website at Your Parenting Mojo.com. They usually take me between 10 and 40 hours to research – the interview ones tend to be on the shorter side because we’re looking at a defined body of work, while the longest one so far has been about two weeks of work sorting out the mess of claims and research related to self-regulation.
I won’t ever tell you about some amazing study just published that says we’ve been parenting wrong all these years without linking it to the rest of the literature and examining it from all sides. I won’t ever send you an email with the subject line “developmental delays” (like I received from one parenting website that will remain unnamed) designed to scare you into clicking through to see if your child has signs of developmental delays. Instead I’ll tell you what the literature says and will suggest some tools coming out of that research that you might consider using with your own children.
Since I finished the Master’s in Psychology I also picked up another Master’s in Education because I wanted to learn more about that as well. My thesis for the psychology degree was on how children learn in the absence of a curriculum, and coming out of that I became convinced that homeschooling would be the right approach to learning for Carys. Enough people asked me the same questions about homeschooling that I actually created a course to help parents decide whether homeschooling could be right for their family. But not everyone can or wants to homeschool, and in recognition of that my thesis for the Master’s in Education was on what parents can do to support their children’s learning in school by working within the existing school systems and outside of them as well.
I offer consults to parents who are struggling with a specific issue related to parenting or child development and, as with all of my work, apply scientific research to this as well. When you sign up for a consult you actually receive a couple of hours of my thinking and reading on the topic, and then we talk for 50 minutes which usually generates a substantial number of ideas and insights to address the problem. Then afterward you receive a recording of our session (if you decided it would be helpful to you), and a summary sheet describing the major action items we discussed so you can quickly refer back to it when you need a refresher but don’t want to watch the whole recording again. You can find information about all of these extra products on the Resources tab on my website – there’s a page linking to more information on the courses, and another on consults.
I’ve also launched a membership group for parents who want to see something between an adjustment and a transformational shift in their approach to parenting in a group called Finding Your Parenting Mojo. In the first three months we dramatically reduce the incidence of tantrums at your house, then we take a step back and look at our goals for parenting so we can make sure our daily interactions with our children support those goals (it’s surprising how often there’s a disconnect there!) and work on getting on the same page with our co-parent. After that we pick topics to work on based on the group’s interests. The group opens to new members about every 4-6 months. There’s a link on the Resources tab to the Membership group as well; if you go to that page and the sign-up link is active, then do feel free to join us. If there’s no sign-up link then the group is currently closed to new members, but do feel free to download the free guide called How to stop using rewards to gain your child’s compliance, which will give you a taste of how the group operates.
If you do nothing else after you finish listening to the show, do subscribe on my website (rather than through iTunes or another platform). If you’re subscribed through another platform then I actually never know who you are and I can’t reach you with the blog posts that cut across the issues we discuss on the podcast, the calls for questions, and occasional calls for co-interviewers that I send out on the weeks when I don’t publish a new podcast episode. So to subscribe, just head over to yourparentingmojo.com and enter your name and email address and hit the ‘subscribe’ button – you’ll also get a free gift for doing it, which is currently a cheat sheet on seven parenting myths that are still perpetuated in the popular press all the time, and which the scientific research quite clearly indicates that we can leave behind and stop worrying about!
Finally, do come on over and join the Your Parenting Mojo group on Facebook, where we talk about issues related to parenting and child development as they intersect our real lives.
All of my courses and groups are judgement-free zones. I’m not here to judge you or lecture you, or make you feel inadequate as a parent because you haven’t been doing XYZ critical activities with your kids for the last year. Instead, I want to research and tell you about information you can use to help your children thrive as human beings, and hopefully to make your life as a parent a bit more confident – and maybe even a bit easier – at the same time. If you disagree with something I’ve said, let me know! If you know of an angle on a certain topic that I should have considered and didn’t, please tell me and if there’s research on it, I’ll cover it in a future episode. You can leave a comment on the episode’s page or drop me an email at jen@yourparentingmojo.com. This is a journey, so I hope we can enjoy the ride together.

References

(On the topic of Reggio Emilia): Edwards, C., Gandini, L., & Forman, G. (Eds). (2012). The hundred languages of children. Santa Barbara: Praeger

(On the topic of Resources for Infant Educarers/RIE): Gerber, M. & Johnson, A. (1988). Your self-confident baby. New York: Wiley