Search Results for “highly sensitive child” – Your Parenting Mojo

12 Books That Shaped How I Parent

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 20:00:00 +0000

Key Takeaways

All parenting book authors promote a vision for society – some prioritize teaching kids to obey authority, while respectful parenting approaches emphasize collaboration (though they often still position the parent’s goals as the ‘right’ ones).
The top parenting books I recommend don’t focus on getting compliance. Instead, they help you understand your child’s needs and build relationships where everyone matters.
Great parenting books show how to move beyond rewards and punishments using positive discipline and nonviolent communication strategies.
Respectful approaches to parenting start in infancy (asking babies permission during diaper changes) and continue through teen years (collaborative problem-solving instead of punishment).
Reading respectful parenting books gives you knowledge, but real change happens when you practice these ideas with coaching support and community.

Most parenting books don’t tell you about the world they’re trying to create.

But every single one of them has a vision for what society should look like. And that vision shows up in the strategies they teach you to use with your kids.

When an author gives you methods to get immediate compliance with your demands, they’re really talking about power. They’re saying that people should comply with the demands of those who have more power. That your child’s job is to do what you tell them to do, when you tell them to do it.

If our vision for an ideal world is where people who have power manipulate everyone else, then our values are aligned with our actions when we use tools from these books.

But if we hope to create a world where people work together to meet everyone’s needs, then these obedience-based books won’t get us where we want to go. We can’t raise a child using compliance-based tools and expect them not to use power over others when they leave our homes.

If we want to raise children – and adults who can understand their own feelings and needs, and also care about other people’s feelings and needs, we have to model how to do that. If we want them to work on dismantling racial and gender power structures, we have to dismantle our power structures at home. If we want them to come to us when they’re teens even when they’re in really dire situations (rather than hiding their mistakes from us) we have to show them when they’re little that we will hear their perspective and try to meet both of our needs. In my opinion, the best parenting books help us to put these ideas into practice.

Too often, parenting book authors don’t make these ideas clear. They simply present ‘parenting tools,’ and because parenting is already hard, it’s assumed by authors and parents alike that anything that gets kids to do what parents say – to ‘listen’ – is a Good Thing.

If we don’t take the extra step of figuring out what the author’s ideas are about how the world should work, and what we want our relationship with our child to be like as they get older, we might end up using tools that aren’t aligned with our values.

For example, I recently worked with a parent who was struggling to get their toddler to stay in bed in the evenings – bedtime routine that used to take 20 minutes now took two hours of screaming and exasperation. Another parent had recommended a Time Out each time the child left their room. The parent said: “That doesn’t feel right to me.” They wanted to have a great relationship with their kid as she got older. Using Time Outs says: “I don’t care why you’re coming out of your room; all that matters is that you stay in your room – because I say so.”

Instead, we worked to understand why the toddler was coming out of her room – she had recently weaned, and was missing that connection with Mom. She also wasn’t tired, and was afraid she was missing out. The parent started:

A daily Special Time practice (10 minutes of predictable daily play time focused on the child’s interests);
Beginning bedtime routine later, when the child seemed tired, instead of early and before the child was tired;
Turning off all the lights in the house when the child went to bed (and turning them back on again 20 minutes later once she was soundly asleep).

Within a week, bedtime routine was manageable again – no Time Outs or power-over moves required.

So if you pick up a parenting book, I’d encourage you to try to understand: what kinds of tools is this author recommending? What do those tools say about what they believe about our relationship with kids, and what the world should be like? And are those ideas aligned with what kind of relationship I want to have with my kids, and what I believe the world should be like?

This list of top parenting books helped me learn how to parent in a way that creates that world. These books are in the approximate order in which I encountered them. Not all of them are about parenting, but each of them taught me something that I see as important to my parenting today.

These aren’t your typical parenting book recommendations. You won’t find books here that focus on getting kids to behave or comply. Instead, these books focus on understanding children’s needs and building relationships where everyone matters.

Before we dive in, I want to mention that there while there are many great parenting books available, there are some I specifically don’t recommend. The “Your X-Year-Old Child” series is one example. These books treat children’s behavior as fixed by their age, rather than as responses to their environment and attempts to meet their needs. If you’ve been relying on those books, this podcast episode explains why I suggest putting them aside.

Now, here are the books that have shaped my approach to parenting:

Click here to download the 12 Top Parenting Books That Focus on Connection Over Compliance

Parenting Book Recommendation #1: Your Self-Confident Baby: How to Encourage Your Child’s Natural Abilities – From the Very Start – Magda Gerber.

A friend told me about this book when my daughter Carys was about three months old. I was standing in the shower one day, thinking: “How am I going to discipline her, and also not be the disliked parent?” (That I was thinking about discipline at three months old tells you something about the parenting I grew up with.)

The friend came over to visit us with their toddler, Jack. Their child ran down our hallway toward our bedroom, and the parent said: “Jack, please don’t go in the bedroom – it’s private. You can go in the baby’s room or come back here to the living room.” Jack stood on the threshold of our bedroom, peeked in, and then ran back to the living room.

My jaw hit the floor, and I said: “How did you DO that??!”

This was the book the parent recommended. Before reading it, I couldn’t have imagined that it was even possible to treat an infant respectfully (or disrespectfully!). I started slowing down my diaper changes, talking through what I was going to do (even today, Carys will say to the cats at the animal shelter where we volunteer: “I’m going to pick you up now”!), and asking permission to do things to her body as soon as she was old enough to express a preference.

I later produced two related podcast episodes: one introducing Gerber’s Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE), and the other looking at whether RIE is backed up by academic research (as it wasn’t developed using research as a foundation).

It’s said that kids ‘age out’ of RIE at age two – likely because they become more able to express their ideas about what they think should happen. And then other tools become more useful…

Parenting Book Recommendation #2: Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason – Alfie Kohn.

This book changed my world, and helped me to see how parenting a child aged 2+ could be about something other than compliance. Many of Kohn’s ideas – and his use of academic research to underpin his ideas – are still with me today:

Punishments and rewards are really tightly related (it’s not that one is ‘bad’ and the other is ‘good’; if punishments don’t fit with our values then rewards don’t either)
Kids (and all people) hide things from those who judge them;
How we were parented shows up in our reactions to our kids’ behavior today
When kids aren’t complying with our requests, one path forward is to reconsider whether the request is reasonable (and I’ve subsequently added: and consider whether there are other ways to meet our needs)
“Attribute to children [I add: and all people!] the best possible motive consistent with the facts.” E.g. if your child is having a meltdown, it’s more likely that they’re feeling overwhelmed than that they’re trying to manipulate you.
Children can and should be treated with the same degree of respect with which we want to be treated
Children can and should be allowed to make real choices about things that affect their bodies and lives
Trying to see things from our child’s perspective almost always generates useful new information

Parenting Book Recommendation #3: The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation – Carolyn Edwards, Lella Gandini, and George Forman (Eds.)

I visited Reggio Emilia, Italy, when Carys was about 18 months old (and I carried her along Cinque Terra at a rate of one village per day afterward – most people hike the whole trail in a day!).

I was the only parent among a sea of visiting preschool teachers, learning how to treat young children’s learning with the utmost respect. We saw how to scaffold that learning sensitively so the child ‘owned’ as much of the process as possible, and how to let their ideas guide the learning instead of explicitly trying to ‘teach’ them.

This book, comprised of a series of essays by different authors, gathers the major principles of the Reggio-based approach to working with children.

Parenting Book Recommendation #4: Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children – Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, PhD and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, PhD.

Dr. Golinkoff was a very early guest on the podcast way back in episode 10, just after this book was released. It introduces the ‘6 Cs’ of children’s learning:

Collaboration
Communication
Content
Critical Thinking
Creative Innovation
Confidence

Schools focus largely on Content, so if we want our children to develop the other skills then that’s most likely to happen at home. The book shows how this does happen at home, through simple activities like doing laundry together. This gave me a lot of confidence to know that I could support Carys’ learning at home.

Even a decade and the arrival of AI later, I still find the ideas in the book to be compelling and relevant.

Parenting Book Recommendation #5: Parenting From Your Heart: Sharing the Gifts of Compassion, Connection, and Choice – Inbal Kashtan.

This book gives a grounding in using principles of NonViolent Communication (which I think should be re-branded, because many people – myself included – have such a knee-jerk reaction to being told we communicate violently!) with kids. Unconditional Parenting gives the theory of what our relationship with our kids would be like; NVC helps us to actually know what to do in difficult situations.

I know a parent who carries copies of this book to give away, because it’s so incredibly short and accessible. Readers who actually want to implement the ideas may find it short on detail, but it’s a beautiful exploration of the application of NVC to relationships with children.

Parenting Book Recommendation #6: Dancing with Life: Buddhist Insights for Finding Meaning and Joy in the Face of Suffering – Phillip Moffitt.

My first thorough introduction to Buddhist principles, that helped me through a tough patch in my own life and also helps me support Carys with her struggles today.

When we see that only a small part of your suffering comes from the original pain, and most of your suffering comes from our reliving of that pain, we find that being in the present is a powerful path to experiencing less pain.

Parenting Book Recommendation #7: Beyond Behaviors: Using Brain Science and Compassion to Understand and Solve Children’s Behavioral Challenges – Dr. Mona Delahooke.

Although this is based in Polyvagal Theory, the evidence for which is highly contested, I find Dr. Delahooke’s explanations for difficult behaviors to be compelling and useful.

Her overall approach is that behavior is like an iceberg: we see the parts on top (that annoy us), but it’s much harder to see the overwhelm, anxiety, and disconnection that can create that behavior.

When we only focus on changing the behavior, the child might learn to mask what’s underneath it so things seem better in the short term. But the underlying causes don’t go away, and can pop out in other circumstances…or much further down the road in our relationship, when they realize we’ve been trying to control them – and they aren’t willing to let that happen anymore.

Listener Jamie and I interviewed Dr. Delahooke about the book here.

Dr. Delahooke’s iceberg metaphor shows that the behavior we see on top is driven by needs underneath. Wondering what need is driving your child’s most challenging behavior? Take the Child’s Needs Quiz to find out and get specific strategies that you can use today.

Parenting Book Recommendation #8: Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment – Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas.

This book describes how we can use our unique talents to create work we love to do.

Most of the people profiled in the book – including Todd Rose himself – struggled through school before launching their own self-guided quest for fulfillment. What if we could work with kids to support them in learning themselves so well that the next step in their future path(s) is obvious, and not one they have to find by themselves after doing a lot of unlearning lessons from school?

We don’t have to know every step in our life’s journey. These days, we expect to pivot along the way – probably multiple times.

But I think that if we shift the way we support kids from: “Get into a good college, graduate, and the rest will sort itself out,” to: “Learn what lights you up, find ways to do that, and then learn what else lights you up,” I think that both individuals and the world will be much better off.

I interviewed Todd Rose here.

Parenting Book Recommendation #9: How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids: A Practical Guide to Becoming a Calmer, Happier Parent – Carla Naumburg, PhD.

This book is short, approachable, and very good at translating academic concepts into readable scenarios.

It gives a thorough grounding in why you lose your shit with your kids – and how to work on doing it less.

There are some people who can read a book and immediately implement the changes they want to make – if you’re like this, I highly recommend this book.

For those who need more support to make the changes real in your life, my Taming Your Triggers workshop is here for you.

Parenting Book Recommendation #10: The ACT Workbook for Kids: Fun Activities to Help You Deal with Worry, Sadness, and Anger Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy – Tamar D. Black, PhD.

I never want to use tools that try to change kids’ behavior first. I always want to begin by trying to understand: what need is the child trying to meet through their behavior? And are there ways we can help you meet that need, that also meet my needs?

But there are times when the child recognizes that their actions aren’t helping them to meet their needs, and that they want to choose a different action but don’t yet know how. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy-based tools can help them do that. There’s an introduction to ACT here.

Parenting Book Recommendation #11: Validation: How the Skill Set That Revolutionized Psychology Will Transform Your Relationships, Increase Your Influence, and Change Your Life – Caroline Fleck, PhD.

You’ll hear in my interview with Dr. Fleck that I think the first half of the book, which teaches you how to validate other people’s feelings, is outstanding. I had no idea that validation and empathy were skills that could be learned, and that it’s possible to see which tools will be most helpful in which circumstances. Neurodivergent folks who do well with specific instructions (and who might have been told they ‘lack empathy’) will find it especially helpful.

I hate mutilating books but in this case I suggest ripping out the second half of the book, in which Dr. Fleck shows you how to use your new-found validation skills to manipulate other people into doing what you want them to do.

Parenting Book Recommendation #12: Spinning Threads of Radical Aliveness: Transcending the Legacy of Separation in our Individual Lives – Miki Kashtan

Part memoir, part manifesto, this book brilliantly connects Miki’s experiences growing up with broader societal observations about power. She describes her father’s explicit project to break her spirit, her mother making feeble attempts to intervene at times but ultimately Father always got his way. Sometimes he used overt methods (locking her out of the house at age six until she apologized for misbehavior) and sometimes covert (allowing her to make the choice about going to live on a kibbutz, and refusing to speak to her for as long as that was her choice).

Even when our own punishment methods are less extreme, we often hold the power in our relationship with our kids. That’s why we train children to ask: “Can I…?” to obtain approval. Immediately after reading that, and knowing that I didn’t want to be in a power-over relationship with my daughter Carys, I encouraged her to say instead: “I’d like to…/I’m going to…” rather than “Can I…?”. If I have concerns, we discuss them. Otherwise, she goes ahead.

Through Miki’s own experiences we see how the coercive methods our parents used with us (and their parents used with them) have created pain in us – which has rippled out into our culture. It gives some starting points to work on addressing this, which I aimed to continue when I wrote Parenting Beyond Power.

Bonus: Parenting Beyond Power: How to Use Connection and Collaboration to Transform Your Family–and the World

Because I wanted to draw attention to this idea of the connection between parenting and what we want the world to be like, I wrote a book that does this explicitly. It also gives practical strategies grounded in real parents’ experience to help you be in a relationship with your kids where everyone’s needs are seen and met. It ties together all the ideas in the books I’ve mentioned here, and parents who have consumed a lot of parenting books have told me they consider it among the best they’ve read.

Final Thoughts

These are the top parenting books I’ve found for parents who want to move beyond traditional discipline methods. From Magda Gerber’s respectful approach to infants to Alfie Kohn’s groundbreaking work on unconditional parenting, each of these books offers evidence-based strategies for understanding and connecting with your child.

Not all of them are specifically about parenting. Some are about Buddhist ideas, how kids learn, or therapy tools. But each one changed how I think about being in relationship with children.

If you’re looking for great parenting books that focus on meeting everyone’s needs rather than gaining compliance, this list is a good place to start.

Links to books are affiliate links, which means I receive a small commission that does not affect the price you pay.

From Reading to Real Life

These top parenting books teach you the theory. But theory doesn’t help when your child won’t put their shoes on and you’re already late.

That’s when you need to understand: What need is my child trying to meet right now?

Instead of fighting about shoes, you’re solving the actual problem. Instead of losing your temper, you’re responding in ways that work for both of you.

Take my free Identifying Your Child’s Needs Quiz to discover what need your child is trying to meet in your most challenging situation. You’ll receive specific strategies to help you respond in ways that work for both of you.

Click the banner to take the quiz.

Frequently Asked Questions About Best Parenting Books

1. What makes a respectful parenting book different from traditional parenting books?

Respectful parenting books focus on understanding your child’s feelings and needs and meeting their needs AND your needs, rather than on just getting compliance. Traditional books often teach methods to make kids obey quickly, which reinforces the idea that people with more power should be obeyed. The best parenting books help you build relationships where everyone’s needs matter. They teach collaboration instead of control, and help children learn to care about other people’s feelings while understanding their own.

2. What is the best parenting book for beginners?

Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn is excellent for parents starting to explore respectful approaches because it lays the theoretical groundwork for making a change. My own book, Parenting Beyond Power, offers a practical guide to living the values Kohn lays out in Unconditional Parenting, in the moments when your kid is refusing to do what you ask.

If you have an infant, start with Your Self-Confident Baby by Magda Gerber to learn respectful parenting from the very beginning.

3. Are there evidence-based parenting books that don’t use behaviorism?

Yes. Beyond Behaviors by Dr. Mona Delahooke uses Polyvagal Theory, which attempts to explain what’s happening in kids’ brains when their behavior is difficult. She offers: “When we see a behavior that is problematic or confusing, the first question we should ask isn’t “How do we get rid of it?” but rather “What is this telling us about the child?”

The book helps us to understand that children’s difficult behavior (especially at school) can indicate that they don’t feel safe. When we change their environment to help them meet their need for safety, they’re much more able to learn than if we try to simply shape their behavior using rewards or consequences.

4. What parenting books help with managing triggers and staying calm?

How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids by Carla Naumburg gives practical strategies for understanding why you get triggered and how to respond differently to your kids. It’s a great resource for people who can read a book and implement the ideas in it.

Dancing with Life by Phillip Moffitt offers Buddhist principles. These helped me to see that worrying about things that have happened or that might happen doesn’t really help – and just adds to my suffering. When instead we focus simply on what is here in this moment, we find we can cope with it more easily.

For deeper help with your triggered feelings and personalized support, the Taming Your Triggers workshop builds on these concepts with coaching and community.

5. Should I read parenting books if my child is neurodivergent?

Many books on this list work well for neurodivergent children because they focus on understanding needs rather than controlling behavior. Validation by Caroline Fleck offers specific instructions that neurodivergent parents often find especially helpful in their relationships with both co-parents and children.

Beyond Behaviors addresses how to understand challenging behaviors through a compassionate lens. However, focus on the first half of Validation – the second half teaches manipulation tactics that conflict with respectful parenting.

6. What’s the connection between parenting books and creating a better world?

Every parenting book teaches a vision of what society should look like, even when it’s not explicit. Books that teach compliance prepare children to obey authority without question. Books focused on collaboration and meeting everyone’s needs prepare children to build a world where relationships matter more than obedience. Parenting Beyond Power makes this connection explicit, showing how the way we parent shapes the kind of world our children will create.

7. Can parenting books actually change how I parent day-to-day?

Reading gives you the foundation, but real change happens when you practice these ideas in tough moments. Some parents can read a book and make changes on their own. Others benefit from support through coaching, practice opportunities, and community with parents working on similar challenges. The Parenting Membership offers modules, monthly coaching, and community support.

8. What parenting books focus on nonviolent communication with kids?

Parenting From Your Heart by Inbal Kashtan applies Nonviolent Communication principles to relationships with children. It’s short and accessible, though some readers want more detailed implementation guidance.

Parenting Beyond Power also incorporates needs-based approaches with practical strategies from real parents’ experiences. Both books help you understand your child’s feelings and needs while finding ways to meet everyone’s needs through collaboration.

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231: How to support baby’s development after a Wonder Week

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 20:00:00 +0000

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

In Part 2 of our Wonder Weeks series, we’re exploring how to support your baby’s development once a Wonder Week has passed. Is there a predictable schedule to follow, or is your baby’s crying tied to something unique?

In this episode, we’ll dive into:
✨ What research says about crying and developmental stages.
✨ The cultural influences behind parenting decisions and baby care.
✨ Strategies to support your baby through challenging times, Wonder Week or not.
✨ Ways to handle stress and ensure both you and your baby thrive.

Whether your baby follows the Wonder Weeks timeline or forges their own path, this episode equips you with the insights and tools you need to nurture their growth.

Book mentioned in this episode:

Mentioned Episodes

Jump to Highlights

00:00 Introduction to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast

01:49 Exploring the Developmental Leaps in Wonder Weeks

02:50 Critical Analysis of Leap Descriptions

12:04 Evaluating Leap Seven and Leap Eight

14:23 Parental Concerns and Cultural Influences

19:31 The Role of Social Support in Parenting

19:47 Addressing Fussy Periods and Parental Stress

44:34 The Evolution and Function of Regression Periods

51:10 Critique of Wonder Weeks’ Parenting Advice

57:36 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

References

Alink, L. R. A., Mesman, J., van Zeijl, J., Stolk, M. N., Juffer, F., Koot, H. M., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2006). The early aggression curve: Development of physical aggression in 10- to 50- month old children. Child Development, 77(4), 954-966.

Brix, N., Ernst, A., Lauridsen, L. L. B., Parner, E., Støvring, H., Olsen, J., … & Ramlau‐Hansen, C. H. (2019). Timing of puberty in boys and girls: A population‐based study. Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology, 33(1), 70-78.

Feldman, D. H., & Benjamin, A. C. (2004). Going backward to go forward: The critical role of regressive movement in cognitive development. Journal of Cognition and Development, 5(1), 97-102.

Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1985). From people, to plans, to objects: Changes in the meaning of early words and their relation to cognitive development. Journal of Pragmatics, 9(4), 495-512.

Green, B. L., Furrer, C., & McAllister, C. (2007). How do relationships support parenting? Effects of attachment style and social support on parenting behavior in an at-risk population. American Journal of Community Psychology, 40, 96-108.

Hall, E. S., Folger, A. T., Kelly, E. A., & Kamath-Rayne, B. D. (2013). Evaluation of gestational age estimate method on the calculation of preterm birth rates. Maternal and Child Health Journal, 18, 755-762.

Horwich, R. H. (1974). Regressive periods in primate behavioral development with reference to other mammals. Primates, 15, 141-149.

Jusczyk, P. W., & Krumhansl, C. L. (1993). Pitch and rhythmic patterns affecting infants’ sensitivity to musical phrase structure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 19(3), 627.

Krumhansl, C. L., & Jusczyk, P. W. (1990). Infants’ perception of phrase structure in music. Psychological Science, 1(1), 70-73.

Luger, C. (2018, January 8). Chelsey Luger: The cradleboard is making a comeback among tribal families. Yes! Magazine. Retrieved from https://indianz.com/News/2018/01/08/chelsey-luger-the-cradleboard-is-making.asp.

Mizuno, T., et al. (1970). Maturation patterns of EEG basic waves of healthy infants under twelve-months of age. The Tohoku Journal of Experimental Medicine, 102(1), 91-98.

Nez Perce Historical Park (n.d.). Cradleboard. Author. Retrieved from https://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/nepe/exb/dailylife/GenderRoles/cradleboards/NEPE57_Cradle-Board.html.

Plooij, F. X. (2020). The phylogeny, ontogeny, causation and function of regression periods explained by reorganizations of the hierarchy of perceptual control systems. In The Interdisciplinary Handbook of Perceptual Control Theory (pp. 199-225). Academic Press.

Sadurní, M., Pérez Burriel, M., & Plooij, F. X. (2010). The temporal relation between regression and transition periods in early infancy. The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 13(1), 112-126.

Sadurní, M., & Rostan, C. (2003). Reflections on regression periods in the development of Catalan infants. In Regression Periods in Human Infancy (pp. 7-22). Psychology Press.

Seehagen, S., et al. (2015). Timely sleep facilitates declarative memory consolidation in infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(5), 1625-1629.

Tremblay, R. E. (2004). Decade of behavior distinguished lecture: Development of physical aggression during infancy. Infant Mental Health Journal, 25(5), 399-407.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control (n.d.). CDC’s Developmental Milestones. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/actearly/milestones/index.html.

Wapner, J. (2020, April 15). Are sleep regressions real? The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/parenting/baby/sleep-regression.html.

Click here to read the full transcript

Emma 00:00

Emma. Hi, I’m Emma, and I’m listening from the UK. We all want our children to lead fulfilled lives, but we’re surrounded by conflicting information and click bait headlines that leave us wondering what to do as parents. The Your Parenting Mojo podcast distills scientific research on parenting and child development into tools parents can actually use every day in their real lives with their real children. If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a free infographic on the 13 Reasons Your child isn’t listening to you and what to do about each one, just head on over to yourparenting mojo.com/subscribe, and pretty soon you’re going to get tired of hearing my voice. Read this intro, so come and record one yourself at your parenting mojo.com/recordtheintro.

Jen Lumanlan 00:45

Hello and welcome to the second of our two part episode on the Wonder weeks on the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. In part one of this mini series, we looked at the research that underpins the concept of regression periods, which is the idea that babies go through periods where they are more fussy than usual, because they’re getting ready to make a developmental leap. In that episode, we saw that, while we might assume that given the global distribution of the Wonder weeks, book and app, that the information is based on studies of 1000s of babies from many different locations, which all came to similar conclusions, that actually they’re based on one single study and three attempted replications with a total of about 80 children, all of European parents who were specifically selected because they were homogenous, meaning they were white and in two parent families and had secure incomes, and the mother planned to stay home with the baby for two years and had lots of family support, if not all of those conditions were in place, then the whole thing kind of fell apart pretty fast. In this episode, I want to take a closer look at the developmental part of the leaps, rather than the fussiness. And the timing of the fussiness. I look back at the ploys earliest paper describing the leaps to see where they got the idea that leaps exist and what they mean. I wanted to understand whether, even though there might be disagreements about when the fussy periods are, we could still get some useful information out of knowing more about the developmental periods that the ploys say happen in between the fussy periods. So we’re going to look at the evidence for the development that the ploys say happens in each of these periods, and also consider what, if anything, we should do with that information to support our babies and ourselves. The ploys research mostly focuses on the fussy behavior that precedes the leaps, both because it’s much easier to measure than the development itself, as well as because that’s perhaps understandably what parents are worried about. They want to know that what they’re going through is normal and that they aren’t responsible for the difficult behavior they’re seeing, but in the books, they also describe the development that’s apparently happening in between the fussy periods. So let’s see what evidence we can find that supports their descriptions. The first thing that stands out to me in the LEAP section of the Wonder weeks website is how fuzzy the languages. Here’s an example, conveniently drawn from leap one. Quote from week four, your baby enters leap one, the world of sensations. The first signals of your baby’s leap will appear between weeks four to six after the due date. Learn everything about leap one in the Wonder weeks app after this leap, baby senses will undergo a sudden, rapid growth. Your baby will notice that something new and strange is happening and in their world, and they could get upset after taking leap one. Your baby will be open for new experiences, and we will notice that he or she is more sensitive. End quote, uh, what? What does this actually mean? It’s like grasping at fog. There’s no specific terms here that we can research ourselves, no indication that this sudden, rapid growth of baby senses that they’re describing is based in research. How on earth are they measuring that babies are more open for new experiences and are also more sensitive? I went through all of the language describing the leaps and tried to find evidence supporting each of them, I looked for terms that actually meant something and ran them through Google Scholar with variations of search terms related to infant development, and I didn’t find very much. After going through leap two, the ploys say that, quote, your baby stops seeing the world as one big mishmash and starts to discover patterns. End, quote, I couldn’t find any specific information on pattern recognition at this age, the one paper I did find observed that the development of pattern recognition, not just in terms of visual patterns, but also patterns in language and relationships, is ongoing throughout the early years. There’s no mention of a specific leap around week 10, moving on to leap three. Around 11 weeks, you may see signs of the next leap approaching. Leap three. The world of smooth transitions, your baby is acquiring yet another new skill. Smooth transitions are things, whether tones, the brightness of light or moving objects that smoothly change into something else. Smooth transitions are so natural to adults that we barely notice them anymore. For your baby, these are the most complex things they can handle, and are therefore peak experiences. It was hard to find any evidence related to this. The paper I did find was written by two authors who are both psychologists, and one is also an ophthalmologist, who showed that visual functions of symmetry, COVID, linearity, motion, depth, acuity, these are all beginning to develop from birth until they show more adult like signatures at seven to eight months with no specific shift in the 11 to 13 week window. Leap four involves grabbing objects which we can actually find evidence to support. This is a common enough milestone it shows up in developmental charts. Deploys also suggest that infants will start babbling in this period around four months, when developmental charts published by the Centers for Disease Control put this at closer to six months. So the ploys are right when they say in the Wonder weeks book that they mention their skills really are on the earliest possible end of when they might appear. I couldn’t find any evidence at all for leap five on putting together the relationships between all the earlier leaps. Leap six on dividing the world into categories or groups, or LEAP seven on beginning to assemble and connect things rather than only deconstruct them. Leap eight is described in such weird language that I initially couldn’t understand it. It involves the ability to observe and perform various programs. And when I put that together with the idea that the child will learn that an end goal can be achieved in different ways, I finally understood that they’re talking about planning, they also pick up this idea in the LEAP nine description. Welcome to the world of principles. If your toddler has taken the leap, you will notice they are running all kinds of programs more smoothly, more naturally and more clearly. Around 64 weeks, your toddler will be a bit used to their new world and the journey of discovery can begin. Leaf nine is the leap of principles. Your toddler is more adept at handling the world of programs. As a result, they can not only imitate programs better, but also change them and create them by themselves. As a result, your little one will learn to think ahead, to reflect, to consider the consequences of their actions, to make plans and to balance them against each other. When we put these two leaps together, we can finally find solid evidence. Dr Allison gottnick and her colleagues did some work on this topic in the 1980s which is not cited in any of the Wonder weeks books which argues that the words there no and more represent baby’s plans. Specifically, there encodes the success of a plan, no encodes the failure of a plan, and more encodes the repetition of a plan or a request for assistance. These words are also used to encode relationships between objects there encodes the location of objects, more encodes the similarity of objects, meaning this thing I just had and that thing over there, the same and I want more of it. And no is used to negate propositions around 18 months, children apply these words to their current concerns, right around the 64 weeks predicted by leap nine, although rather later than leap eight, where it’s first discussed, the description of LEAP 10 is that you will notice that your toddler is a little more enterprising. They are behaving more maturely. They become very aware of themselves, gain a better understanding of time, begin to really enjoy music, and they treat things and toys differently. They want to do everything by themselves. And I’m thinking, Well, yes, it would be sort of surprising if, all things equal, your child wasn’t behaving more maturely as time went on. A child is going to gain a better understanding of time as time goes on, as it were, from the early days in infancy, when they had no idea where you went, when you disappeared, to being able to predict when something will happen that comes on a daily basis to understanding what just a minute means, which, when we say is almost never just one minute, their understanding of time is continually evolving. I also have a video of my daughter, Karis, at about eight months, sitting on a mat and swaying in time to someone’s guitar playing, clearly enjoying music. I’m not seeing anything unique in treating things and toys differently, which can happen at a variety of ages for a variety of different reasons. Holovitz brings us to how does the Wonder weeks help? Why do so many people follow this stuff I mentioned in the last episode on this topic that I ran a definitely unscientific poll in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group to understand whether parents knew that they had to base the timing of the Wonder weeks on the child’s gestational age when they responded to the survey. Some parents added comments about their experience with the program. Parent Anker said, we use the app, and it helped us tremendously. I have since learned there is much to criticize about the concept, but the perceived knowledge of what was happening for our baby made it easier for us to deal with the increased fussiness and difficult nights, and I really think that’s at the heart of it. It’s about seeing that there might be a reason why your child is being fussy and that you aren’t eat. In other words, you aren’t breaking your baby I think a big part of why we think we need apps is because we aren’t parenting in villages like we used. Do Before parenting was even a verb, and when we would have had so much help with the baby from people who had done it many times before.

Jen Lumanlan 10:08

Parent, Katie loved wonder weeks and said that they’re in parenting groups about reflux, and they’ve noticed that a surprising number of babies with reflux seem to have flares during the regression periods. Katie’s son would projectile vomit twice as often as normal, and then they would realize a new leap was underway, and every time it matched up with a wonder week. But again, we have to ask, what the Wonder week’s adds here? I totally get that we want to know that our baby is normal. I remember reading the your three year old child book when Karis was that age, and being amused and relieved that she fit about half of the descriptions in the book, but not the other half, and thinking, Oh, great, she’s doing what other kids before her have done. Then, of course, I did the deep dive into those ideas that I described in the why we shouldn’t read the your x year old child books anymore episode, because yes, she did fit half the ideas in the book. But as I pointed out in that episode, and as parent Christina pointed out in the Facebook group, these things are kind of like horoscopes, there is enough there that anyone can find something true to them in it, but also in a flex that it somehow fits millions of people. So parent Lauren found it helpful to see their baby was in a wonder week, even though their babies were so colicky that every week was a wonder week in their home. In the book The ploys note that baby lifting their head and torso with their arms while lying face down. Happens for the first time, or more often, or better than before, starting around three weeks, but maybe not until five months. They say, on average, most babies do this after making this leap, meaning leap two, which happens in weeks eight to nine. But given the wide range of ages, there are going to be a significant number of babies that lift their head and torso with their arms while lying face down after leap three and leap four as well. The book says that baby rolling from their back to their side is associated with the second leap, but that some babies won’t do this until they’re seven months old, by which they would have already gone through leap five. So what development is happening related to each leap? Well, apparently nothing that we can specifically pinned down, kind of like a horoscope deploys then liken the leaps to puberty. They say every child goes through puberty around the same age. But do they Well, not really. Firstly, puberty has a lot of different components. For kids with penises, researchers generally measure things like genital development and children the age at which their voice breaks and their first ejaculation for kids with vulvas, researchers measure things like breast development developed development of pubic hair and the age of the first period. A study of over 14 and a half 1000 children in Denmark found that boys genitals develop between the ages of eight and 17. Pubic hair between 10 and 16, and voice break and first ejaculation track very closely together between about ages 11 and 16. For kids with breasts, we’re looking at breast development between the ages of eight and 18. Pubic hair between nine and 18, and the first period between about 10 and 15. So these ranges do vary by continent. Another study found the median age at which children with vulvas develop breast buds range from 9.8 to 10.8 years in Europe, 9.7 to 10.3 years in the Middle East, 8.9 to 11.5 years in Asia, 8.8 to 10.3 years in the US, and 10.1 to 13.2 years in Africa, and yet deploys say that every child goes through puberty around the same age, even though puberty develops differs from the mental development your baby goes through, they are comparable in that all babies go through leaps at the same age, when clearly this is not the case. They go on to say that with a each age linked leap, we include a list of things that a baby could do for the first time at that earliest possible age. The key words here are could do and earliest possible, as we’ve stated before, babies don’t do all these skills at once, and hence, could do the age at which these skills appear for the first time varies greatly, sometimes by many months. To illustrate the large differences in ages when skills appear, we also state for some motor skills the average age and maximum age at which children master the skill. And we do that because we notice that parents want to know but do keep in mind that averages say nothing about your baby. End quote. So if the averages say nothing about our baby. What’s the point in providing the averages? I get that as a parent, you want to know if your child is okay, but it seems to me that it would be more helpful to provide something like the Center for Disease control’s developmental milestones, which are things like 75% or more of children can do a thing by a certain age, these are based in research, and they’re much more helpful for parents in understanding when a child might need more support, rather than knowing the earliest possible age at which a child might be able to do something, even knowing the date by which 75% of children can do a certain thing is way more difficult than you might think. So. I’m thinking back to the episode on the science of rye, where we looked at whether there’s evidence to back up the ideas in books by Magda Gerber, who developed the resources for intimate educators, or rye approach to being with young children. Gerber developed rye after her daughter was sick with a cold. One day she lived in Hungary, and physicians still made house calls then, and a physician named Dr Emmy Pickler came to her house. Gerber thought that Pickler would talk with her, Gerber as the parent, and was stunned when Dr Pickler instead talked respectfully with Gerber’s daughter. Dr Pickler published a study in English comparing the age in weeks that seven researchers had said that certain physical developmental milestones would occur, and the variation between the dates when these researchers said we would see each of the milestones appear, was incredible. One author said that babies should be able to turn from their back to their side at 18 weeks. Another said 28 weeks. One says babies should be able to turn from their back to their front by 18 weeks. Another says 32 weeks, and the rest appear in between. The lowest estimate on starting to walk is 49 weeks. The highest is 70 weeks. Most of the researchers will set a date when the child can sit by themselves, meaning the parent sits the baby up on the floor, and the baby doesn’t topple over. But parents who follow rye often don’t ever put the baby sitting up on the floor. They put the baby on their back, and baby eventually learns to get themselves into a seated position. And of course, that happens way later than parents who don’t use rye would sit their baby up so those babies would completely miss that milestone. But it doesn’t mean that anything is wrong. So why does it matter if we’re looking for a child to roll over in weeks eight to nine, when some babies can’t do this until seven months? Essentially, what we’re doing here is balancing concerns about whether we can help our child’s development if we know they’re about to be able to do something with how much we might worry if they can’t do something until later. That’s why we get the different focuses in the Wonder weeks book from the CDC. Wonder weeks is trying to appeal to a fairly well advantaged audience who wants the absolute best for their child, which probably includes people like you and me, people who could afford to buy black and white mobiles for our newborns because we’ve read the infants can’t perceive color, and the subscription toy services that send you toys supposedly geared to your child’s exact developmental stage, and cribs that function as an extra set of hands whenever you need a break, to shower, to work, to cook or sleep, and promise you’ll get your baby to sleep for an extra One to two hours each night because of its calming womb like motion and sound, a finding which has been published in a peer reviewed journal in a grand total of four paragraphs and definitely with not enough information to help us properly evaluate that claim. Now when two of the three authors on that study about the crib work for happiest baby, the manufacturer of said wellness device and the company also funded the study, and lo and behold, they have quote, unquote, peer reviewed data in support of their product. Claim, wonder weeks knows there are parents out there who want the best for their baby and will buy the Wonder weeks book and hopefully also the app and the baby monitor with its associated app and the baby’s first year diary. These parents want to know they’re proactively doing everything they can to support babies development. The CDC data, on the other hand, is looking to catch children who should have already passed a milestone but haven’t. It’s looking retroactively to see who might be having problems, rather than looking ahead to support children in reaching the milestone. And you might think, well, of course, it’s better to know what’s coming and support them in doing it. I want that. And what I want you to consider is, is it better? Is it better to know that very few babies might be able to roll over after leap two, even though most of them won’t do it for a couple more months, and some perfectly, normally developing babies won’t do it for quite a while? Because, to me, that’s a big reason why parents show up in online groups in week 10 saying wonder week says my baby should be rolling over by now, because now you know that a very small percentage of babies can do it. You worry when yours can’t do it. In my mind, there are enough real things to worry about in parenting without adding more things. Based on these incredibly early estimates of when babies might be able to do a certain skill, and with wonder weeks, you might find yourself not only worrying about what skill they should be able to do and can’t do, but also about anticipating the next stormy period, as the regressions are called in the book and the app, before it even arrives, instead of just being present with your baby and enjoying your baby today.

Jen Lumanlan 19:22

The second questionable assumption behind telling parents that babies might pass milestones very early is that parents think they both can and should do something to get or help the child to pass the milestone and maybe even to pass it early. And that’s a big fail, from my perspective, what we’re really doing when we’re doing this is comparing our child to a theoretical perfect child who passes their milestones on time and preferably early. We’re saying that the child won’t pass this milestone on time or preferably early without you doing things to make that happen. And the book encourages this approach in leave one The book tells us that quote, after eight weeks your baby. Become bored if they always see, hear, smell or taste the same old things. They crave variety. If they seem bored, keep them stimulated, carry them around in your arms or move the position of their baby chair to give them different objects to look at end. Quote, we’re told to quote, help your baby discover their hands and feet. But the only way we’re told to do that is to quote, allow your baby to study their hands as long as they want and as often as they want to. But now I’m worried they get bored by looking at their hands. How do I even know if an eight week old is bored? And if, quote, some babies will need a lot of time to complete their explorations, whereas other babies won’t. How should I support my baby if they’re done looking at their hands, or if they want to look at them endlessly, should I still move their baby chair so they can see other things? While we’re on that topic, the use of a baby chair is one of those things that’s really a cultural decision, but here it’s accepted as if it’s not a decision. There’s no place in the book where we’re encouraged to think about the benefits and drawbacks of putting your child in a baby chair. It’s just assumed we’ll have a baby chair and will put a child in it. I’m not saying that baby chairs are evil and we should never use them, but putting your child in a chair says something about what we expect a child to do, that they’re supposed to be quiet and still and contained, and that this takes preference over their ability to explore their hands and feet, which is apparently also important. We can imagine a baby who has the opportunity to just be on the floor for most of the time might reach their physical milestones earlier than a baby who spends a lot of time in a chair because they have more opportunity to move parents. In many indigenous cultures in North America used to strap their babies into a cradle board, which is a rigid board with a pillow around the back of the head and protection on the front. The practice is making a comeback among indigenous people today, who say that placing the cradleboard at eye level showed the baby the parent nurtured and respected them. Another benefit of the cradleboard was that it allowed babies to observe nature and the daily routines of the people around them in a world where close observation was a critical survival skill, the families using cradleboards Were preparing their children for success in their environment through the decisions they make that as they’re with the children. And our decisions prepare our children for our culture as well. And in this case, it’s a culture of keeping quiet and being still in the house. We used a baby rocker because I didn’t know anything differently back then, and I wrote in Karis diary when she was just a few days old that it was capable of stopping a meltdown instantly, which at the time, I thought was pretty flippin magical. I have to say, we also got one of those things that kids over about six months old, can sit in and bounce surrounded by toys. Another parent had told us it was the only way we were going to be able to take a shower. So of course, it sounded like a must have device for us, but what it was really doing was constraining Karis movement, not to a degree that harmed her, but to a degree that started teaching her that she was going to be expected to move in the ways we wanted her to move, which might not be how she wanted to move. She’s never been one of those kids who are in constant motion, although we definitely had her struggles over jumping on the couch as she got big and heavy enough that it shifted from being an activity we could permit to being an activity that broke a couchspring. But I do coach a lot of parents who want their children to stop moving so much, stop climbing on things, stop jumping on things. We all, and I include ourselves here, assume that children should adapt to the furniture we already have in our homes, even though it was designed for adults and is often inconvenient or dangerous for children to use. We rearranged our living room a few months ago so we could have hang a hammock in the middle of it. Both ends of the hammock are suspended from the same point, and that makes it perfect for swimming, swinging around in and Charis uses it many, many times throughout every day. Sometimes she says she can’t imagine what life was like before it I would love to install monkey bars down our hallway, but unfortunately, I can’t figure out a way to do it without wrecking the wood paneling another example of how a home is designed for adults rather than children. When I talked with Dr Diana Hill on the topic of how we can use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to support ourselves and our children, she mentioned that because she believes so much in the mental and physical health benefits of movement, she removed most of the big furniture from her living room, which cues everyone in the house to use the room to get more movement. So in parenting, as it’s practiced in the US, we’re giving our kids mixed messages. We want them to meet these movement milestones early, but we want them to do it in ways that are convenient for us. And when I say us, I fully include myself here, because while we did practice a lot of elements of rye, there were also many ways that our home was not set up for children, which made it more difficult for Karis to get the movement she needed and that we needed also, but we had trained to only do when we were exercising.

Jen Lumanlan 24:35

Praise is another one of those cultural decisions that seems like it isn’t a decision. The book tells us to, quote, encourage your baby to grab toys by showing them that you are enthusiastic about the effort they’re making, and encourage each serious attempt. Praise from you will encourage them to continue. End, quote. We also see a quote from a parent eight week mental development leave baby finds their hands. Good job, buddy. I was sort of surprised. Is that the ploys didn’t cite Dr Carol Dweck work on this, because it definitely seems to be on their minds. We looked at this research in the episode on can growth mindset live up to the hype, where we concluded that yes, it seems safe to say that if you work harder at something, you’re more likely to succeed at it, but that it’s highly unlikely to be a variable that makes an important contribution to your child’s success. Our conversation with Alfie Kohn on the topic of rewards is relevant here, because praise is essentially a kind of reward. When we praise someone, we’re saying we have power to judge their behavior, and we get to determine what measures up to an appropriate standard and what doesn’t the ploys say this directly, we are to quote, encourage each serious attempt, so we’re the ones who judge whether the attempt is serious or not, and thus worth praising or not. The decision to say good job or not when our child reaches for a toy might seem pretty inconsequential, but I can’t tell you how many women I work with, especially who describe themselves as people pleasers or recovering people pleasers. People who are praised as children tend to go on to have a really hard time saying no and will say yes even when they don’t want to do what they’re being asked to do, they neglect their own needs and feel guilty if they can’t do it. All. People pleasing is driven by a variety of factors, including a desire to avoid conflict, a fear of rejection or criticism, or a need for safety, and underneath all of those is the need to belong, to have the other person accept us and love us, and we fear that they won’t if we say no to them, which we learned when our parents judged our behavior and praised us for behavior that matched their expectations and either ignored or punished behavior that didn’t measure up. We equate that praise with love and belonging, and we do whatever it takes to keep the praise coming, including abandoning ourselves when we’re trying to get our child to match up with some external idea about what they should be doing, and when we aren’t really seeing the actual child in front of us, and that is what our child needs us to do more than anything else, these cultural ideas show up throughout the book, and we presume the app as well. We learned that we should talk to our baby throughout their waking hours as a matter of course, where we see echoes of the research on the massive word gap that supposedly exists between black and white four year olds when you ignore a lot of the ways that the black kids hear words spoken between other people, rather than directly to the child. We looked at that research in our pair of episodes on the so called 30 million word gap, we learned that many babies like pull up games, which means pulling a child who’s old enough to lift their head from a half sitting position to an upright position, or pulling them from sitting to standing. We’re even told that quote, fathers are usually the first to discover that babies enjoy the early pull up games, then mothers will follow end quote. Because, of course, the mothers are the caretakers and the fathers of the fun parents. The ploys uncritically state that quote, fathers tend to be slightly more enthusiastic with baby boys than baby girls, which may well be true because we all tend to call babies dressed in pink cute and pretty, and babies dressed in blue strong our expectations of what babies can and should do, and especially what girl and boy babies shouldn’t can do, shapes them from even the younger stages. We looked at that topic in the episodes on parenting beyond pink and blue, as well as on Virginia Mendes, great book childhood Unlimited, where we found that when researchers dress a baby up in blue clothes, people call the baby big and strong, and when they dress the same baby up in pink clothes, people call it pretty and cute. We assume that mothers are supposed to take the more nurturing, caring role because that’s what women are supposed to do. Dads are supposed to take the more fun, physical role, because that’s what men are supposed to do. We’ve been socialized to think this for our whole lives. And here are the ploys, reiterating these ideas, confirming that it’s a normal and natural thing for parents genitals to be the thing that determines how they take care of and play with their babies. Later on, we learn that quote, many babies try to help their parents crawl, which I hadn’t known was possible. When I read this, I realize the Floyds have an odd writing style, where they tell us that some parents do X and many parents do Y without stating why. They’re telling us this. Are we supposed to take this as advice? The text itself doesn’t say whether we should teach our babies to crawl or not. Only. The subheading says, teach your baby to crawl. It sometimes works. It only sometimes works. Why not always? What are parents or babies for whom it doesn’t work doing that’s different from the ones for whom it does work? What does research say about whether helping babies to crawl helps them? Does it even matter? And if it doesn’t matter, why are they telling us this going back to the chimps who would physically pry their infants off them after a regression period to teach the infants how to be more independent. We see this come out at the very beginning of the Wonder weeks book, when the child of the parent reading the book is probably still an infant. And we get when a baby learns something new, we want to encourage them and make it stick so they can build on that new skill to crawl instead of being carried. Means unlearning. The habit of reaching up for their mommy or daddy. Like the earlier example of a phone update, the old way of doing things is no longer available. Once they can crawl, they can get their own toys. After each leap, a baby can do more and will also be more independent. The more they do themselves, the more their self confidence and self esteem will grow. End quote, and this is where we see how we’re being taught to train our children to be successful in a culture that prioritizes independence. I do wish I could have gotten my hands on the early Dutch version of the book and knew how to read it so I could see whether the ploys gave the same advice for their Dutch audience that got massively more social support than the average parent in the US. Because this issue is at the heart of how we parent. I’m certainly not advocating that we become our child’s servant and whatever they whatever they want, something we deliver it, but there’s a wide gulf between that and constant encouragement to do more for themselves. Always doing more for yourself leads to the parents I work with not knowing how to ask anyone for help, the statement that the more they do for themselves, the more their self confidence and self esteem will grow, is not backed by any peer reviewed research cited in the book. Do we even want their self esteem to grow? Long time listeners might remember our episode on that topic from a while ago where we saw how the state of California learned the hard way after spending millions of dollars implementing school based programs to improve children’s self esteem. The higher self esteem is not associated with better outcomes for children, and actually, self compassion is a much more useful tool. You can hear all about that in the episode called don’t bother trying to increase your child’s self esteem. Related to this, I will never forget a parent telling me that their mom used to be so kind and compassionate when the child was sick that the now parent on the call with me used to wish that they could be sick more often. That story has really guided me for a lot of years, and I try very hard to treat my daughter, Karis, every day with the same tenderness and compassion that I do when she’s sick. It doesn’t mean that I do everything for her, but it does mean that I check in with her and make more requests of her when she has more capacity and come toward her a bit more when her capacity is lower. I don’t say, well, you’re 10 now, so you should be able to unload the dishwasher when I ask you to just like I wouldn’t think, well, you’re eight months old. You should be able to get the toy by yourself, because that comparison takes us right back to the most harmful component of self esteem. It turns out that self esteem is reliant on comparing yourself to others and seeing yourself as better than them. And when you compare your child to a sibling or a theoretical child of their age who should be able to do this task, you don’t actually help them. Those comparisons create shame, which is not where we want to be. If we can help it, we may end up there accidentally, so we don’t need to end up there on purpose, because we’re trying to encourage our child to be more independent. So all of these ideas are underneath the seemingly simple advice to keep babies stimulated rather than letting them get bored by carrying them around or pointing their chair toward new things or pull them up by their hands, or get them to practice a skill once they’ve learned it, at the end of the day, your baby won’t do any better, either in the next leap or in life, because they went through these milestones faster than any other baby, we can’t even say that they will develop a particular and specific skill at a time that’s aligned with a particular and specific fussy period. Dr ploy even acknowledges this in his book chapter summarizing the results of all these so called replication studies, he says, quote, There is no simple one to one relation between new skills, task performances and behaviors on the one hand, and the age related regression periods on the other. In the past, developmental psychologists tried to establish a temporal link between brain maturation and the so called developmental milestones. They failed. The developmental milestones did not appear to be age related. Developmental Psychology has shown abundantly that children may show huge individual differences of many months in the age of first appearance of some milestones. End Quote, so once again, why do the ploys attempt to tie the developmental growth to specific periods of time, as they do in the Wonder weeks book. As well as to the fussy periods.

Jen Lumanlan 34:06

The final issue I want to work through is the idea of what we parents should do in the fussy phases. The ploys say that quote, When your baby becomes aware their world is changing, they will usually cry more easily than before. At this point, many parents might call their babies cranky, bad tempered, whiny or disconnect, discontented. End quote. They go on to list a variety of other behaviors you might notice, including being restless, impatient, troublesome, cry more often than they used to, and may want to be in physical contact with you. They might have nightmares, although the evidence they use for this is the baby tosses and turns during sleep, so it looks like they’re having a nightmare. But we have no idea if this is actually happening for infants. They say, quote, This phase is not only difficult for your baby, but also for you, and it causes worries, irritation and quarrels that puts you under strain. End, quote, the way this is presented makes it sound like there’s a direct line from the child’s clingy behavior to the parent’s worry, irritation and strain. Which is what presumably results in the quarrels. I’m not sure how you can quarrel with an infant, but I guessed it was a translation issue, and that they mean have disagreements about how much of the time you want to be in physical contact. And then on my second reading of the book, I found buried in the LEAP six section that quarrels are related to the baby’s fickle behavior, sometimes wanting to nurse, sometimes not, which irritates the mother, and that quarrels can also develop when parents and babies fail to negotiate the amount of physical contact and attention their baby wants, and their mommy and daddy are willing to give end quote, and oh my gosh, I remember those days so well. One time when Karis was a few months old, I wanted to go grocery shopping, so I got all the bags and the list ready in advance while she was napping, and then she woke I fed her. I took a few minutes to put my shoes on, go to the bathroom, head out to the car, and I was just about to get in the car when my husband came out carrying her, and she was crying, and he said, I think she needs feeling again. And I shouted pretty loudly across the street, I just want to make one decision for myself. The Wonder week’s book quotes a variety of parents saying things like, I can hardly move without my daughter crying out in fear, and my baby doesn’t like playing on his play mat for long periods. I really have to keep him occupied on my lap or walk around with him, and my son keeps on bothering me to sit on my lap, but as soon as I take him, there’s almost no controlling him. He crawls all over me and gropes around like a monkey for anything he can get his hands on. I try playing games, but it’s a waste of time, so he doesn’t feel like playing with me, okay, but at least he could stop being difficult. Another parent said, reasons why Carl was crying like this yesterday. I took the toilet paper away from him. He was playing with his favorite toy. I changed his very wet diaper. I set him down so I could use the restroom for five seconds. He hit his head on the door. I put the car I put him in the car seat. The dog walked away from him. I wouldn’t let him bite me. And lastly, for absolutely no reason at all, leap seven is really hitting this guy hard, and we still have 23 days until it’s over. And I do remember those days too. When Charis was about four months old, I would try to transition from playing with her on the floor in the living room to cooking dinner in the kitchen, and she would cry, and I remember quite clearly telling someone she won’t let me cook dinner. I didn’t know at the time how much she was impacted by being able to see me or not see me, and when I was cooking she couldn’t see me. It wasn’t that she wouldn’t let me cook dinner, it was that she may have felt disconnected from me and potentially scared at being alone. The ploys say that quote, parents are concerned when their baby is upset, they try to find a cause for their babies now, more frequent crying? Could it be teething, not enough sleep, a pesky sibling? Or perhaps it’s a leap, and I think that’s what the Wonder weeks does for us. Our child is crying more than usual, and we’re racking our brains trying to figure out what’s going on. And if we can’t think of what else it could possibly be, we conclude maybe it’s a leap. We feel better. We try to remember which are the stormy weeks, and we know weeks eight to nine are stormy ones, and it’s week 10, but week eight wasn’t that bad, was it? Maybe it’s a late regression now, but what if we didn’t have to buy the book or enter daily data into an app or worry about whether a leap is happening, given it could happen any time over a multi week period. What if we could see our baby fussing more than usual? And think I can see that you need more help today than you did yesterday? How much can I willingly come towards you, and what am I not willing to do? Yes, we want to know if there’s a physical reason why baby’s crying. If they’re wet, we change them. If they’re hungry, we feed them. If they have a tooth coming in, we offer them something cold to bite down on. If they always fuss when we put a particular item of clothing on them, we might conclude they find that particular piece of clothing to be uncomfortable. If they’re crying when we disappear to the kitchen to cook dinner, perhaps we could imagine they feel disconnected or scared, and if we put them on the floor just outside the kitchen, or maybe the end of the day is difficult. We do more meal prep earlier in the day, so there’s less work to do in the evenings, and we both have less capacity. The key is that when we do this, we’re responding to the child in front of us. We aren’t comparing our baby to some external milestone that some babies hit some time over a four week period, and trying to understand whether that’s why our baby is having a hard time we’re saying you’re having a hard time today. Let’s see how I can help. If we go back to some of those parents who were expressing dismay at their baby’s fussy behavior, we might be able to find some of the reasons why that’s happening. Maybe a baby who’s crying when they’re on their mat is feeling bored. We can test this by offering something new for them to investigate, which for a child who’s grasping things could be something as simple as a napkin, and seeing whether that engages them. If they’re not actually protesting being on the mat, but they’re protesting not being able to see us, then a napkin isn’t going to help. Putting them in a spot nearer to us will help when we perceive our child climbing on us as being difficult, when we probably want this very same child to meet milestones related to crawling and walking on time or early. Maybe the problem isn’t with our child. If they’re pulling on necklaces or earrings, maybe we could wear jewelry a bit less for a bit. If they’re grabbing at our glasses. We could take our glasses off when they climb on us and re. Great. I don’t want you to grab my glasses. We can learn to see each thing our baby is doing as exactly the right thing for them in their development, in this moment, instead of feeling unhappy when they’re too fussy and also unhappy when they aren’t fussy, as baby Nina’s parent says, The only thing my baby likes doing right now is cuddling up close to me in her sling. She’s very quiet and no trouble at all. She doesn’t do much except sleep. To be honest, though, I’d much rather see her full of life. The poor kids can’t win, can they? And what we’re hoping here is that you’re getting enough support that you don’t find babies requests for help to be difficult to hear, if you are having a hard time, that you can get help. Because according to the Wonder weeks, you should get help if things are difficult and difficult enough that you’re finding babies fussing hard to cope with. And this fact does come through clearly to readers. Parent, Catherine said in our Facebook group she got the impression the Wonder weeks book was a series of reminders not to shake your baby even if you are frustrated at a change, because that change could supposedly be expected based on their schedule. And the book is a bit repetitive on this, there isn’t much on the topic at leap one, but it starts in earnest at leap two, under a subheading, you may be on the edge of really losing it. The ploys say, only Rarely will a parent admit to having been a bit rougher than necessary when putting their baby down, because they were so driven to distraction by the baby screaming and crying that it happened without their thinking about it, even thoughts of being rough, need to be addressed immediately, because it’s an indication that you’re overwhelmed and desperate and need help right away. There is no excuse for acting on these feelings. However difficult your baby is being, accept that it can be trying at times and take action before the situation overwhelms. You talk to someone about how you’re feeling. End Quote, here’s the LEAP three reminder, if parents worry a lot about their baby and they are not given enough support from family and friends, they may become exhausted. Unwelcome advice. On top of exhaustion could make any parent feel even more irritable and snappish. They feel they have no one to turn to with their problems. They feel alone. However understandable these feelings of frustration may be, one should never act on them. Slapping or hurting a baby in any other way is not acceptable. Seek help if you feel it is all getting too much for you. End quote. Then there’s a special call out box with a drawing of a cloud and a lightning bolt at the top that says, shaking is very dangerous. In capitals, never shake your baby. Shaking a young child can easily cause internal bleeding just below the skull, which can result in brain damage that may lead to learning difficulties later on, and in some cases, even death. End quote.

Jen Lumanlan 42:29

The LEAP four reminder is many mothers and fathers can become annoyed toward the end of a fussy phase, when there seems to be no real reason a baby is upset. It may feel like their baby has no valid reason for making such a fuss, and they are inclined to let them cry a little longer than they used to. Parents may think of comments and helpful advice they’ve heard from others about spoiling their baby, baby. They really are giving into their whims too much. We hope you will remember your baby needs to be comforted. Leaving them to cry will not help them through this fussy phase when your baby won’t stop crying and you are at your wit’s end. Get help long before you lose control. Shaking in particular can be harmful. So this all, and I’m not going to repeat the same thing from all of the leaps, but it’s there for most of them. It brings us back to our quarrels with the baby. The book essentially sees our role, by which I mean the mother’s role in particular is to provide the perfect environment for your child. You have to really pay attention to their behavior and preferably record it in the Wonder weeks app and provide the right level of stimulation to ensure they’re taking advantage of their developmental leap. Which reminds me of those toy kits you can sign up for that the toys are supposedly timed for the exact developmental stage your child is at when there’s no evidence that children benefit from presenting specific toys at specific times, you as the mother don’t really exist as a person anymore. Once you become a parent, your role is to be a parent, to be a mother, to do that job perfectly, and if you get stressed out doing that, get help and don’t shake the baby. You can take an active role during a leap. We’re told, by helping and guiding your baby, you build a safe and strong bond. End quote, and even though we give you the earliest age at which the behavior appears, quote, don’t focus on the earliest possible age, as most babies exhibit these skills at the later side of the range. And anyway, you can anticipate when a leap will happen by age, but your baby’s choices make them unique. And also, don’t shake the baby as we start to zoom out a bit at the end of this pair of episodes, we have to wonder, what’s the purpose of the fussy periods? Assuming they do exist, what are we to do with this information that our child is going through one of these nebulously defined periods of development for which there’s basically no research supporting them in the book, in a book chapter celebrating the legacy of pediatrician and author, T Barry Brazelton, Dr ploy recounts the results of his early chimp studies and mapped these to the data they gathered from human parents, with a goal of understanding the four whys, where researchers try to understand the evolution, development, causation and function of behavior, regression. Periods have evolved in humans, primates and non primate mammals as well. He says the chimp mothers would tolerate increased contact that the infants were trying to get, but then, after the regression they would enter a period of conflict where the mother chimp would actually try to push the baby off them, in providing evidence for the development of regression periods. Dr ploy says that mothers of younger human babies would initially worry that something was wrong with their babies during a regression period and take them to the doctor, only to find out there was nothing wrong. Then their worry would turn to annoyance. In the first few months, they wouldn’t do anything about their annoyance, but from the second half of the first year onwards, they would the chapter is pretty light on details, and I didn’t see this information described in any peer reviewed paper, but he says the mothers sensed their babies were able to do more, and so they would demand more of them. They initially used mild strategies like diverting the baby’s attention, but over time, these would develop into what took deploy, called clashes, and by the time the babies were 18 months old, all the mothers reported these clashes, which we can assume are the same thing as the quarrels in the Wonder weeks book, Dr ploy argued that the cause of regression seems straightforward. They’re related to age linked developments in children’s brains. Their function is to trigger what he calls better caring behavior for mothers, because being able to trigger this behavior creates better outcomes for children. The evidence in support of this is a single study finding that temperamentally difficult middle class and upper class children, who we can assume are all white, had unexpectedly high IQs. He theorized that, quote, temperamentally difficult children activate special family resources, stimulating intellectual development. End quote, The ploys and a collaborator developed a program quote for a group of single mothers at risk of abusing their infants. End Quote, to help them see that their babies couldn’t help being difficult and that comforting their babies would facilitate later learning, they published their findings in a book, not in a paper, and only in Dutch, so I can’t check the outcomes, and as we might expect, they reported in this chapter that I was reading unequivocally positive outcomes, and conclude that regression periods have the function of activating family resources to promote intellectual and social development as well as physical health. If we accept this premise as true, then ultimately, what Dr ploy is saying is, hug your baby, respond to your baby, ignore all that science based advice from earlier in the century that said you would spoil your baby by hugging them too much. It is not at all clear what’s happening during the clashes, and it seems to me that that’s just as important at what happens during the regressions. But that isn’t the ploys area of expertise. Their expertise is on whether regressions exist, not on how to support children in their growth and development, which is what most of the Wonder weeks book is about. We can only speculate that there might be a connection between regression periods and attachment, between mothers and children. And if you need a refresher on how attachment theory, which we’re discussing here, is different from attachment parenting, you can find that in the episode on most of what you know about attachment is probably wrong. Dr Woolmore, who did one of the sort of replication studies in the first episode in this mini series, speculates that one interpretation of regression periods is they’re essentially periods of attachment behavior. Depression can impact attachment relationships because, as we’ve seen, depressed mothers can have a more difficult time responding flexibly and sensitively to their infant, especially when they perceive baby as crying for no reason. Perhaps the entirety of the Wonder weeks method, along with all of these reminders not to shake the baby, is that the baby is going through some sort of internal stress that it doesn’t have any control over that it’s a phase that will pass and that it doesn’t need pain medication, which some mothers and study populations did often give because they thought there was something physically wrong with baby. But this introduces a potential challenge to the ploys perspective. If we understand that something important is happening in these fussy periods, that our calm and sensitive presence is helping our baby to cope with internal struggles that we don’t know much about, then quarreling or clashing with them is not even a neutral action. It’s an action that may create more difficulties for our baby. A variety of studies have found the biggest predictor of a secure mother infant attachment relationship is adequate social support. So once again, we find ourselves considering cultural consequences of what the ploys very much see as issues that only take place within the family. It’s a lot easier to respond sensitively every time baby cries when you aren’t the only one responsible for doing this, because there are 10 other adults around you who all have experience of being with babies, but don’t have one exactly the same age as yours. So they can support you now, because they know you’ll support them with their baby when the time is right, when our culture has told us for several generations now that a family is one mother and one father and their biological children, and we can’t cope with the work that it takes to respond sensitively to those children, then clearly the answer is to spend $1,650 on a bassinet. It rocks baby back to sleep when it detects the moving, rather than to try to understand why we’re doing the work of a village of people all by ourselves. So where do we go with this information? Is there anything useful here? I think the ploys are on their safest ground when they tell us that regressions exist, because I believe they probably do, but also so what I’ve been looking at peer reviewed research on parenting and child development for about nine years now, and until I read this book and started looking for research on it. I’d heard of Wonder weeks and regressions because I’d heard of the book, but I had never seen this concept appear in any peer reviewed paper on any other topic related to parenting or child development, ever. I’ve never seen an author say we found the babies in our study did x, but we realized we tested it in a regression week. So we’re not sure if the results are valid. No other researchers are thinking about this, unless we’re talking about the three sets of researchers who were trying to prove that regressions happened back in the 1990s it seems to have basically been abandoned since of a line of work since then, I think it’s worth reiterating the weak evidence base behind the entire idea of the Wonder weeks. I’m not going to restate the contents of the first episode on this topic, where we covered this extensively. Suffice it to say the entire concept is based on essentially four studies of fewer than 100 children in total. I went through the references list to the 2019 edition of the book, and tried to get hold of every single book chapter and article that was cited. On one hand, that wasn’t very difficult. There are only 53 references in that edition. Just for comparison, this episode references 46 studies, so not that many fewer than the book. Books that describe precise developmental processes usually have much longer reference lists because readers want to know what research the assertions the authors make are based on. And to be clear, my list is shorter actually, because I couldn’t find most of the studies of the book chapters and books that the ploys are referencing. But at least 53 references is better than 28 references that the 2012 edition was published with when you look at the ploy zone research, it seems there’s a long list that is kind of explicitly relevant, but when you count up the subjects of those studies, you find a good chunk of the work is actually based on their chimpanzee studies. They have 19 papers and book chapters cited in the 2019 edition. Eight of them are studies of chimps, which is 42%.

Jen Lumanlan 52:21

One was about both chimps and people. One was in a book that I couldn’t find, so I generously interpreted that that was about both chimps and people as well. So if we distribute those studies, basically about half the work they’re published that’s cited in the 2019 book is on chimps, not on human children. Again, this is not a massive study of chimpanzees we can use to make sweeping conclusions about all chimpanzee behavior. The ploys main 80 page paper describing the pattern of Mother infant behavior among chimps was conducted on five mother infant pairs, and these are not wild chimps. These are chimps in Gombe National Park with whom Dr Jane Goodall had worked for decades. If you Google Jane Goodall chimpanzee, you can find pictures of her holding and even kissing chimpanzees on the lips. The researchers would follow the mother to be around every day to make sure she would tolerate being followed after she had the baby, and then did monthly observations until 300 minutes of good observation were obtained, which is five hours over two years. It’s nothing. And we’re looking at five chimps, two of whom became ill in the course of the study. And we know that illness affects behavior, and this one chimp study generated the data they based their subsequent papers on. So once again, we’re looking at a beyond tiny sample size here. And as we know, we can write pretty much anything we want in a book. The publisher will do some basic fact checking, but they aren’t going to dig into the weeds like we do here on the podcast, and like peer reviewers do when the study is published in a journal. 13 of the 19 studies, the ploys were involved with that are referenced in the book are book chapters rather than peer reviewed journal articles. That’s 68% of their reference work that’s never been peer reviewed, and all of this work is old. Five of the references, which is 9% of the total of 53. References cited in the 2019 book were published in the 1970s which means they’re over 40 years old. Another eight or 15% of the total was published in the 1980s 11, 21% of the total were published in the 1990s because nobody else has really looked at the existence of Wonder weeks. There’s no more recent research to support or refute the idea. I think we should be aware of the Centers for Disease Controls act early recommendations, which state the age by which 75% of children have achieved certain milestones. So if your child hasn’t met this milestone yet, then keep an eye on it. Make an appointment to see your doctor if you’re worried. There are different milestones at each age for social and emotional development, language and communication, cognitive milestones that involve learning, thinking and problem solving and movement and physical development milestones, so the social and emotional milestones at two months old that your baby calms down when spoken to or picked up, looks you in the face, seems happy to see. You when you walk up to them and smile when you talk to them or smile at them. The language and communication milestones at two months so that your baby makes sounds other than crying and reacts to loud sounds. The cognitive milestones are that your child watches you as you move and looks at a toy for several seconds. Note that they don’t say a toy that’s specifically geared toward their exact developmental stage. And the movement and physical development milestones are that they hold up their head when they’re on their tummy, they move both their arms and legs and open their hands briefly. There’s no mention of the leap of changing sensations in the CDC milestones. We could imagine that a number of the CDC milestone items could be found within the leap of changing sensations that happened back at five weeks. But then what additional information does the LEAP offer? Nothing at eight weeks, baby is supposed to be entering the world of patterns leap, and there’s nothing in the CDC guidelines about that. So the book is essentially a set of 10 reminders that babies go through periods of time when they’re fussy. Each chapter unfolds the same way with some variation of the questions deploys asked in their questionnaire to appearance. They don’t tell you all the questions at once, though, and partly that makes sense, doesn’t make sense to ask about temper tantrums for an eight week old, but the book spreads out the description of the questionnaire items, making it seem like, for example, a baby demanding more attention than before is uniquely associated with Leap two, rather than something they expect to see in every leap they’re a mixture of these questionnaire items sprinkled throughout the chapters, and when they appear in multiple chapters, they’re phrased differently to make them sound unique. There’s the reminder that you may feel overwhelmed by baby’s behavior in the fussy phase, but don’t shake the baby. They give some pointers on the kinds of things baby might be able to do at that stage, although at the very earliest end of the potential spectrum so you can look out for them. There’s a checklist of things you can go through so you can see what your baby can do. And that’s kind of it repeated 10 times. And the further you go into the book, there’s increasing focus on parenting advice as well. Just a representative sample, many parents say their sweet toddler sometimes turns into an aggressive Tiger, and this makes them uneasy, yet it is an understandable change in the world of principles. Your child tries all types of social behavior. Being aggressive is one of those your toddler studies how their parents, other adults and children react if they hit, bite, push or kick or if they deliberately break something. Show your child what you think of their behavior. This is the only way they will learn that being aggressive isn’t sweet, interesting or funny. This way they learn it’s hurtful and that adults are not amused by aggressive or destructive behavior. End Quote, and there’s a call out section on the next page which assures parents that aggression in toddlers is normal, which concludes quote, when children live in environments where aggression is not tolerated and where sweet and friendly behavior is rewarded, the child will not start hitting and kicking when they are frustrated, want something or are corrected, they will use more acceptable ways of expressing themselves. End quote, If you are a regular listener, I am sure you can imagine. I could spend an entire episode dissecting those statements, but let us go for the short version. How are we to show the child what we think of their behavior. The ploys say that, quote, a whining toddler is quicker to land in a time out than when they were younger. So are the ploys advocating this strategy. It’s hard to tell. The language is observational, but what else are we supposed to make of it? And of course, we are told, Don’t let quarrels escalate. No matter how bad the outburst of quarrels are, stay calm and consistent. Screaming is never a good example, even a small smack on their bottom or hand will work against you in the end, physical violence can never be justified. Okay, all well and good, but what are we supposed to do? Just say no. I think it’s totally fine to say no to behavior that hurts us. If your child is hitting, biting or kicking you, you should absolutely block them from doing it if you can and say, I won’t let you hit me, but only say that if you do block the hit, because if they already hit you and say, I won’t let you hit me, they learn that your I won’t let you doesn’t mean very much. If they already got a hit in you can say, I don’t want to be hit and block them from hitting you again. We’re going to get through the meltdown as safely as we all can. And then immediately after that, we want to figure out. Why did that happen? Were they overwhelmed, hungry, tired? Did you say no to 10 things beforehand, and this was the last straw, and they didn’t know how else to express their frustration? Had their sibling been poking at them all morning? Had they been keeping it together all day at preschool and they had no energy left to figure out how to tell you that they didn’t want peas for dinner today? No, we can’t always understand every single meltdown your toddler has, but you might be surprised how often you can find patterns. When you find patterns, you find needs. Your toddler probably has needs for connection and autonomy, and at some points, their need for connection may be more prevalent. At times, it might be autonomy. Some kids have additional sensory needs. They struggle with certain types of clothes or slippery foods. Some kids seek out more sensory input. Sometimes hitting can be a way of looking for more stimulation. Just imagine you came home at the end of a long day and your partner said, Hey, how are you doing? Did you get the milk we needed? And you say, No, did you get the milk? Since you clearly did remember, we can then imagine that our partner might think to. Sells. Wow. My partner’s in a crappy mood right now. How can I show them their behavior isn’t okay, but what do we want them to do in that situation? I would want my partner to think, Hmm, sounds like Jen’s had a tough day. Is there any way I might have contributed to this? And I wonder what I can do to help. And that’s usually what our kids want us to think as well. And then come towards them as much as we reasonably can, we might even find that if we can interpret our child’s behavior in this way, we might not find ourselves so frustrated by it. Psychologists call that reframing, which means seeing the same situation in a different way. What if we didn’t have to remind ourselves not to shake the baby over and over again, because we could see this is just a child doing the best they can, just like I’m a parent, doing the best I can. There’s a reason why they’re having a meltdown, just like there’s a reason why I snap at people when I’m having a hard time. The more we can look for patterns that help us understand these reasons, the less we’re reliant on horoscopes or wonder weeks. Thanks so much for being here with me as we explore these topics. If you’d like to see the extensive list of references that I consulted for this episode, you can find them at your parentingmojo.com forward slash wonder weeks part two.

Emma 01:01:13

We know you have a lot of choices about where you get information about parenting, and we’re honored that you’ve chosen us as we move toward a world In which everyone’s lives and contributions are valued. If you’d like to help keep the show ad free, please do consider making a donation on the episode page that Jen just mentioned. Thanks again for listening to this episode of The Your Parenting Mojo podcast.

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195: Raising Good Humans Every Day with Hunter Clarke-Fields

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0000

Hunter Clarke-Fields is back with us again! She’s the author of Raising Good Humans, and now the new book Raising Good Humans Every Day (affiliate links).

Why does the world need two books with such similar titles? Are they even different?!

Yes, they are! Raising Good Humans Every Day is small! And short! And the chapters are short! Each one contains just one practice, described in a few pages.

If you’ve got five minutes you can read a chapter and then put the idea into practice immediately.

Use it, see some success, and get inspired for the next one.

Short, simple, and sweet. Can’t beat that!

Hunter Clarke-Fields’ books:

Raising Good Humans

Raising Good Humans Every Day (affiliate links)

Jump to Highlights

00:43 Introducing Hunter Clarke-Fields

01:46 Hunter’s reasons for writing a second book with a title so much like their first one

03:29 Why controlling our children and have them control themselves doesn’t work effectively

06:54 The need to shift from rewards and punishments to teaching and guiding children in understanding consequences and needs

09:18 The benefits of connection-based parenting

12:58 Reflecting on parenting experiences: gratitude and regrets

16:25 Exploring Hunter’s upbringing as a highly sensitive child

21:47 Navigating parenting a highly sensitive child with insights coming from Hunter’s own experiences

24:39 The importance of being authentic with children and openly sharing challenges as a parent

26:29 Parenting with heartfelt intention and presence

31:01 Embracing the importance of being present with children and practicing mindfulness in a fast-paced society

38:14 Asking for community support to be a better parent

42:24 Embracing a beginner’s mind to counter judgment and remain open to possibilities

45:14 Wrapping up

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152: Everything you need to know about sleep training

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 27 Mar 2022 09:00:00 +0000

We’ve already covered a couple of episodes on sleep, including the cultural issues associated with sleep, then more recently we talked with Dr. Chris Winter about his book The Rested Child where we looked at sleep issues in older children.

But if you have a young child who isn’t sleeping well, from the baby stage all the way up to about preschool, this episode is for you! My guest is Macall Gordon, senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Antioch University Seattle, and who has studied young children’s sleep for 20 years. She’s particularly interested in the intersection between children’s temperament and their sleep, and how parents of the children she calls ‘little livewires’ can support these children so everyone gets more sleep.

If you have questions about sleep training – particularly when and how to do it – this episode is for you!

Jump to highlights

01:25 Introduction of episode

05:15 Age range of a child to be sleep-trained

16:15 What it’s like to be a parent in a sleep training study

17:30 The active ingredient to sleep coaching

29:00 The differences of how babies sleep through the night

37:20 Only one method in sleep training the child

40:21 Limit setting disorder

48:54 Realization on the episode

Click here to read the full transcript

Jen Lumanlan 00:02

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

Jenny 00:09

Do you get tired of hearing the same old interest in podcast episodes? I don’t really but Jen thinks you might. I’m Jenny, a listener from Los Angeles, testing out a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes. There’s no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn’t just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development but puts it in context for you as well. So you can decide whether and how to use this new information. I listen because parenting can be scary and it’s reassuring to know what the experts think. If you’d like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn’t listening to you and what to do about each one. Sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe. You can also join the free Facebook group to continue the conversation. Over time you might get sick of hearing me read this intro so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script Jen provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com/recordtheintro. I can’t wait to hear yours.

Jen Lumanlan 01:26

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

Macall 04:16

Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Jen Lumanlan 04:18

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

Macall 04:28

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

Jen Lumanlan 06:44

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

Macall 07:19

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

Jen Lumanlan 08:32

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

Macall 09:08

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

Jen Lumanlan 13:01

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

Macall 13:52

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

Jen Lumanlan 16:11

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

Macall 16:40

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

Jen Lumanlan 19:32

Yes. They are irrelevant.

Macall 19:43

They are irrelevant because we say so.

Jen Lumanlan 19:38

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

Macall 20:14

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

Jen Lumanlan 21:38

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

Macall 22:15

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

Jen Lumanlan 24:07

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

Macall 24:39

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

Jen Lumanlan 26:58

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

Macall 27:03

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

Jen Lumanlan 27:17

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

Macall 27:25

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

Jen Lumanlan 28:59

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

Macall 29:10

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

Jen Lumanlan 30:28

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

Macall 32:06

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

Jen Lumanlan 33:01

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

Macall 33:05

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

Jen Lumanlan 34:32

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

Macall 34:44

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

Jen Lumanlan 36:57

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

Macall 37:08

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

Jen Lumanlan 39:01

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

Macall 40:10

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

Jen Lumanlan 40:26

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

Macall 40:32

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

Jen Lumanlan 40:44

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

Macall 41:06

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

Jen Lumanlan 42:12

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

Macall 42:16

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

Jen Lumanlan 43:14

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

Macall 43:36

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

Jen Lumanlan 46:00

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

Macall 46:04

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

Jen Lumanlan 47:32

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

Macall 48:53

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

Jen Lumanlan 51:01

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

Macall 51:08

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

Jen Lumanlan 51:37

And the website is?

Macall 51:38

LittleLiveWires.com

Jen Lumanlan 51:40

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

Macall 52:08

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

Jen Lumanlan 52:11

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

Jenny 52:37

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

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Macall Gordon’s website, Little Livewires

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138: Most of what you know about attachment is probably wrong

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 15:00:00 +0000

New parents often worry about attachment to their baby – will I be able to build it? My baby cries a lot – does that mean that we aren’t attached? If I put my baby in daycare, will they get attached to the daycare staff rather than to me?

Based on the ideas about attachment that have been circulated over the years, these are entirely valid concerns. But it turns out that not only should we not worry about these things, but the the research that these ideas were based in was highly flawed.

It’s often forgotten that attachment theory was developed in the period after World War II, when policymakers were trying to get women out of the jobs they had held during the war, and back into their ‘natural’ place in the home.

In one of his earliest papers Dr. John Bowlby – the so-called Father of Attachment Theory – described 44 children who had been referred to his clinic for stealing, and compared these with children who had not stolen anything. He reported that the thieves had been separated from their parents during childhood, which led them to have a low sense of self-worth and capacity for empathy. He went on to say that “to deprive a small child of his mother’s companionship is as bad as depriving him of vitamins.”

But much later in his life, Bowlby revealed that he had conflated a whole lot of kinds of separation into that one category – everything between sleeping in a different room to being abandoned in an orphanage. And in addition to being separated, many of the thieves had also experienced physical or sexual abuse. The fear that spending time apart from your baby will damage them in some way is just not supported by the evidence.

What other common beliefs do we hold about attachment relationships that aren’t supported by evidence? Well, quite a lot, as it turns out! Listen in for more.

Link to the book mentioned:

Cornerstones of Attachment Research (Affiliate link).

Jump to highlights:

03:30 Download the free Right From The Start Roadmap

06:11 Dr. John Bowlby, who is known as the founder of attachment theory

06:40 A brief overview of attachment theory

08:06 What is attachment theory

09:44 A closer look at the word attachment

12:55 Five aspects out of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory

14:32 44 Juvenile Thieves – One of the major ideas about separation from parents

17:50 What is the word monotrophy

18:49 The four dimensions that distinguish African-American views of motherhood from American views by Dr. Patricia Hill Collins

20:49 Aka Pygmy tribe in Africa

21:37 What is PIC or Parental Investment in the child Questionnaire by Dr. Robert Bradley

24:19 The Strange Situation Procedure developed by Dr. Mary Ainsworth

30:30 White middle class mothers in Baltimore stand for what attachment should look like in families of all types around the world

33:36 Two main cross cultural studies

40:13 The cognitive thinking component of the attachment relationship

47:29 What is Outcomes

01:01:25 Summary

References

Ainsworth, M.D.S. (1985). Patterns of infant-mother attachments: Antecedents and effects on development. Bulletin of The New York Academy of Medicine 61(9), 771-791.

Attached at the Heart (n.d.). Talking points/frequently asked questions. Author. Retrieved from http:// attachedattheheart.attachmentparenting.org/faq/

Birns, B. (1999). I. Attachment Theory revisited: Challenging conceptual and methodological sacred cows. Feminism & Psychology 9(1), 10-21.

Bliwise, N.G. (1999). Securing Attachment Theory’s potential. Feminism & Psychology 9(1), 43-52.

Bradley, R.H. (1998). In defense of parental investment. Journal of Marriage and Family 60(3), 791-795.

Bradley, R.H., Whiteside-Mansell, L., Brisby, J.A., & Caldwell, B.M. Parents’ socioemotional investment in children. Journal of Marriage and Family 59(1), 77-90.

Buchanan, F. (2013). A critical analysis of the use of attachment theory in cases of domestic violence. Critical Social Work 14(2), 19-31

Callaghan, J., Andenaes, A., & Macleod, C. (2015). Deconstructing Developmental Psychology 20 years on: Reflections, implications, and empirical work. Feminism & Psychology 25(3), 255-265.

Cleary, R.J. (1999). III. Bowlby’s theory of attachment and loss: A feminist reconsideration. Feminism & Psychology 9(1), 32-42.

Duschinsky, R. (2020). Cornerstones of attachment research. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Duschinsky, R., Greco, M., & Solomon, J. (2015). The politics of attachment: Lines of flight with Bowlby, Deleuze and Guattari. Theory, Culture & Society 32(7-8), 173-195.

Duchinsky, R., Greco, M., & Solomon, J. (2015). Wait up!: Attachment and sovereign power. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28, 223-242.

Franzblau, S.H. (1999). II. Historicizing Attachment Theory: Binding the ties that bind. Feminism & Psychology 9(1), 22-31.

Gov.uk (2019). Elitism in Britain, 2019. Author. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/news/elitism-in-britain-2019#:~:text=Overall%2029%25%20of%20current%20Members,Senior%20judges%20%2D%2065%25

Hays, S., (1998). The fallacious assumptions and unrealistic prescriptions of Attachment Theory: A comment on “Parents’ socioemotional investment in children.” Journal of Marriage and Family 60(3), 782-790.

Leinonen, J. A., Solantaus, T. S., & Punamäki, R. L. (2003). Social support and the quality of parenting under economic pressure and workload in Finland: The role of family structure and parental gender. Journal of Family Psychology, 17(3), 409.

Mesman, J., Minter, T., Angnged, A., Cissé, I. A., Salali, G. D., & Migliano, A. B. (2018). Universality without uniformity: A culturally inclusive approach to sensitive responsiveness in infant caregiving. Child Development, 89(3), 837-850.

Schaverein, J. (2011). Boarding school syndrome: Broken attachments a hidden trauma. British Journal of Psychotherapy 27(2), 138-155.

Schaverein, J. (2004). Boarding school: the trauma of the ‘privileged’ child. Journal of Analytical Psychology 49, 683-705.

Silverstein, L.B. (2996). Fathering is a feminist issue. Psychology of Women Quarterly 20, 3-37.

Simonardottir, S. (2016). Constructing the attached mother in the “world’s most feminist country.” Women’s Studies International Forum 56, 103-112.

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

Van der Kolk, B. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Penguin.

Van Dijken, S. (1998). John Bowlby: His Early Life: A Biographical Journey into the Roots of Attachment Theory. London: Free Association Books

Vicedo, M. (2017). Putting attachment in its place: Disciplinary and cultural contexts. European Journal of Developmental Psychology 14(6), 684-699.

Ziv, Y., & Hotam, Y. (2015). Theory and measure in the psychological field: The case of attachment theory and the strange situation procedure. Theory & Psychology 25(3), 274-291.

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128: Should I Redshirt My Child?

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 24 Jan 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Parents – worried about their child’s lack of maturity or ability to ‘fit in’ in a classroom environment – often ask me whether they should hold their child back a year before entering kindergarten or first grade. In this episode I review the origins of the redshirting phenomenon (which lie in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, and which statisticians say contained some seriously dodgy math), what it means for your individual child, as well as for the rest of the children in the class so you can make an informed decision.

Jump to highlights:

(01:00) Malcolm Gladwell’s anecdote about the Junior League Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants ice hockey teams that initiated the redshirting craze
(02:56) Ability grouping is done in early childhood, just like in sports
(03:59) Parents holding their children back from kindergarten came to be referred to as redshirting
(10:20) How common is redshirting?
(11:04) Boys are redshirted at a ratio of 2:1 compared to girls
(12:18) The maturationist approach of why to redshirt
(13:05) State support and agenda for redshirting
(15:10) Teachers tendency to view a maturationist view of development.
(17:16) The Maturation Hypothesis
(17:36) Parents redshirt their children to give their child an advantage
(20:34) Redshirting as a way to give boys age and size advantage and avoid getting bullied
(27:28) Making a judgement call into what benefits mean with regards to the body of research on redshirting
(29:24) The evidence of whether redshirting is beneficial
(35:19) Misdiagnosis of ADHD caused by relative maturity
(37:56) A year outside of school reduces the likelihood that children receive timely identifications of learning difficulties
(38:35) Students with speech impairments may actually benefit from redshirting
(39:22) Redshirted students may have more behavioral problems in high school
(46:04) Children from higher socioeconomic status are more likely to perform well in tests in kindergarten
(48:19) It’s possible that the way the teacher sees the child is what helps the child because of Labelling Theory
(49:46) Opportunity hoarding associated with middle-class, White parents.
(52:01) Is kindergarten truly the new first grade?
(56:06) Advocating for Developmentally Appropriate Practice or DAP
(57:35) Almost everyone agrees that retention has negative impacts on children
(58:55) Accumulative Advantage
(01:00:07) Malcolm Gladwell’s proposed solution to homogenize and my thoughts on it
(01:02:32) Summary
(01:04:56) Why I think asking “should I redshirt my child” is the wrong question

Books and Resources:

Links:

Join our the YPM Facebook Community:

Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group

Click here to read the full transcript

Jen 00:02

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

Jen 00:29

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

Jen 00:48

I do hope you’ll join us.

Jen 01:00

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

Jen 02:28

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

Jen 02:56

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

Jen 03:59

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

Jen 05:11

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

Jen 05:20

How common is redshirting?

Jen 05:22

Who does it and why do they do it?

Jen 05:24

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

Jen 05:28

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

Jen 05:33

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

Jen 05:39

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

Jen 06:02

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

Jen 07:08

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

Jen 08:13

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

Jen 08:47

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

Jen 09:33

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

Jen 10:20

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

Jen 11:04

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

Jen 11:58

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

Jen 12:18

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

Jen 13:04

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

Jen 13:04

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

Jen 14:14

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

Jen 15:10

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

Jen 15:28

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

Jen 17:16

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

Jen 17:36

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

Jen 18:34

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

Jen 20:09

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

Jen 20:34

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

Jen 22:02

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

Jen 23:07

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

Jen 23:59

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

Jen 24:16

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

Jen 25:16

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

Jen 25:48

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

Jen 26:55

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

Jen 27:58

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

Jen 28:30

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

Jen 28:53

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

Jen 29:24

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

Jen 29:38

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

Jen 30:15

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

Jen 30:48

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

Jen 31:53

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

Jen 32:16

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

Jen 32:35

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

Jen 33:13

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

Jen 34:02

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

Jen 34:40

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

Jen 35:19

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

Jen 36:00

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

Jen 36:45

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

Jen 37:23

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

Jen 37:56

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

Jen 38:35

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

Jen 38:52

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

Jen 39:22

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

Jen 39:55

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

Jen 40:42

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

Jen 41:33

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

Jen 42:07

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

Jen 42:47

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

Jen 43:19

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

Jen 44:06

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

Jen 44:23

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

Jen 44:47

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

Jen 46:04

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

Jen 46:27

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

Jen 47:09

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

Jen 47:36

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

Jen 48:19

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

Jen 49:16

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

Jen 49:46

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

Jen 51:05

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

Jen 51:28

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

Jen 52:01

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

Jen 52:53

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

Jen 53:44

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

Jen 54:32

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

Jen 54:57

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

Jen 55:27

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

Jen 56:06

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

Jen 56:42

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

Jen 57:35

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

Jen 58:03

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

Jen 58:55

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

Jen 59:37

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

Jen 01:00:07

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

Jen 01:00:36

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

Jen 01:01:39

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

Jen 01:02:32

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

Jen 01:03:56

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

Jen 01:05:12

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

Jen 01:05:33

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

References:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graue, M.E., & DiPerna, J. (2000). Redshirting and early retention: Who gets the ‘gift of time’ and what are the outcomes? American Educational Research Journal 37(2), 509-534.

Graue, M.E. (1993). Expectations and ideas coming to school. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 8, 53-75.

Greenburg, J.E., & Winsler, A. (2020). Delayed kindergarten entry among low-income, ethnically diverse children: Prevalence, predictors, and selection patterns. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 53, 496-506.

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

Ilg, F.L., & Ames, L.B. (1964). School readiness, behavior tests used at the Gesell Institute. Scranton, PA: Harper and Row.

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

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

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

Kniffin, K.M., & Hanks, A.S. (2016). Revisiting Gladwell’s hockey players: Influence of relative age effects upon earning the Ph.D.. Contemporary Economic Policy 34(1), 21-36.

Larsen, S.A., Little, C.W., & Coventry, W.L. (2020). Exploring the associations between delayed school entry and achievement in primary and secondary school. Child Development (Online first). Retrieved from: https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.13440

Lenard, M.A., & Pena, P.A. (2018). Maturity and minorities: The impact of redshirting on achievement. Education Economics 26(6), 593-609.

Lincove, J.A., & Painter, G. (2006). Does the age that children start kindergarten matter? Evidence of long-term educational and social outcomes. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 28(2), 153-179.

Lubotsky, D., & Kaestner, R. (2016). Do ‘skills beget skills’? Evidence on the effect of kindergarten entrance age on the evolution of cognitive and non-cognitive skill gaps in childhood. Economics of Education Review 53, 194-206.

Moore, R. S. (1979). School can wait. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press.

National Assessment of Educational Progress (2020). NAEP report card: Reading. Retrieved from: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/groups?grade=4

National Assessment of Educational Progress (2020). NAEP report card: Mathematics. Retrieved from: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/nation/groups?grade=4

National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education (2000). STILL unacceptable trends in kindergarten entry and placement. Author. Retrieved from: https://www.naeyc.org/sites/default/files/globally-shared/downloads/PDFs/resources/position-statements/Psunacc.pdf

North Carolina General Assembly, Fiscal Research Division. 2007. “Highlights: Fiscal and Budgetary Actions (2007 Regular Session).

Oshima, T.C., & Domaleski, C.S. (2010). Academic performance gap between summer-birthday and fall-birthday children in grades K-8. The Journal of Education 99(4), 212-217.

Payne, T., Joseph, R.A., Yampolskaya, S., & Vatalaro, A. (2020). Florida HIPPY parents successfully prepare their children for kindergarten. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 53, 650-657.

Paul, P. (2010, August 20). The littlest redshirts sit out kindergarten. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/fashion/22Cultural.html

Pellizzari, M., & Billari, F. (2011, January 31). The younger, the better? Age related differences in academic performance at university. Journal of Population Economics 25(2), 697-739.

Redshirt (college sports) (n.d.). Retrieved October 22, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirt_(college_sports)

Repko-Erwin, M.E. (2017). Was kindergarten left behind? Examining US kindergarten as the new first grade in the wake of No Child Left Behind. Global Education Review 4(2), 58-74.

Weil, Elizabeth. 2007. “When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?” The New York Times, June 3, 2007.

Wilson, A. (2018). Pipeline to failure: Social inequality and the false promises of American Public Schooling. Unpublished Master’s Thesis. New York: The City University of New York.

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Using everyday activities as a foundation for learning

Jen Lumanlan — Sat, 26 Dec 2020 05:35:54 +0000

Have you ever observed a child setting a toy car at the top of a ramp and watching it roll down over and over again? What is it that enables a child to do this for 45 minutes at a time when they won’t sit and listen to a story for more than five minutes?

They stick with this behavior because something about it is captivating them. Think of everything the child in this scenario is learning!

The car always rolls down easily, but rolling it uphill works differently
If there’s something in front of the wheels, it will change the direction or stop the car
The car changes speeds if you push it harder
The car goes faster down the steepest part of the ramp
If something gets stuck between the wheel and the car, it won’t roll as well
Different cars roll at different speeds—heavier cars go faster

All of this just from a ramp and a toy car! By observing and following our child’s natural interests and curiosity we develop the kind of skills they really need to be successful: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence.

Motivation is critical to learning

When schools implement one standard curriculum using the same methods for all students, student motivation to learn decreases (<

Schools often try to boost motivation to learn by using extrinsic rewards (stickers! stars! grades!), but this is a short-term fix. And with schools in such disarray right now – with various combinations of in-person and Zoom-School working to a greater or lesser extent for different children – many parents are frustrated. For the first time, parents are seeing what it takes to keep a child motivated to do work that doesn’t interest them – because parents now have to provide much of this extrinsic motivation. It’s understandable that parents are concerned and looking for solutions.

The good news is that parents who are homeschooling or supplementing their child’s school-based education at home can have a substantial positive impact on their child’s motivation to learn.

The path of the Dark Horse

It might sometimes seem like there’s only one well-trodden path to success (get good grades in high school, go to college – preferably a ‘good’ one, get a white collar job, get married, buy a house, have 2.4 children…), but this is far from the truth.

According to Dr. Rose Todd Rose, whom I interviewed for the podcast, a Dark Horse is someone who uses a variety of unusual strategies like understanding their ‘micromotives’ and not worrying about their overall destination, and instead focusing on more immediate goals to create a fulfilled life.

Dark Horses usually find their ‘calling’ in mid-life – I consider myself to be a bit of a Dark Horse. I went to prestigious schools and had a career in sustainability counseling, but after I had my daughter everything changed. I went on to study psychology and education and started the podcast. I now structure the way I work to provide blocks of time interacting with people and then long stretches of time alone to think and write, which aligns well with my introversion. Now I’ve gained a lot of confidence with a method of communication that doesn’t require that I fluff my hair up beforehand I’m broadening my horizons to include video. And now I get up every morning knowing that the work I’m doing is making an incredible impact on the world. That is motivation.

It’s an entirely different definition of success; one that isn’t measurable by the traditional metrics but that I feel deeply inside.

This is one of the typical paths Dark Horses typically take—they appear successful on the outside (at the college or even mid-career level) but find themselves unfulfilled on the inside, and they make a shift.

Other future Dark Horses struggle in school and find themselves bouncing around until they finally realize what they really want to do. Once they find what really motivates them, they take-off and seem unstoppable. Dr. Rose himself dropped out of high school with a 0.9 GPA (for those of you outside the U.S., that’s a grade F). Now he has a Ph.D., teaches at Harvard, and studies the topic that drives his passion.

Tiger Parenting can get a child into an elite college, but that isn’t the only way to get there – or the only way that success should be measured either.

While I was talking with Dr. Rose, I thought: “wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could help our children identify their unique path to fulfillment and success when they’re young so they could avoid the often frustrating and painful journey that seemed common among the adult Dark Horses whom he studied?”

Child-led Learning

I think we can make this tough path to fulfillment obsolete by showing parents how they can discover and nurture their child’s uniqueness. If we can help our children find what fulfills them early in life, they can start on the path to fulfillment from the beginning. Dr. Rose agreed that this path would really be the ideal. Unfortunately, schools aren’t equipped to individualize learning in this way, and they often kill children’s creativity and curiosity.

(It’s important to note that most of the people working in education are incredibly well-meaning. Many who work inside the school system are disheartened by the current one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t allow for creativity from students, teachers, or administrators. Too often, teachers don’t have the freedom to pursue activities that expose children to ideas and experiences that aren’t specifically connected to their performance on a test.)

By following our child’s unique talents and interests rather than a curriculum, we can help them identify the path to fulfillment at a young age and eliminate the need for them to have a Dark Horse experience.

I had a classmate in middle school who was interested in music. He wanted to be a conductor. His parents weren’t musicians themselves. They were more comfortable riding horses than attending a symphony, but they supported him. They provided piano lessons and sent him to music camps. They didn’t object when as a teenager he coordinated an out of state trip for 20 high school friends to attend an opera performance in another state. Today he’s the principal conductor of an opera house. He’s had a distinguished career that he finds personally fulfilling. (And that’s not to say that following our child’s passions has to be expensive – they can rent equipment rather than buying, or find ways to trade labor for lessons.)

Our children aren’t always as clear and forthcoming with their interests and passions as my former classmate, and we don’t even know what opportunities the world may present to them when they reach adulthood. If your child is 4 years old in 2020, they will be 25 in the year 2041, and they’ll be 65 in the year 2081. The world is sure to look very different by then. Imagine if Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, tried to explain his work to someone in 1968 when he was 4 years old—it would have been unimaginable.

The opportunities available to our children – and the needs of our society – will look very different in 20 or 40 years. To continue thriving throughout life, we have to be willing and able to learn and adapt. We can prepare them to thrive in our ever-evolving world by helping them to do two things: hold a deeply intrinsic love of learning, as well as knowledge of how to learn.

Supporting Your Child’s Intrinsic Love of Learning

My goal with the Supporting Your Child’s Learning membership is to show you how to identify patterns in your child’s interests and continue helping them explore these at progressively deeper levels.

Some of you are thinking, “what if all my child is interested in is playing with toy cars? Don’t they have to learn their letters and how to count? There’s not much demand for toy car experts.” Never fear, this is actually a great place to start. We already saw how an interest in pushing cars down a ramp leads to the development of complex knowledge related to physics.

Maybe your child would like to time the different cars going down under different conditions (math! scientific method!).

Maybe they would like to write signs for the drivers – or for you, to tell you not to put their creation away (literacy!)

Maybe they become interested in the cars themselves and how they’re built (mechanics!), or how their structure has changed over the years (history!).

When you follow the child’s interests, all of this becomes not just possible, but fun. (And we’ll even help if your child is interested in everything they lay eyes on for approximately 30 seconds – and then they move on to the next thing.)

Is following my child’s interest enough?

Lots of parents worry that they need to drill their children on letters and numbers. After all, isn’t that what schools do?

While many preschools do focus on drilling letter names and sounds, counting, and learning how to hold a pencil, highly trained early childhood educators are rarely supportive of this model. They know that child-centered preschool and even school should not be filling out workbooks or memorizing letters.

They should be learning how their body works, how the world immediately around them works, and how they relate to the world. What they need is someone to scaffold their learning process.

This is exactly what you did when your child was learning to walk. You made sure the environment was safe. You shared their enthusiasm when they made progress toward their goal. You let them learn about their legs and experiment with balance—offering support if they needed it. You used a variety of techniques—sometimes you sat with them to boost their confidence, but other times you hung back and let them try on their own. You helped them feel better if they fell down and cried.

As we follow our child’s interests, there will be opportunities for them to learn more traditional subjects through the topics that interest them. If your child’s interests lead you to start a garden, you’ll be measuring the distance between plants, making signs so you know what plants you put in which location, and counting the number of seeds that sprout each day. These opportunities will happen naturally and your child will be excited about using letters and numbers to make their project a success. Your own child’s interests may lead you in a completely different direction, but whether you find yourself gardening, cooking, observing shadows, writing stories, or throwing a tea party, letters and numbers are sure to come up and your child will learn them more quickly and on a deeper level because it will be in an authentic situation.

How do I teach a child how to learn?

We’ll spend an entire module on this inside the membership. Much of it involves bringing to the surface strategies your child is already using, so they can use them again.

My daughter Carys has been interested in estimation lately, which grew out of an interest in dinosaurs. We were having a hard time picturing how long the dinosaurs were, so we measured out 25, 50, and 75 feet in our house (which is really long and narrow!) so we could ‘see’ how long a 50 foot dinosaur would have been.

Yesterday she asked me how many people live in a town, which led to a discussion about different towns and their sizes, and how we can know how many people live in one, and how street signs will estimate population sizes. Sometimes a street sign will say there are 4,239 people living in the town…but what happens when someone dies? Or twins are born? What would be a better estimate of the number of people living in the town?

Today we went to a friend’s house to relieve her overloaded lemon tree of some of its burden and when we got home, Carys excitedly told her Dad about it and estimated that there were “about 50 lemons on the tree!”

I said “Did you see what you just did? You used the estimating skill we talked about yesterday! What would have happened if you said “there were 49 lemons on the tree!”? Daddy would have thought you counted them. But when you said ‘50 lemons,’ you gave him an idea of how many lemons there were and how precise your estimate was. Now you know how to do that, you can do it next time you need it as well.”

This is called metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it’s invaluable as we teach children how to learn. It’s not that hard to do, if you have a little information on the tools and some support as you practice using them.

Joining the Supporting Your Child’s Learning Membership

In the Supporting Your Child’s Learning Membership you’ll get all the information and tools you need to make this shift. You’ll learn how to observe your child so you can learn not just about their surface-level interests, but the deep questions they’re asking about their place in the world.

You’ll be guided step-by-step through your child’s first Learning Exploration, from selecting a topic that’s likely to be successful to documenting what you (both!) learned.

And you’ll go on to look at topics like Using Nature as a Muse (even if you know nothing about the natural world right now!), how to sensitively scaffold to keep your child within their Zone of Proximal Development, how to foster the development of critical thinking skills – and developing metacognition as well.

So you get knowledge – but you also get support. The parents in our private community are curious and collaborative, and deeply invested in sharing ideas on these topics and learning from each other. In this time when we’re so cut off from connections with other parents, you’ll also find community in the small groups of up to six parents who meet for 40 minutes each week to share your successes, stumbles, and progress toward a self-defined goal and determine your next step. And you may also choose to join group coaching calls with me, where we get you unstuck from the specific challenge you’re facing.

This isn’t a curriculum, or a monthly boxed kit, or a toy subscription. I’m not going to tell you what your child should know by certain milestones. But whether you’re homeschooling, Zoom-Schooling or regular schooling, what you learn in the Supporting Your Child’s Learning Membership will help you to use your child’s interests to guide them on a life-long learning journey that is exciting, fun, and rewarding – for both of you.

Click here to learn more about the membership:

Get the resources, encouragement, and confidence you need to promote your child’s innate love of learning while still having fun – whether they are already in school and you want to complement their education or if they are homeschooling. It’s deeply aligned with your values as a parent, and you get to have fun while you’re doing it!

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108: How to cope with the Coronavirus pandemic

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 09:00:00 +0000

In this episode we discuss how to cope with parents’ and children’s fear and anxiety related to the Coronavirus pandemic, how to keep the children busy so you can get some work done (without resorting to hours of screen time), and how to use the time that you are focused on them to develop your family relationships as well as their learning, rather than you driving each other nuts.

To download a FREE sample routine to help you organize your days, and also join a FREE one-week workshop to give you the tools you need to cope with this situation, please go to yourparentingmojo.com/coronavirus

Other episodes mentioned in this show

Talk Sex Today

Understanding the AAP’s new screen time guidelines

Raising your child in a digital world

Resources

List of video conferencing companies offering free services

Geocaching website

Nature journaling videos with John Muir Laws

Jump to highlights

00:58 Introduction of episode

04:16 Difference between fear, worry, anxiety, and panic and how they impact a person

07:23 Official diagnosis of anxiety

08:36 Official diagnosis of a panic attack

10:05 What can we do to be less afraid

16:33 Difference between routine and schedule

22:48 A learning exploration

29:49 Parents worry about loneliness

39:50 Realization during the pandemic

Click here to read the full transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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099: How to parent highly sensitive children

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 22:45:00 +0000

Is your child Highly Sensitive? Does it sometimes feel as though you don’t understand them, and struggle to support them in the ways it seems they need to be supported? Or does your child experience and process things more deeply than other children, but this is the first time you’re hearing about High Sensitivity?

In this episode Dr. Michael Pluess helps us to understand how we can know whether our child is highly sensitive, and how to parent these children effectively so they can reach their full potential.

References

Aron, E. N., Aron, A., & Jagiellowicz, J. (2012). Sensory processing sensitivity: A review in the light of the evolution of biological responsivity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16, 262–282.

Aron, E. N., Aron, A., & Davies, K. M. (2005). Adult shyness: the interaction of temperamental sensitivity and an adverse childhood environment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 181-197.

Aron, E.N. (2002). The highly sensitive child: Helping our children thrive when the world overwhelms them. New York, NY: Harmony.

Aron, E. N., & Aron, A. (1997). Sensory-processing sensitivity and its relation to introversion and emotionality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 345-368.

Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2011). Differential susceptibility to rearing environment depending on dopamine-related genes: New evidence and a meta-analysis. Development and Psychopathology, 23, 39–52.

Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., Van IJzendoorn, M. H., Pijlman, F. T., Mesman, J., & Juffer, F. (2008). Experimental evidence for differential susceptibility: dopamine D4 receptor polymorphism (DRD4 VNTR) moderates intervention effects on toddlers’ externalizing behavior in a randomized controlled trial. Developmental Psychology, 44, 293-300.

Belsky, J., & Puess, M. (2013). Beyond risk, resilience, and dysregulation: Phenotypic plasticity and human development. Development and Psychopathology 25, 1243-1261.

Belsky, J., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & Van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2007). For better and for worse: Differential Susceptibility to environmental influences. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 300-304.

Bouvette-Turcot, A-A., Pluess, M., Bernier, A., Pennestri, M-H., Levitan, R., Skolowski, M.B., Kennedy, J.L., Minde, K., Steiner, M., Pokhvisneva, I., Meaney, M.J., & Gaudreau, H. (2015). Effects of genotype and sleep on temperament. Pediatrics 136(4), e914-e921.

Pluess, M. (2015). Vantage sensitivity: Environmental sensitivity to positive experiences as a function of genetic differences. Journal of Personality 85(1), 38-50.

Pluess, M. (2015). Individual differences in environmental sensitivity. Child Development Perspectives 9(3), 138-143.

Pluess, M., & Boniwell, I. (2015). Sensory processing sensitivity predicts treatment response to a school-based depression prevention program Evidence of Vantage Sensitivity. Personality and Individual Differences 82, 40-45.

Pluess, M., & Belsky, J. (2013). Vantage sensitivity: Individual differences in response to positive experiences. Psychological Bulletin 139(4), 901-916.

Pluess, M., & Belsky, J. (2011). Differential susceptibility to maternal sensitivity. Maternal Sensitivity: A critical review for practitioners, 95-107. Retrieved from http://philosonic.com/michaelpluess_construction/Files/PluessBelsky_2010_Differential%20Susceptibility%20to%20Maternal%20Sensitivity.pdf

Pluess, M. & Belsky, J. (2010). Differential susceptibility to parenting and quality child care. Developmental Psychology 46(2), 379-390.

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092: Fathers’ unique role in parenting

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 21:00:00 +0000

This episode began out of a query that I see repeated endlessly in online parenting groups: “My child has a really strong preference for me. They get on great with the other parent (usually the father, in a heterosexual relationship) when I’m not around, but when I’m there it’s all “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” This is destroying my partner; how can we get through this stage?”

So that’s where I began the research on this question, and it led me down quite a rabbit hole – I’d never thought too much about whether mothers and fathers fulfill unique roles in a child’s development and while it isn’t necessarily as prescriptive as “the mother provides… and the father provides… ,” in many families these roles do occur and this helps to explain why children prefer one parent over another. (we also touch on how this plays out in families where both parents are of the same gender).

My guest for this episode is Dr. Diana Coyl-Shepheard, Professor at California State University Chico, whose research focuses on children’s social and emotional development and relationships with their fathers.

Parenting Membership

If parenting feels really hard, and it seems like you’ve read all the books and you’ve asked for advice in free communities and you’re tired of having to weed through all the stuff that isn’t aligned with your values to get to the few good nuggets, then the Parenting Membership will help you out.

The Parenting Membership is now open for immediate enrollment. Sign up now!

Click the “Send Voicemail” button on the right >>> to record your message for the 100th episode: it can be a question, a comment, or anything else you like!

Read Full Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

Jen: 01:20

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 02:15

Thank you, Jen.

Jen: 02:17

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 02:32

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

Jen: 02:44

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 03:11

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

Jen: 04:24

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 05:03

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

Jen: 06:16

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 06:48

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

Jen: 07:24

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 07:48

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 09:07

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

Jen: 09:27

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 09:39

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

Jen: 11:02

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 11:41

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

Jen: 12:30

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 12:45

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

Jen: 13:12

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 13:43

Yeah. A rather alarming.

Jen: 13:45

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 13:59

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

Jen: 14:28

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 14:38

Yes.

Jen: 14:39

Can you just remind us what attunement is?

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 14:40

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

Jen: 15:11

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 15:32

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

Jen: 16:13

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 16:24

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

Jen: 16:34

Yeah, it was easy for you.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 16:36

I didn’t realize it was so difficult now.

Jen: 16:39

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 17:13

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

Jen: 17:48

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 18:03

Absolutely.

Jen: 18:04

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 18:13

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

Jen: 18:47

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 19:15

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

Jen: 20:17

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 20:47

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

Jen: 21:12

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 21:27

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

Jen: 21:57

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 23:10

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

Jen: 23:52

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 24:07

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

Jen: 24:12

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

Jen: 24:31

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

Jen: 25:28

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 26:06

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

Jen: 27:09

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

Jen: 27:54

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

Jen: 28:35

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 29:14

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

Jen: 30:18

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 30:33

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

Jen: 30:59

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 31:08

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

Jen: 31:32

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 31:52

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

Jen: 32:12

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 32:22

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

Jen: 32:25

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 32:50

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

Jen: 33:57

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 34:03

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

Jen: 34:27

Oh, interesting.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 34:28

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

Jen: 34:39

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 35:03

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

Jen: 35:54

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 36:12

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 37:06

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

Jen: 37:47

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 38:04

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

Jen: 38:42

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 38:51

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

Jen: 39:24

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 39:48

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

Jen: 40:28

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 41:06

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

Jen: 41:50

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 42:01

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

Jen: 42:25

Yeah, that a bath is not scary.

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 42:27

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

Jen: 42:37

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 43:07

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

Jen: 43:18

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 44:19

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

Jen: 44:57

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 45:26

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

Jen: 46:17

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 46:55

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

Jen: 47:33

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

Jen: 47:55

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

Dr. Coyl-Shepherd: 48:07

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

Jen: 48:10

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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090: Sensory processing disorder

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 12 May 2019 18:00:00 +0000

This episode comes to us courtesy of my friend Jess, whose daughter has Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) and who is on a mission to make sure that as many parents as possible learn about it. She says that every time she describes it to a parent they realize that they know someone who exhibits behavior that looks like SPD that warrants following up.

I have to say that I was highly ambivalent about doing this episode, because I don’t usually deal with topics that result in medical diagnoses as I’m (obviously) not a doctor. But the more I looked into this the more I realized that helping parents to understand the mess of research on this topic is exactly the kind of thing that I usually do on this show, and that an episode on this topic could probably be useful to a number of you.

And here’s the love letter to John McPhee that I mention in the episode

Read Full Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today’s episode on Sensory Processing Disorder comes to you courtesy of my friend Jess, and I’m going to tell you a little about Jess and her daughter as a way to introduce the topic. Jess told me that her daughter likely had a mini-stroke either in utero or during birth that affected the left side of her body, and Jess figured this out around the time her daughter was 10 months old. So her daughter started physical therapy for that, but Jess still felt as though something wasn’t quite right, and while she already had a pediatrician, physical therapist, and neurologist, six months or so of Jess being (in her words) “a crazy parent,” along with the support of her mother who happens to be a pediatric physical therapist, to convince her daughter’s support team that something wasn’t right, and finally her daughter was evaluated for sensory processing disorder. Her daughter received occupational therapy treatment and is now doing very well.

Jess realized that if she hadn’t been especially vocal, and if she hadn’t had her own mother’s expert support, then it’s possible that her daughter’s issues would have gone undiagnosed. Jess told me she has started talking with anyone who will listen about this topic and whenever she mentions it a lightbulb goes off with whomever she is talking with about either a child in their lie or a friend of a friend who is having similar issues, so she asked me to do an episode on it so more people could learn about it.

Now I have to say that as much as I love Jess I did hesitate before taking this on. I don’t usually deal with topics that result in medical diagnoses because I’m obviously not a doctor or a psychiatrist. But the more I looked into this the more I realized that helping parents to understand the mess of research on this topic is exactly the kind of thing that I usually do on this show, and that an episode on this topic could probably be useful to a number of you. So, to reiterate, I am not a doctor or a psychiatrist, and this episode is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. In fact, for reasons we’ll get into in the episode, it’s actually kind of difficult for a doctor to diagnose as well. So we’ll talk about diagnoses, and about the efficacy of treatment for SPD, and finally about how to chart a path forward if you suspect that your child may have difficulties processing sensory information.

So let’s get into it! For those of you who haven’t heard of it before, what is sensory processing disorder, and where did it come from? The research in this field was pioneered by Dr. A. Jean Ayres, who was an occupational therapist active from the 1960s to the 1980s. Dr. Ayres’ classic book is called Sensory Integration and the Child, and was re-released in 2005 in a 25th anniversary edition. In the book, Dr. Ayres describes sensory integration, which is the organization of our senses, which give us information about the physical conditions of our body and the environment around us. She says that the brain has to organize all of these sensations if a person is to move and learn and behave in a productive way – for example, by making your eyes, nose, mouth, skin, muscles, and joints work together to peel and eat an orange, and that an adaptive response to a sensory experience is a purposeful and goal-directed one. When we have an adaptive response we master a challenge and learn something new. Until the child is about 7, they are primarily a sensory processing machine – they sense things and respond, without having many abstract thoughts and ideas. Dr. Ayres says that the brain’s mental and social functions in the later years are based on this foundation of sensorimotor processes, and if sensorimotor processes are well organized in the first 7 years, the child will have an easier time learning mental and social skills later on.

Dr. Ayres died in 1989, and Dr. Lucy Jane Miller has carried the flag on this work. Dr. Miller is the director of the Sensory Therapies and Research Center in Denver, Colorado, and has written her own book called Sensational Kids: Hope and Help for Children with Sensory Processing Disorder. In Dr. Miller’s book she shifts Dr. Ayres’ original six syndromes of sensory integration dysfunction into three main “pattern types” with a number of subtypes.

Pattern Type 1 is Sensory Modulation Disorder (SMD), and results when a person has difficulty responding to sensory input with behavior that is appropriate to the degree, nature, or intensity of the sensory information. Dr. Miller’s book describes SMD as having three main subtypes, although her own peer-reviewed research has only found support for two of these – sensory seeking, and sensory underresponsivity.

In Subtype 1, Sensory Overresponsivity (so the one that doesn’t have peer-reviewed research support), people respond faster, with more intensity, or for a longer duration than people with typical sensory responsivity. It may occur in only one sensory system (like not wanting to be touched) or in multiple systems. Difficulties are most often seen in new situations and during transitions, and the responses may appear as willful behavior, seemingly logical, and inconsistent. For example, a child with this subtype may not be able to tolerate being jostled as coats are being put on at preschool for the transition to outdoor play, and may lash out at another child in response. Behavior may also result from cumulative stresses, so the jostle while putting coats on might just trigger the response that has built up as a result of a whole morning of being jostled and touched through normal interactions.

People with Subtype 2, Sensory Underresponsivity, disregard or do not respond to sensory stimuli. A child may seem apathetic, lethargic, and lacking an inner drive to socialize and explore. They might not notice bumps, falls, or cuts, or extreme eat or cold, and may be labeled ‘lazy’ or ‘unmotivated.’ As an infant, the child might have been considered a ‘good baby’ or an ‘easy child’ but when they become older they may not be able to maintain enough arousal to participate in family or school life.

People with Subtype 3, Sensory Seeking/Craving, crave an unusual amount or type of sensory input, possibly including spicy food, loud noises, visual stimulation, and constant spinning, which can lead to socially unacceptable or unsafe behavior and can be perceived as demanding or attention-seeking. They may become explosive or aggressive when they are unable to meet their sensory needs – for example, when they are asked to sit still and be quiet at school. This subtype can be confused with, and even co-occur with, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

People with Pattern 2, Sensory Discrimination Disorder, have trouble interpreting qualities of sensory stimuli and tell how they are similar and different; this characteristic may be present in just one or more than one sense. SDD in the tactile, vestibular, and proprioceptive systems, which tell you where your body is in the world, results in awkward motor abilities. SDD in the visual or auditory systems can lead to learning or language disabilities.

There are two sub-types to Pattern 3, which is Sensory-Based Motor Disorder. In Subtype 1, Postural Disorder, the person has difficulty stabilizing the body during movement or at rest. The child may have low muscle tone, inadequate control of muscles and movement, and poor balance.

In Subtype 2, Dyspraxia, the person has difficulty conceiving of, planning, sequencing, and executing actions. They may appear awkward and poorly coordinated in their gross motor skills like running and jumping, fine motor skills like drawing and painting, or oral-motor skills like chewing and swallowing. They seem unsure where their body is in space, have trouble with ball sports, and any actions involving coordinated timing.

Where does SPD come from? Dr. Ayres herself acknowledged that we don’t really know what causes SPD, but she goes on to make quite a variety of speculations. She says “Many people think that the increase in environmental toxins, such as air contaminants, destructive viruses, and other chemicals that we take into our bodies may contribute to the dysfunction,” without offering a shred of supportive evidence from these “many people.” She hypothesizes that hereditary and chemical factors may be combined in some children, and that genetic factors in certain children may allow environmental toxins to interfere with sensory integrative development. Some babies do not get enough oxygen at birth, which may affect brain function, and that children who lead very deprived lives – like the children in the Romanian orphanages from the 1980s who had very little human contact – don’t develop adequate sensory, motor, or intellectual functions. But lest you start blaming yourself for your child’s problems, she goes on to say that most of the children with minor irregularities in brain function have had normal sensory experiences, and their parents or guardians did do a good enough job of raising them to allow for good brain development so the parents did not deliberately or accidentally produce the dysfunction.

When I was researching this episode I got a question in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group about whether there’s any evidence about how children’s diets impact their sensory processing, and I have to say that this view is VERY popular in the online community groups related to SPD but I’m afraid there is zero evidence whatsoever in the peer-reviewed research, or even in the books by Dr. Ayres and Dr. Miller, that implicates children’s diets in causing or worsening SPD. The only potential connection I could see is that a child may be unwilling to eat if they find the textures of some foods to be difficult to deal with, but there is zero evidence that SPD is caused by gluten intolerance or eggs or sugar or food coloring or any other kind of food.

I want to put a couple of side notes in at this point. Firstly, I’m also looking at doing an episode on Dr. Elaine Aron’s work on Highly Sensitive People, and in one of her papers Dr. Aron actually expressly makes the distinction that being a Highly Sensitive Person is different from Sensory Processing Disorder. In her book The Highly Sensitive Child, Dr. Aron says that many parents have told her they have found sensory integration to be helpful for their highly sensitive children, but she doesn’t think that being sensitive as she defines it is a problem to be treated, much less cured.

Secondly, a couple of listeners have been in touch about unintegrated reflexes, and since the topic has a bit of an overlap with this one I’d like to address that here too. All babies have reflexes – one of the more famous ones is the Moro reflex which is when the infant spreads their arms and hands out and then pulls them in, usually while crying, when they feel they’re falling. In most infants this reflex goes away, which we call becoming “integrated,” by around four or five months of age but in some children this reflex doesn’t become integrated and the child will still produce it when they feel like they’re falling. There is quite a bit of evidence showing that unintegrated reflexes are *correlated* with a variety of developmental disabilities, but I’m afraid that’s pretty much where the evidence ends on this topic. It’s a bit hard to get your head around because nobody seems to have done any kind of meta-analysis to synthesize the results except the Wisconsin Department of Health Services which briefly reports that this therapy remains an “untested treatment, as there are no studies that have tested its effectiveness. There is no evidence to suggest that it is harmful.” Also, the main figure doing the research is Dr. Svetlana Masgutova is the creator of the Masgutova Neurosensorimotor Integration Method® and she’s also done a good chunk of the research on the effectiveness of the eponymous method. Unfortunately, methodological problems abound in the paper she’s done that’s most relevant to us, which is on the use of the Nurosensorimotor Integration Method in treating symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder. In that study she trated 484 children with autism, but the control groups were only 72 children with Autism who weren’t treated, and 483 children with neurotypical development. A more robust methodology would have compared the treated children with a much larger group of children who received comparable attention from a therapist and traditionally accepted treatment to compare the reflex integration treatment with traditional treatment, rather than with no treatment. It’s well-known that just attention from a therapist can produce a therapeutic effect even when the treatment itself doesn’t have any effect at all. And the results produced changes in reflex patterns, which were correlated with improvements in cognitive abilities, but since there’s no mention in the study of the children being randomly assigned to treatment or control groups, we can’t say with any certainty that the treatment *caused* these improvements. So that’s that.

And while we’re on the topic of co-morbidity, which is two or more chronic diagnoses in the same individual, some authors estimate that the majority of children with autism spectrum disorders have SPD, although not all children with SPD have autism.

SPD is also very difficult to diagnose, and this topic brings me to the part of the episode where I’m not going to just recite what Dr. Miller and Dr. Ayres say but bring a bit more of a critical perspective. SPD is actually not included in the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is abbreviated as DSM-V, which is the standard diagnostic guide for psychological diagnoses, although I should acknowledge that what makes it into the DSM is as much a political issue as a diagnostic one – the first and second editions of the DSM included homosexuality as a mental disorder and it wasn’t removed until 1973. Dr. Ayres developed a Sensory Integration and Praxis test which has been described as “the most comprehensive and statistically sound means for assessing some important aspects of sensory integration, most notably praxis and tactile discrimination,” but apparently five of the 17 subtests are unstable, which means that the same child is likely to get different results each time they are tested. Dr. Ayres reported that scores on the test were different for children with and without learning disabilities, although subsequent analyses of her work showed there were actually no reliable differences between the scores of children with and without learning disabilities, which is a pretty big problem.

The American Academy of Pediatrics published a position paper in 2012 stating “it remains unclear whether children who present with findings described as sensory processing difficulties have an actual “disorder” of the sensory pathways of the brain (and I will note, Dr. Ayres says they do), or whether these deficits represent differences associated with other developmental and behavioral disorders. Specifically, the behavioral differences seen in children with autism spectrum disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and developmental coordination disorders overlap symptoms described in children with sensory processing disorders. Studies to date have not demonstrated that sensory integration dysfunction exists as a separate disorder distinct from these other developmental disabilities. Furthermore, numerous challenges exist for evaluating the effectiveness of sensory integration therapy, including the wide spectrum of symptom severity and presentation, lack of consistent outcome measures, and family factors, which make response to therapy variable.” The APA officially recommends that “At this time, pediatricians should not use sensory processing disorder as a diagnosis.” Dr. Miller’s team published a paper in 2014 describing the development of a new scale to diagnose SPD, but it focused on only some of the sub-types and the study was conducted on only 20 children, and only 10 of those actually had a developmental disorder, with the other 10 being typically developing children in a comparison group. Dr. Miller does acknowledge that “the standardization of a reliable and valid scale to assess SPD is essential for the field to move forward” but at the moment, we don’t have one.

So I want to set this issue of diagnosis aside for a bit and talk about prevalence and treatment, because that is, after all, how we got here in the first place – after occupational therapy was successful for my friend Jess’ daughter.

The most widely cited study on the prevalence of SPD was conducted by Dr. Miller and her colleagues, where the researchers sent surveys out to the parents of one suburban public school asking about whether their children exhibit symptoms of SPD. Only 39% of the parents responded, and the researchers were conservative in assuming that none of the parents who didn’t respond who had children who had these symptoms, and based on this they came up with a prevalence rate of 5.3%. If you assume that the children of the non-responding parents had symptoms at the same rate as the responding parents then the prevalence rate goes up to 13.7%. Of course, there are a variety of problems with this – firstly, that this is a suburban school district of mostly white, middle class parents who may be more likely to look for symptoms in their children and report these to a set of researchers. The second problem is that 39% of parents from one school really is a pretty low response rate to base this kind of determination on, even if you are going to assess the results conservatively. Thirdly, the researchers didn’t make any attempt to study comorbidity, which is the concept of having more than one infliction at once, and as we already know SPD has a LOT of symptoms in common with other potential diagnoses. And, finally, there’s the predictable issue we see with so much other research on this show – we see a heavily caveated result in a paper that gets grasped by other researchers and reported as if it were fact: for example, a 2013 paper reports that “Mental health practitioners, however, may have limited information or understanding of [SPD]. This is concerning, as [the disorder] is estimated to occur in 5% of the general population (Ahn et al. 2004), equating to three million children in the United States (United States Census Bureau 2008).” Another set of researchers report that “In fact, Ahn, Miller, Milberger, and McIntosh found that 5-15% of children in the general population of kindergarten-age children demonstrate difficulties with sensory modulation” when in fact it would be irresponsible to generalize from those few white children in suburban Colorado to the entire “general population” of children. Further, the researchers never actually met with any of the children to determine if they did have SPD – they just asked parents, most of whom probably knew nothing at all about SPD, whether their children might have symptoms that *could* point to SPD – or could point to a number of other disorders as well. I could ask the parents of my daughter’s preschool class how often their children report having stomach aches and perhaps 100% of them would report their children saying this every day, but that doesn’t mean the incidence of stomach cancer – which has stomach pain as a symptom – is 100% in my daughter’s classroom. As such, this 5-15% number that gets quoted in the literature with alarming frequency – even by Dr. Miller herself, who really should know better – has little basis in fact.

A subsequent study conducted in 2011 in New Haven, CT asked a reasonably representative sample of parents of children in the city whether their children were “bothered by” things like tags in clothing, cutting finger or toe nails, hair brushing, mud, alarms, sirens, or concerts. The researchers found that 16.5% of children were bothered by at least four tactile or auditory sensations, although once again the researchers made no attempt to relate being bothered by sensations to an actual assessment for SPD.

As we move on to treatment, I’m afraid the picture gets even worse – at least, on the research front. But let’s hear from Dr. Ayres first on a description of what treatment for SPD looks like. She says that the central idea of sensory integration therapy is to provide and control sensory input, especially the input from the vestibular system, muscles and joints, and skin in such a way that the child spontaneously forms the adaptive responses that integrate these sensations. Making this idea work with a child who has a sensory integrative disorder requires a skilled therapist and a large room with a lot of simple yet specialized equipment. When the therapist is doing her job effectively and the child is organizing his nervous system, it looks as if the child is merely playing. Life is full of paradoxes; this is one of them. The general idea is that children want to experience certain sensations and initiates an activity to get those sensations. The brain is designed to give itself the experiences that are necessary for its own development. The therapist’s job is to provide the right kind of activity (so the child gets the right kind of experience) and the right level of challenge so the child is able to try and succeed without getting too frustrated. The therapy itself may appear…surprising. The therapist might put the child between two mats to make a “hamburger”, and the therapist presses down on the child, pretending to put ketchup, mustard, relish, and all kinds of condiments on the “hamburger” to provide deep pressure sensations, and that children will often come out of this activity calmer and better organized than before. The therapist may offer activities that press the bones in a joint together, or ask the child to hang from monkey bars or climb up a rock wall to stimulate the sensory receptors in the joints. The child might sit or stand on a motor-driven vibration board to send impulses to the vestibular system. They might play “net hockey,” which is where the child and the therapist lie in nets suspended from the ceiling bout 10 feet apart and close enough to the floor to push themselves around with their hands, and then hit a soft ball around with plastic hockey sticks, which generates a variety of vestibular input as he figured out the placement of his body and watched the ball and stick. The child might play on a “helicopter,” where two children spin in separate seats and spin around, and then might choose to use the Play Buoy which is a plastic buoy that can move freely along two ropes about 15 feet long. Organizing sight to see the buoy coming and the arms to push it can be difficult for children with SPD but the idea is that their brain has been primed with vestibular input from the hockey and helicopter games and the child will then be able to process the sensations and movements of the Play Buoy more effectively than they would have been able to otherwise. The child might play hide and seek, which gives the child a feeling of mastery over both space and other people. Outside of the therapy sessions, parents and teachers might ask the child to do what’s called “heavy work,” which consists of pushing, pulling, or carrying heavy things. Dr. Ayres reports that a child using this kind of therapy might see improvements after just a couple of months, because the child has a strong inner drive to seek the stimuli they need and is able to follow their own internal directions. The therapy works especially well with young children, whose brains are very plastic and changeable, to develop new connections between neurons, and for older children it may make it easier to transmit messages between neurons. Dr. Ayres acknowledges that some children may have problems that are so severe that we don’t have the knowledge needed to treat them, or perhaps we can’t determine the nature of the problem with enough clarity to design an effective program for that child. Sometimes the problem is in a part of the brain that is less dependent upon organizing sensations, and these children may profit more from other kinds of therapy.

Unfortunately Dr. Ayres’ writing doesn’t tell us much about the efficacy of this therapy, probably mostly because she was pretty much writing the theory as she was figuring it out back in the ‘60s, so there just wasn’t any research on whether it was effective. More research has been conducted in the intervening years but even though the 25th anniversary edition of Dr. Ayres’ book contains a contemporary expert commentary on each chapter, the commentary on the Assessment and Intervention chapter studiously avoids mentioning any peer-reviewed research on the efficacy of this treatment. And there’s probably good reason for this – there is little peer-reviewed research showing that it is effective.

One of the most popular treatments for SPD is known as the Wilbargers’ protocol after the clinicians who developed it, which includes what is known as a sensory diet of prescribed activities, as well as brushing with what is essentially a scrubbing brush using deep pressure three times a day for six weeks by their parents at home. Even though the authors conducted a literature review and lamented the methodological constraints present in previous studies on this topic they went on to recruit just five participants themselves, all of them male, and one of the five children started refusing the brushing after two weeks but because the mother wanted to be included in the study the researchers went ahead and included this child’s results. The intervention was found to be effective, but given the tiny sample size and the absence of any kind of control group, this study has to be considered exploratory at best.

A study using a convenience sample of 10 children, mostly males, found that a therapeutic music listening program using music that had been processed using filters to create disruptions in the sound that apparently ‘exercises’ the muscles in the middle ear. The children showed on average a statistically significant improvement in scores on a test of sensory processing as well as parent reports of child behavior, although the small sample size is again concerning, along with the wide variety of diagnoses of the children who were studied, and the fact that the music therapy was combined with other sensory therapies, make it difficult to draw strong conclusions.

Dr. Miller and some colleagues did a pilot study on the effectiveness of occupational therapy for children with sensory modulation disorder and achieved mixed results; they got statistically significant results on some criteria but not on others, which may have been because of the tiny sample size of 24 children – only eight of whom received treatment. Because this study was a pilot it was never intended to reach full scale to achieve definitive conclusions, but it was published in 2007 and I was unable to find a subsequent study scaling the results. The authors themselves note that “One likely reason that many previous studies found no signiﬁcant changes from occupational therapy is that the outcome measures used were not sensitive enough to detect changes. Because previous literature does not present pilot testing of instrumentation, researchers unknowingly replicate each other’s work. Outcomes research in OT-SI, therefore, is continually relegated to pilot research rather than research that moves forward and has the potential to change practice.” These impacts are compounded when you start looking at meta-analyses of endless pilot research projects with tiny sample sizes and results with low statistical power.

A 2014 meta-analysis of 27 studies over a 37-year period found a great deal of variability in the research, with potential positive outcomes in sensorimotor skills and motor planning, socialization, attention, behavioral regulation, reading-related skills, participation in active play, and achievement of individualized goals – but were severely hampered by small sample sizes, variable doses of treatment, failing to deliver the treatment as planned, and the selection of outcomes that may not be meaningful to clients and families (like IQ tests or the involuntary movements the eyes make after you spin around, which may be clinically interesting but doesn’t make much difference in the child’s or family’s life) or may not change with the amount of treatment provided. Because SPD has so many sub-types it can help us to understand the impact of treatment better if the treatment is provided to only research participants who only have that particular sub-type so you can weed out the problems of interactions with other subtypes, but that’s very difficult to do in practice and leads to a lot of variability in the response to treatment. Virtually all of the studies had very low statistical power, meaning that if a control group receiving attention from a therapist but no actual treatment was used (which wasn’t always the case), that there usually wasn’t a large difference between the two groups after the treatment period. It’s possible that a positive effect could be found if the researchers would look at more children in each study; 12 of the studies did analysis on less than 20 participants; the largest one had 78 participants and the smallest one had just five. I find it very frustrating that we *continue* to see research hampered by this issue. It seems like such an easy thing to fix – yes, it costs more to have more participants but you’d think the benefits in terms of not having to do the same research over and over again would outweigh the costs.

The typical way of doing a meta-analysis in this field seems to be to do a really wide search of more than 11,000 article abstracts, screen the results for quality, and then conduct the final analysis on the eight studies that meet the researchers’ inclusion criteria. One study that used this methodology looked at treatments like Qigong massage, weighted vests, slow swinging, and incorporation of multisensory activities into preschool routines. Strong evidence was found to support Qigong massage, although this was for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder rather than SPD specifically. Limited evidence supported weighted vests in one randomized controlled study of 30 children, and there was insufficient evidence to draw conclusions on the swinging and multisensory activities, due to the poor methodology in the original studies.

One meta-analysis on just the effectiveness of the Wilbarger protocol started with 300 studies but ended up analyzing only four, found that the sample sizes in these studies ranged from 1-4 participants with no justification provided in any study for the size of the sample; all used convenience sampling to recruit from local occupational therapy clinics; all participants were boys, and in the one study where the single participant was compared with a single control, the participants were randomly allocated to treatment and control interventions but the person giving the treatment knew which boy was in which condition which could have impacted the results. All researchers trained parents to do the brushing but didn’t ask whether the mother had adhered to the prescribed schedule of brushing or not. The meta-analysis concluded that there isn’t enough evidence to support or refute the use of the Wilbarger protocol with children, or to be able to generalize the results of these studies to other populations.

Another meta-analysis doesn’t tell us how many articles the researchers initially screened but says they ended up with 50 articles, emphasizing results from work accomplished in the last 15 years, but “some older papers were included because they are considered key in the field of neuroplasticity” – in other words, the researchers cherry-picked some older studies that would support their conclusions. The vast majority of the high quality studies were conducted on animals, usually rodents, with many of the lower quality studies with weaker designs also using animals but some were done with humans; almost always adults rather than children. Despite the problems with extrapolating from animal studies to outcomes that are actually significant for patients and families, the researchers concluded that their review “provides direct and robust support for neuroplasticity in many brain regions in response to environmental conditions or direct sensory input.”

A pretty new meta-analysis published at the beginning of 2018 identified 11,619 potential citations and abstracts to study, and then whittled this number down until five studies remained, one of which was conducted by one of the authors of the meta-analysis. The usual tiny sample sizes, confounding with other conditions as all children in all of the studies coincidentally also had autism, problems in understanding whether the treatment protocol was actually adhered to, and mixed results were somehow lost in the finding that “the evidence is strong that [sensory integration therapy] demonstrates positive outcomes for improving individually generated goals of functioning and participation as measured by Goal Attainment Scaling for children with autism.” One of the meta-analysis’ authors, Dr. Roseann Schaaf, has written elsewhere about Goal Attainment Scaling as a way to measure outcomes – it consists of the therapist and parent working together to define minimal, intermediate, and desired outcomes of therapy at the beginning of treatment that progress can then be measured against. I can see the relevance of this in the individual’s treatment plan, and it’s certainly a step above the therapist asking the parent whether the parent thinks the child is better which is the way results are gathered in some studies on this topic, but it does seem to be problematic when you’re attempting to generalize results to a much larger population that the efficacy of treatment is essentially decided by the therapist and parent rather than assessed using any standardized measure.

Moving beyond the meta-analyses, I want to tell you about a chapter I read on Sensory Integration Therapy in a book called Controversial Therapies for Autism and Intellectual Disabilities. These researchers clearly have an anti-sensory integration therapy agenda, but their position is extremely well-referenced using high-quality sources. They start out by noting that “A major limitation in Sensory Integration theory, however, is the dearth of reliable evidence for its main tenet, which is the integration of sensory input is necessary for high-level cognitive functioning.” In fact, In Dr. Lucy Miller’s book the source she cites on this topic is a researcher named Hebb who published a relevant paper in 1995, but when I went to find it I realized it was actually a paper published in 1955 that described Hebb’s untested hypothesis that “there will be an optimal level of arousal for effective behavior.” But it turns out that there is no current scientific basis for this idea. Some neuroscientists who reviewed Dr. Ayres’ work and state that: “In her classic work, Sensory Integration and the Child, Jean Ayers concludes that the symptoms reflected in Sensory Integration Disorder “are the end products of inefficient and irregular sensory processing in the brain.” She does not, however, address the significance of specific brain–behavior relationships, including the possible interactive roles of the neocortex, the basal ganglia, and cerebellum. Instead the theory of SID is based upon a pyramid of sensory, cognitive, and behavioral systems that places tactile, vestibular, and proprioceptive systems at the base, above which are the distal senses of vision and audition, while the complex sensorimotor, cognitive, and behavioral systems are found at the highest levels. While this model might make intuitive sense, the brain–behavior relationships inherent in this view of the brain’s organization have not been established. Accordingly, while the symptoms that comprise the criteria for Sensory Integration Disorder, Sensory Processing Disorder, and Sensory Modulation Disorder are common and real, the conditions lack clear operational definitions and they are poorly understood from an anatomic point of view.” The neuroscientists conclude that the symptoms of SPD probably can be classified within a neuroscientific knowledge base neuroscientists collaborate with occupational therapists to better understand the relationships between brain and behavior but I can’t find any indication that this work is underway – there’s certainly no mention of it on Dr. Miller’s Sensory Therapies and Research Center’s website.

The skeptical book chapter goes on to wonder why, given the dearth of evidence about the efficacy of sensory integration therapy, practitioners continue to recommend it and parents continue to seek it out. The authors argue that three factors contribute to continued belief in its therapeutic value – first, practitioners promise vague benefits that are difficult to test. Second, they contend that these benefits occur because the treatment corrects a central, underlying deficit. And third, the research may give providers and families the impression that the therapy “can’t hurt” and may be worth a try even if benefits are unlikely to occur. The authors cite comments from Dr. Ayres’ book to back up each of these assertions, and state that the main reasons not to use this therapy are that it may distract families from focus on educational and therapeutic practices that could actually be helpful. If it is helpful, the lack of quality in the research base doesn’t allow us to know whether it’s helpful because of the specific treatment, or because of the attention the child gets from the therapist, or because they enjoy skipping school to go to therapy. If some aspect of the treatment has produced benefits for their child then individual parents may not care why, but it would be a whole lot faster and cheaper to implement an intervention that involves playing with your child 1:1 for an hour than diagnosing a disorder and implementing therapy if it turned out that attention was the driver of the improvement. For these reasons, the insurance company Aetna maintains a web page of information related to sensory integration therapy that describes the therapy as experimental and investigational with unproven effectiveness which – I assume – means it isn’t covered by insurance. I’ve heard that some insurance companies do cover it, and some school districts apparently provide this treatment as well.

So, as you can imagine, all of this leaves me in an a rather uncomfortable position, having been asked by my friend to do this episode on a therapy that has apparently helped her daughter but concluding from the research that it’s not clear how or why or even if it was the therapy itself that helped.

This may seem like a bit of a digression but actually it won’t end up being one: As I was in the middle of writing this episode our family went on a camping trip to see the spring wildflowers in Southern California and since I only had writing to do rather than reading, I grabbed a book from my shelf to take on the trip for evening reading. Believe it or not I don’t get a lot of time these days to read anything that isn’t related to child development but John McPhee’s book Assembling California caught my eye so that’s what I took with me.

As a side note, those of you who already love John McPhee are thinking “of COURSE Jen loves John McPhee too” and if you love John McPhee and you haven’t read the love letter about him that Sam Anderson wrote in the New York Times Magazine a couple of years ago then you really must go and find that in the references. Those of you who haven’t heard of him yet should browse McPhee’s titles and find something that seems even vaguely interesting to you, and watch as his amazing writing draws you in to learn about orange farming or life as a merchant marine or the geology of California. The book I picked out, Assembling California, is told through a series of interactions with geologist Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes of the University of California Davis, who went to grad school in the 1950s before the theory of plate tectonics had been fully explained so McPhee asked Deffeyes what Deffeyes had been taught about how mountains were formed. Deffeyes had learned a couple of different theories; that either the earth’s skin contracted by shriveling up like the skin of an apple and the wrinkles became mountains, or that there were deep troughs in the ocean called geosynclines that filled up with sediments and after enough had collected and become rock it would rebound like a huge log coming up from underwater. It turned out that there was a lot of truth in geosyncline theory – you could use this knowledge to find gold, silver, antimony, and oil. And there are rocks in the mountains that were formed under the oceans. But it wasn’t until plate tectonics came along that it all started to make sense and we realized what parts of the previous theories we should keep and which we should discard.

And read that chapter I realized it held a parallel with the research on SPD. Even the skeptics agree that some children have problems processing information from their senses; the problems arise in our attempts to understand why these occur and to separate them well enough that we can see how potential treatments impact them. The earth’s plates were moving around all along, whether or not we knew how to describe it, and we may find that children have had sensory processing difficulties all along even though we can’t fully describe it. Or it’s possible that once we understand the underlying neurological mechanisms better that SPD will get subsumed under autism spectrum disorders and other diagnoses that come with sensory processing difficulties just as we know geosynclines do exist, even though they don’t explain the entirety of how mountains are formed. Unfortunately, given that the research to actually help us understand SPD is moving slower than plate tectonics, this may not be of much practical help you to you today if you suspect that your child may have sensory processing difficulties.

If you do suspect this, then Dr. Miller’s book Sensational Kids is probably the most helpful in terms of describing a series of children moving through their days that is likely to make you say “my child TOTALLY does that” which can help you to talk with your child’s pediatrician about a potential course of action. Dr. Ayres’ book is helpful too, but from a less case-study based and more descriptive approach. Since many pediatricians likely haven’t heard of SPD, you may find it to be an uphill struggle to convince them that there is anything wrong with your child, just like my friend Jess did.

If you are able to see an occupational therapist who is able to determine that your child does exhibit symptoms associated with SPD then given the state of the research on the effectiveness of treatment, I think you would be safely within your bounds to decline it if you felt the therapist was not convincing in describing the potential benefits to you. If you did decide to proceed, then you should work with the therapist to define goals for your child’s behavior – for example, the number of times the child will get up out of their seat during story time at preschool. You might decide to ask your child’s teachers to count the number of times your child gets up during story time every day for a week, and then proceed with treatment for a period of time and count the number of times the child gets up again. The child getting up is just an example; the actual variable you measure will depend on the child’s particular challenges. You should set an agreement with the therapist by when you should expect to see progress, and do not be afraid to stop the treatment then if you aren’t seeing adequate progress. It’s unfortunate that the state of the research forces parents to have to develop their own scientific study to see if the treatment is working, but hopefully this will change in the future. I have to confess that it makes me feel a little squeamish to reduce the human experience to expressed behavior but in this case it seems as though changes in behavioral expression is the only way we can know whether or not any underlying mechanisms are being affected.

So that’s where we are with the research on SPD. To summarize, I and many experts believe that some children have problems processing sensory inputs. Whether this is a specific diagnosable condition or whether it is a symptom of other diagnosable conditions remains to be seen. Given the dearth of evidence for the efficacy of treatment it would not be irresponsible of you to decline treatment if the therapist is unable to convincingly articulate its benefits but if you do proceed with treatment, you may want to approach it like a scientific study and set goals against which progress will be measured, and these goals should be ones that are meaningful for your child’s and your family’s experience, rather than being ones that are clinically interesting but otherwise irrelevant to you and your child. I hope this helps those of you with children who struggle with processing sensory input to determine a path forward that is right for your child and your family.

References for today’s episode can be found at yourparentingmojo.com/spd

References

Aetna. (2018). Sensory and auditory integration therapy. Author. Retrieved from http://www.aetna.com/cpb/medical/data/200_299/0256.html

American Academy of Pediatrics (2012). Sensory integration therapies for children with developmental and behavioral disorders. Pediatrics 129, 1186-1189.

Anderson, S. (2017, September 28). The mind of John McPhee: A deeply private writer reveals his obsessive process. The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/magazine/the-mind-of-john-mcphee.html

Aron, E.N., Aron, A., & Jagiellowicz, J. (2012). Sensory processing sensitivity: A review in the light of the evolution of biological responsivity. Personality and Social Psychology Review 16(3),262-282.

Aron, E.N. (2002). The highly sensitive child: Helping our children thrive when the world overwhelms them. New York, NY: Three Rivers.

Ayres, A.J. (2005). Sensory integration and the child: Understanding hidden sensory challenges. Los Angeles, CA: Western Psychological Services.

Bhopti, A., & Brown, T. 92013). Examining the Wilbargers’ deep pressure and proprioceptive technique for treating children with sensory defensiveness using a multiple-single-case study approach. Journal of Occuaptional Therapy, Schools, & Eaerly Intervention 6(2), 108-130.

Bodison, S.C., & Parham, L.D. (2018). Specific sensory techniques and sensory environmental modifications for children and youth with sensory integration difficulties: A systematic review. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy 72(1), 1-7.

Gieysztor, E.Z., Choinska A.M., & Paprocka-Borowicz, M. (2018). Persistence of primitive reflexes and associated motor problems in healthy preschool children. Archives of Medical Science 14(1), 167-173.

Hall, L., & Case-Smith, J. (2007). The effect of sound-based intervention on children with sensory processing disorders and visual-motor delays. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy 61(2), 209-215.

Hebb, D.O. (1955). Drives and the C.N.S. The Psychological Review 62(4), 243-254.

Hoehn, T.P., & Baumesiter, A.A. (1994). A critique of the application of sensory integration therapy to children with learning disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities 27, 338-351.

May-Benson, T.A., & Koomar, J.A. (2010). Systematic review of the research evidence examining the effectiveness of interventions using a sensory integrative approach for children. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy 64(3), 403-414.

James, K., Miller, L.J., Schaaf, R. Nielsen, D.M., & Schoen, S.A. (2011). Phenotypes within sensory modulation dysfunction. Comprehensive Psychiatry 52, 715-724.

Konicaraova, J., & Bob, P. (2013). Asymmetric tonic neck reflex and symptoms of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder in children. International Journal of Neuroscience 123(11), 766-769.

Konicarova, J., Bob, P., & Raboch, J. (2013). Persisting primitive reflexes in medication-naïve girls with attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 9, 1457-1461.

Koziol, L.F., Budding, D.E., & Chidekel, D. (2011). Sensory integration, sensory processing, and sensory modulation disorders: Putative functional neuroanatomic underpinnings. The Cerebellum 10(4), 770-792.

Lane, S.J., & Schaaf, R.C. (2010). Examining the neuroscience evidence for sensory-driven neuroplasticity: Implications for sensory-based occupational therapy for children and adults. The American Journal of Occupational therapy 64(3), 375-390.

Mailloux, Z., May-Benson, T.A., Summers, C.A., Miller, L.J., Brett-Green, B., Burke, J.P., Cohn, E.S., Koomar, J.A., Parham, L.D., Roley, S.S., Schaaf, R.C., & Schoen, S.A. (2007). Goal attainment scaling as a measure of meaningful outcomes for children with sensory integration disorders. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy 61(2), 254-259.

Masgutova, S., Akhmatova, N., Sadowska, L., Shackleford, P., & Akhmatov, E. (2016). Progress with neurosensorimotor reflex integration for children with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Neurology and Psychology 4(2), 14.

McPhee, J. (1993). Assembling California. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

McPhillips, M., Hepper, P.G., & Mulhern, G. (2000). Effects of replicating primary-reflex movements on specific reading difficulties in children: A randomized, double-blind, controlled trial. The Lancet 355, 537-541.

McPhillips, M., & Sheehy, N. (2004). Prevalence of persistent primary reflexes and motor problems in children with reading difficulties. Dyslexia 10, 316-338.

Miller, L.J. (2006). Sensational kids: Hope and help for children with sensory processing disorder (SPD). New York, NY: Putnam.

Miller, L.J., Anzalone, M.E., Lane, S.J., Cermak, S.A., & Osten, E.T. (2007). Concept evolution in sensory integration: A proposed nosology for diagnosis. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy 61(2), 135-140.

Miller, L.J., Nielsen, D.M., Schoen, S.A., & Brett-Green, B.A. (2009). Perspectives on sensory processing disorder: A call for translational research. Frontiers in integrative neuroscience. Volume 3(22), 1-12.

Miller, L.J., Coll, J.R., & Schoen, S.A. (2007). A randomized controlled pilot study of the effectiveness of occupational therapy for children with sensory modulation disorder. The American Journal of Occupationoal Therapy 61, 228-238.

Schaaf, R.C., Dumont, R.L., Arbesman, M., & May-Benson, T.A. (2018). Efficacy of occupational therapy using Ayres Sensory Integration®: A systematic Review. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy 71(1), 1-10.

Schaaf, R.C., & Lane, A.E. (2015). Toward a best-practice protocol for assessment of sensory features in ASD. Journal of Autism and Development Disorders 45, 1380-1395.

Schoen, S.A., Miller, L.J., & Sullivan, J.C. (2014). Measurement in sensory modulation: The Sensory Processing Scale Assessment. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy 68(5), 522-530.

Smith, T., Mruzek, D.W., & Mozingo, D. (2015). Sensory integration therapy. In R.M. Foxx & J.A. Mulick (Eds). Controversial Therapies for Autism and Intellectual Disabilities (2nd Ed.) (pp.247-269). New York, NY: Routledge.

Taylor, M., Houghton, S., & Chapman, E. (2004). Primitive reflexes and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Developmental origins of classroom dysfunction. International Journal of Special Education 19(1), 23-37.

Walbam, K.M. (2013). The relevance of sensory processing disorder to social work practice: An interdisciplinary approach. Child & Adolescent Social Work Journal 31, 61-70.

Weeks, S., Boshoff, K., & Stewart, H. (2012). Systematic review of the effectiveness of the Wilbarger Protocol with children. Pediatric Health, Medicine and Therapeutics 3, 79-89.

Wisconsin Department of Health Services (2015, April 24). Treatment intervention advisory committee review and determination: Determination of Masgutova Method or Masgutova Neurosensorymotor Reflex Integration as a proven and effective treatment for individuals with autism spectrum disorder and/or other developmental disabilities. Author. Retrieved from https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/tiac/masgutovanri.pdf

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068: Do I HAVE to pretend play with my child?

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 08 Jul 2018 21:00:00 +0000

Pretty regularly I see posts in online parenting groups saying “My child loves to pretend, and they always want me to participate. I dare not tell anyone else, but I CAN’T STAND PRETEND PLAY. What should I do?”

In this final (unless something else catches my interest!) episode in our extended series on play, Dr. Ansley Gilpin of the University of Alabama helps us to do a deep dive into what children learn from pretend play, and specifically what they learn from fantasy play, which is pretend play regarding things that could not happen in real life (like making popcorn on Mars).

We’ll discuss the connection between fantasy play and children’s executive function, the problems with studying fantasy play, and the thing you’ve been waiting for: do you HAVE to do fantasy play with your child if you just can’t stand it (and what to do instead!)

If you missed other episodes in this series, you might want to check them out: we started out asking “what is the value of play?”, then we looked at the benefits of outdoor play and talked with Dr. Scott Sampson about his book How to Raise a Wild Child. We wrapped up with outdoor play by trying to understand whether we should allow our children to take more risks.

References

Bergen, D. (2013). Does pretend play matter? Searching for Evidence: Comment on Lillard et al. (2013). Psychological Bulletin 139(1), 45-48.

Buchsbaum, D., Bridgers, S., Weisberg, D.S., & Gopnik, A. (2012). The power of possibility: Causal learning, counterfactual reasoning, and pretend play. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 367. 2202-2212.

Carlson, S.M., White, R.E., & Davis-Unger, A.C. (2014). Evidence for a relation between executive function and pretense representation in preschool children. Cognitive Development 29, 1-16.

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Read Full Transcript

Transcript

Jen: [00:38]

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

Jen: [01:24]

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

New Speaker: [01:57]

Thank you for having me.

Jen: [01:59]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [02:06]

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

Jen: [02:45]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [02:56]

Pretty much. Fantasy play as a type of pretend.

Jen: [02:59]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [04:14]

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

Jen: [05:42]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [06:29]

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

Jen: [07:32]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [08:17]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [09:16]

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

Jen: [10:36]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [11:33]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [12:28]

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

Jen: [13:46]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [13:58]

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

Jen: [14:15]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [14:19]

Yes, it is a longitudinal follow up.

Jen: [14:22]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [15:12]

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

Jen: [15:48]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [16:01]

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

Jen: [16:59]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [17:16]

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

Jen: [17:22]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [17:24]

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

Jen: [18:21]

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

Jen: [19:25]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [19:45]

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

Jen: [20:30]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [20:35]

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

Jen: [21:16]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [21:21]

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

Jen: [22:12]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [22:13]

But fascinating.

Jen: [22:16]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [22:23]

We did.

Jen: [22:23]

Okay.

Dr. Gilpin: [22:24]

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

Jen: [22:52]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [23:05]

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

Jen: [23:34]

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

Jen: [24:25]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [25:10]

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

Jen: [25:17]

Of course. Yes, of course.

Dr. Gilpin: [25:19]

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

Jen: [25:24]

Yes.

Dr. Gilpin: [25:25]

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

Jen: [26:02]

They really don’t.

Dr. Gilpin: [26:02]

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

Jen: [26:27]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [27:06]

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

Jen:[27:15]

Let’s make the laundry fly to the moon!

Dr. Gilpin: [27:17]

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

Jen: [27:28]

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

Jen: [28:22]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [29:11]

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

Jen: [30:32]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [30:39]

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

Jen: [30:50]

Yeah, mine went through that.

Dr. Gilpin: [30:50]

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

Jen: [32:08]

Wow.

Dr. Gilpin: [32:10]

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

Jen: [32:17]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [32:32]

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

Jen: [33:00]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [33:04]

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

Jen: [33:10]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [33:14]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [33:23]

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

Jen: [33:29]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [33:34]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [34:24]

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

Jen: [34:39]

Whoa.

Dr. Gilpin: [34:39]

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

Jen: [35:02]

Okay. So not something to worry about then?

Dr. Gilpin: [35:05]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [35:10]

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

Jen: [35:40]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [36:01]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [36:04]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [36:35]

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

Jen: [37:07]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [37:09]

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

Jen: [38:21]

Or finding it useful in some way?

Dr. Gilpin: [38:22]

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

Jen: [38:47]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [39:52]

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

Jen: [40:18]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [40:20]

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

Jen: [41:04]

In a day?

Dr. Gilpin: [41:05]

In a day.

Jen: [41:07]

And how old are these children?

Dr. Gilpin: [41:07]

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

Jen: [41:49]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [42:00]

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

Jen: [42:33]

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

Jen: [43:22]

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

Jen: [44:04]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [44:40]

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

Jen: [45:34]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [46:40]

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

Jen: [47:26]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [47:49]

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

Jen: [48:05]

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

Dr. Gilpin: [48:13]

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

Jen: [48:20]

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

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053: Sleep! (And how to get more of it)

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 21:00:00 +0000

“HOW DO I GET MY CHILD TO SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT?!” is the thinly-veiled message under the surface of many of the emails that I get about sleep. And I don’t blame you. I don’t claim to be a magician in this regard, although I did get incredibly, amazingly lucky – my daughter put in her first eight-hour night at six weeks old, and has regularly slept through the night for longer than I can remember. I’m really genuinely not sure I could parent if things weren’t like this.

But today’s episode is about the data, not about anecdata.

Zoe in Sydney wrote to me:

A hotly debated topic with my friends has been “sleeping through the night.” My daughter never was great at napping and still wakes up once a night, coming into our bed. We have never been able to do controlled crying etc – I would love to know what science says about sleeping through the night! And what is best for your child (vs the parent). My close friend is a breastfeeding counselor and said they are taught that lots of children don’t sleep through until 4 years old! Other mothers I knew were horrified if their child wasn’t sleeping through by 6 months – and the French talk about their children ‘having their nights’ much earlier…

As I started researching this topic it became clear that sleep is driven to an incredible extent by cultural preferences. Some (Western) psychologists advocate for letting children Cry It Out, while people in many cultures around the world see putting a child to sleep in their own room (never mind allowing them to cry) as tantamount to child abuse.

So: can we get our children to sleep more? Is bed-sharing inherently bad? Does Cry It Out harm the child in some way? Let’s find out!

References

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Bernier, A., Carlson, S. M., Bordeleau, S., & Carrier, J. (2010). Relations between physiological and cognitive regulatory systems: Infant sleep regulation and subsequent executive functioning. Child Development, 81, 1739–1752.

Blampied, N.M. (2013). Functional behavioral analysis of sleep in infants and children. In A. Wolfson & H. Montgomery-Downs (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of infant, child, and adolescent sleep and behavior. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.

Burnham, M.M. (2013). Co-sleeping and self-soothing during infancy. In A. Wolfson & H. Montgomery-Downs (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of infant, child, and adolescent sleep and behavior. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.

Chess, S., & Thomas, A. (1984). Origins and evolution of behavior disorders. New York, NY: Brunner/Mazel.

Crncec, R., Matthey, S., & Nemeth, D. (2010). Infant sleep problems and emotional health: A review of two behavioral approaches. Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology 28(1), 44-54.

Ferber, R. (1985). Solve your child’s sleep problems. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

France, K.G. (1991). Behavior characteristics and security in sleep-disturbed infants treated with extinction. Journal of Pediatric Psychology 17(4), 467-475.

Gaddini, R. (1970. Transitional objects and the process of individuation: A study in three different social groups. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 9(2), 347-365.

Germo, G.G., Goldberg, W.A., & Keller, M.A. (2009). Learning to sleep through the night: Solution or strain for mothers and young children? Infant Mental Health Journal 30(3), 223-244.

Giannotti, F., & Cortesi, F. (2009). Family and cultural influences on sleep development. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America 18(4), 849-861.

Hale, L., Parente, V., & Phillips, G.K. (2013). Social determinants of children’s sleep. In A. Wolfson & H. Montgomery-Downs (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of infant, child, and adolescent sleep and behavior. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.

Healey, D., France, K.G., & Blampied, N.M. (2009). Treating sleep disturbances in infants: What generalizes? Behavioral Interventions 24, 23-41.

Hiscock, H., Bayer, J., Gold, L., Hampton, A., Okuomunne, O.C., & Wake, M. (2006). Improving infant sleep and maternal mental health: A cluster randomized trial. Archives of Disease in Childhood 92, 952-958.

Hupp, S., & Jewell, J. (2014). Great myths of child development. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

Jenni, O.G., & O’Connor, B.B. (2005). Children’s sleep: An interplay between culture and biology. Pediatrics 115(1), 204-216.

Lushington, K., Pamula, Y., Martin, J., & Kennedy, J.D. (2013). The relationship between sleep and daytime cognitive/behavioral functioning: Infancy and preschool years. In A. Wolfson & H. Montgomery-Downs (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of infant, child, and adolescent sleep and behavior. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.

McKenna, J.J., Ball, H.L., & Gettler, L.T. (2007). Mother-infant cosleeping, breastfeeding, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: What biological anthropology has discovered about normal infant sleep and pediatric sleep medicine. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 50, 133-161.

Meleva-Seitz, V.R., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J., Battaini, C., & Luijk, M.P.C.M. (2015). Parent-child bed-sharing: The good, the bad, and the burden of evidence. Sleep Medicine Reviews. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298427230_Parent-child_bed-sharing_The_good_the_bad_and_the_burden_of_evidence

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Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and style of behaving and the demands and the

expectations of the environment are in accord. Such consonance

between organism and environment potentiates optimal

positive development. Should there be a dissonance between

capacities and characteristics of the organism on the

one hand and the environmental opportunities and demands

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

functioning and distorted development.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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052: Grit: The unique factor in your child’s success?

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 21:00:00 +0000

In Professor Angela Duckworth’s TED talk, she says of her research: “One characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn’t social intelligence. It wasn’t good looks, physical health, and it wasn’t IQ. It was grit.”

The effusive blurbs on the book cover go even beyond Professor Duckworth’s own dramatic pronouncements: Daniel Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness, says: “Psychologists have spent decades searching for the secret of success, but Duckworth is the one who has found it…She not only tells us what it is, but how to get it.”

Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking (which we’ve looked at previously in an episode on supporting your introverted child) says: “Impressively fresh and original…Grit scrubs away preconceptions about how far our potential can take us…Buy this, send copies to your friends, and tell the world that there is, in fact, hope. We can all dazzle.”

Don’t we all want to dazzle? Don’t we all want our children to dazzle? Is grit the thing that will help them do it?

It turns out that Professor Duckworth’s own research says: perhaps not. Listen in to learn how much grit is a good thing, how to help your child be grittier, and why it might not be the factor that assures their success.

Other episodes mentioned in this show

How to support your introverted child

Why you shouldn’t bother trying to increase your child’s self-esteem

References

Crede, M., Tynan, M.C., & Harms, P.D. (2017). Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113(3), 492-511.

Del Giudice, M. (2014, October 14). Grit trumps talent and IQ: A story every parent (and educator) should read. National Geographic. Retrieved from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141015-angela-duckworth-success-grit-psychology-self-control-science-nginnovators/

Denby, D. (2016, June 21). The limits of “grit.” The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-limits-of-grit

Duckworth, A.L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M.D., & Kelly, D.R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92(6), 1087-1101. Full article available at https://www.ronaldreaganhs.org/cms/lib7/WI01001304/Centricity/Domain/187/Grit%20JPSP.pdf

Duckworth, A.L., & Yeager, D.S. (2015). Measurement matters: Assessing personal qualities other than cognitive abilities for educational purposes. Educational Researcher 44(4), 237-251.

Duckworth, A.L. (2016). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. New York, NY: Scribner. (Affiliate link)

Eskreis-Winkler, L., Shulman, E.P., Young, V., Tsukayama, E., Brunwasaser, S.M., & Duckworth, A.L. (2016). Using wise interventions to motivate deliberate practice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 111(5), 728-744.

Farrington, C.A., Roderick, M., Allensworth, E., Nagoka, J., Keyes, T.S., Johnson, D.W., & Beechum, N.O. (2012). Teaching adolescents to become learners: The role of noncognitive factors in shaping school performance: A critical literature review. The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research. Retrieved from https://consortium.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Noncognitive%20Report.pdf

Forsyth, D.R., & Kerr, N.A. (1999, August). Are adaptive illusions adaptive? Poster presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Boston, MA.

Hannon, B. (2014). Predicting college success: The relative contributions of five social/personality factors, five cognitive/earning factors, and SAT scores. Journal of Educational and Training Studies 2(4), 46-58.

Heckman, J.J. (2013). Giving kids a fair chance (A strategy that works). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kamenetz, A. (2016, May 25). MacArthur ‘genius’ Angela Duckworth responds to a new critique of grit. NPR. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/05/25/479172868/angela-duckworth-responds-to-a-new-critique-of-grit

Kapoor, M.L. (2017, June 27). 12 books expelled from Tucson schools. High Country News. Retrieved from http://www.hcn.org/articles/education-tucsons-mexican-american-studies-ban-goes-back-to-court

Kohn, A. (2014). Grit: A skeptical look at the latest educational fad. Author. Retrieved from http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/grit/

No byline. (1998, March 15). Weddings; Jason Duckworth, Angela Lee. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/15/style/weddings-jason-duckworth-angela-lee.html

Sparks, S.D. (2015, June 2). ‘Nation’s Report Card’ to gather data on grit, mindset. Education Week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/06/03/nations-report-card-to-gather-data-on.html

The Leadership Conference. (2015, May 5). Civil rights groups: “We oppose anti-testing efforts.” Author. Retrieved from https://civilrights.org/civil-rights-groups-we-oppose-anti-testing-efforts/

The Learning Project Elementary School. Website. Author. Retrieved from http://www.learningproject.org/

The Nation’s Report Card (n.d.). Percentage of fourth-grade students at or above Proficient not significantly different compared to 2013. Author. Retrieved from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_2015/#reading/acl?grade=4

Tough, P. (2016). Helping children succeed: What works and why. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Useem, J. (2016, May). Is grit overrated: The downsides of dogged, single-minded persistence. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/is-grit-overrated/476397/

Zernike, K. (2016, February 29). Testing for joy and grit? Schools nationwide push to measure students’ emotional skills. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/01/us/testing-for-joy-and-grit-schools-nationwide-push-to-measure-students-emotional-skills.html?_r=0

Read Full Transcript

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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050: How to raise emotionally healthy boys

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 22:19:00 +0000

“Be a man.” “Boys don’t cry.” “Don’t be a sissy.”

Boys hear these things all the time – from parents, from teachers, from friends and peers. What does it do to their emotional lives when they crave close relationships but society tells them to keep emotional distance from others?

Join my guest Alan Turkus and me as we quiz Dr. Judy Chu, who lectures on this topic at Stanford and was featured in the (awesome!) documentary The Mask You Live In.

This episode is a must-listen if you’re the parent of a boy, and may even help those of you with girls to understand more about why boys and men treat girls and women the way they do.

Don’t have a boy? Check out How To Raise A Girl With A Healthy Body Image.

References

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chu, J. When boys become boys: Development, relationships, and masculinity. New York, NY: NYU Press. (Affiliate link)

Maccoby, E.E. (1990). Gender and relationships: A developmental account. American Psychologist 45(4), 513-520.

Miedzian, M. (1991). Boys will be boys: Breaking the link between masculinity and violence. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Pollack, W. (1998). Real boys: Rescuing our sons from the myths of boyhood. New York, NY: Random House.

Read Full Transcript

Transcript

Jen: [00:40]

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

Alan: [01:42]

Thank you.

Jen: [01:44]

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

Dr. Chu: [02:28]

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

Jen: [02:31]

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

Dr. Chu: [03:11]

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

Dr. Chu: [04:01]

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

Dr. Chu: [04:45]

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

Jen: [05:24]

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

Dr. Chu: [05:27]

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

Jen: [06:24]

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

Dr. Chu: [06:43]

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

Dr. Chu: [07:29]

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

Dr. Chu: [08:14]

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

Dr. Chu: [09:00]

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

Jen: [09:37]

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

Dr. Chu: [09:46]

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

Dr. Chu: [10:24]

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

Dr. Chu: [11:22]

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

Dr. Chu: [12:08]

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

Jen: [12:44]

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

Alan: [12:55]

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

Jen: [13:16]

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

Alan: [13:21]

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

Jen: [13:51]

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

Dr. Chu: [13:56]

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

Jen: [14:35]

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

Dr. Chu: [14:45]

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

Dr. Chu: [15:52]

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

Jen: [16:15]

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

Dr. Chu: [16:24]

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

Alan: [17:13]

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

Dr. Chu: [17:31]

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

Dr. Chu: [18:16]

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

Dr. Chu: [19:00]

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

Dr. Chu: [19:41]

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

Dr. Chu: [20:30]

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

Jen: [20:58]

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

Alan: [21:03]

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

Jen: [21:06]

Okay. What have you seen?

Alan: [21:09]

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

Jen: [21:51]

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

Dr. Chu: [22:32]

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

Dr. Chu: [23:09]

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

Dr. Chu: [23:53]

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

Dr. Chu: [24:35]

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

Dr. Chu: [25:17]

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

Jen: [25:50]

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

Alan: [25:58]

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

Alan: [26:52]

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

Dr. Chu: [27:42]

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

Dr. Chu: [28:30]

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

Dr. Chu: [29:33]

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

Dr. Chu: [30:16]

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

Jen: [30:55]

Probably.

Dr. Chu: [30:56]

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

Jen: [31:25]

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

Dr. Chu: [31:35]

Right.

Jen: [31:35]

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

Jen: [32:10]

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

Dr. Chu: [32:29]

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

Jen: [33:02]

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

Dr. Chu: [34:34]

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

Jen: [35:08]

Cashew ice cream!

Dr. Chu: [35:08]

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

Dr. Chu: [36:03]

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

Dr. Chu: [36:45]

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

Dr. Chu: [37:28]

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

Dr. Chu: [38:08]

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

Jen: [38:44]

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

Dr. Chu: [39:22]

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

Alan: [40:47]

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

Alan: [41:58]

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

Dr. Chu: [43:07]

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

Dr. Chu: [43:54]

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

Jen: [44:49]

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

Alan: [44:57]

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

Dr. Chu: [45:34]

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

Dr. Chu: [46:13]

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

Dr. Chu: [46:53]

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

Jen: [47:40]

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

Alan: [47:44]

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

Dr. Chu: [48:36]

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

Dr. Chu: [49:18]

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

Jen: [49:53]

He knows!

Dr. Chu: [49:54]

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

Dr. Chu: [50:42]

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

Dr. Chu: [51:24]

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

Dr. Chu: [52:02]

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

Dr. Chu: [52:48]

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

Jen: [53:34]

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

Dr. Chu: [53:50]

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

Jen: [54:43]

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

Alan: [54:56]

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

Jen: [54:58]

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

Dr. Chu: [55:12]

Absolutely. It’s my pleasure.

Jen: [55:13]

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

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039: What to do when your toddler says “No, I don’t wanna…!”

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 21 May 2017 21:00:00 +0000

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

But today’s episode is for me, and you guys are just along for the ride. Because, friends, we are in the thick of what I now know to be called “oppositional defiance,” otherwise known as “Noooo! I don’t wanna [insert activity here]”. We’ll discuss why toddlers are defiant, and lots of strategies we can use to deal with that defiance and even head it off at the pass. If your child has ever said “No!” to something you want them to do, this episode is for you!

Other episodes mentioned in this show

020: How do I get my child to do what I want them to do?

022: How to talk so little kids will listen (Author interview)

References

Dix, T., Stewart, A.D., Gershoff, E.T., & Day, W.T. (2007). Autonomy and children’s reactions to being controlled: Evidence that both compliance and defiance may be positive markers in early development. Child Development 78(4), 1204-1221.

Dunn, J., & Munn, P. (1986). Sibling quarrels and maternal intervention: Individual differences in understanding aggression. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 27, 583-595. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.1986.tb00184.x

Eyberg, S. M., Nelson, M. M., & Boggs, S. R. (2008). Evidence-based psychosocial treatments for children and adolescents with disruptive behavior. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 37, 215-237. doi: 10.1080/15374410701820117

Grolnick, W.S. (2012). The relations among parental power assertion, control, and structure. Human Development 55, 57-64. DOI: 10.1159/000338533

Grusec, J. E. (2012). Socialization and the role of power assertion. Human Development, 55, 52-56. doi: 10.1159/000337963

Kaler, S. R., & Kopp, C. B. (1990). Compliance and comprehension in very young toddlers. Child Development, 61, 1997-2003. doi: 10.2307/1130853

Knowles, S.J. (2014). The effectiveness of mother’s disciplinary reasoning in response to toddler noncompliance (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Oklahoma State University. Full copy available at: https://shareok.org/bitstream/handle/11244/25670/Knowles_okstate_0664D_13688.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Kuczynski, L. (1984). Socialization goals and mother-child interaction: Strategies for long-term and short-term compliance. Developmental Psychology 20(6), 1061-1073.

Langer, E., Blank, A., & Chanowitz, B. (1978). The mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action: The Role of “Placebic” Information in Interpersonal Interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(6), 635-642.

Read Full Transcript

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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015: How to support your introverted child

Jen Lumanlan — Sun, 04 Dec 2016 21:00:00 +0000

Do you think your child may be introverted? Or are you not sure how to tell? Around one in three people are introverted so if you have two or three children, chances are one of them is introverted. While Western – and particularly American – society tends to favor extroverts, being an introvert isn’t something we can – or should – cure. It’s a personality trait, not a flaw.

Join me as we walk through a topic near and dear to my heart, and learn the difference between introversion and shyness, and how to support your introverted child – no matter whether you yourself are introverted or extroverted.

References

Aron, E.N. (1996). Are you highly sensitive? Retrieved from: http://hsperson.com/test/highly-sensitive-test/

Belsky, J., Jonassaint, C., Pluess, M., Stanton, M., Brummett, B., & Williams, R. (2009). Vulnerability genes or plasticity genes? Molecular Psychiatry 14, 746-754. DOI: 10.1038/mp.2009.44

Cain, S. (2013). Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking. New York: Broadway.

Dobbs, D. (2009). The science of success. The Atlantic. Retrieved from: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-science-of-success/307761/

Kagan, J., & Snidman, N. (2004). The long shadow of temperament. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Keogh, B.K. (1986). Temperament and schooling: Meaning of “Goodness of Fit”? In J.V. Lerner and R.M. Lerner (Eds). Temperament and social interaction in infancy and children. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

Laney, M.O. (2002). The introvert advantage: How to thrive in an extrovert world. New York: Workman.

Markway, B.G., & Markway, G.P. (2005). Nurturing the shy child: Practical help for raising confident ans socially skilled kids and teens. New York: St. Martin’s.

McCrae, R.R., & Terracciano, A. (2006). National character and personality. Current Directions in Psychological Science 15(4), 156-161.

Pluess, M., & Belsky, J. (2009). Differential susceptibility to rearing experience: The case of childcare. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 50(4), 396-404. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2008.01992.x

Pluess, M., & Belsky, J. (2010). Differential susceptibility to parenting and quality child care. Developmental Psychology 46(2), 379-390. DOI: 10.1037/a0015203

Similarminds.com (a version of Eysenck’s Personality Inventory). Retrieved from: http://similarminds.com/eysenck.html

Swallow, W.K. (2000). The shy child: Helping children triumph over shyness. New York: Warner.

Swann, W.B. & Rentfrow, P.J. (2001). Blirtatiousness: Cognitive, behavioral, and physiological consequences of rapid responding. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81(6), 1160-1175. DOI: 10.1037//0022-35I4.81.6.1160

Thomas, A., & Chess, S. (1977). Temperament and development. New York: Brunner/Mazel.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we get started today I’d like to take a few minutes to chat with you about the podcast. Firstly, I’d like to thank you so much for listening to the show. I’ve been really honored over the last few weeks since I started the show to hear from so many of you about how much the show is helping you in your parenting. Because at the end of the day, I’m getting a masters degree in Psychology focusing on child development to be a better parent myself, and to help you be better parents as well. There’s just too much good information out there about how this whole parenting thing works for us to kind of bumble along and not know any better. And I put myself in the same boat as you here; I’m literally learning this stuff with you as I go. I don’t always handle things in the best way but when I learn better I do better, and I forgive myself for having done things “the old way.” I’m growing and becoming a better parent because of what I’m learning with you, and I’m honored that those of you who have left me reviews on iTunes and have written to me and told me how much the show is helping you are finding it useful too. So I have a four (yes, four!) specific favors to ask of you. Firstly, if you enjoy this episode, and especially if you’ve enjoyed several episodes, please subscribe to the show so you don’t miss an episode. Because I’m learning in the same way that you are we often build one episode on top of another. I regularly refer back to the episode on scaffolding, for example, and if you’ve already listened to that one then you’ll be able to follow right along as I describe how to scaffold behavior in a certain situation in the episode related to tantrums. You can subscribe on iTunes or if you go to YourParentingMojo.com you get a little freebie for signing up – a list of seven relationship-based strategies that I use to support my daughter’s development – and also make parenting just a little bit easier on me. Secondly, while you’re over on iTunes, I’d love it if you would leave a rating and write a review of the show. It doesn’t have to be super long; just decide how many stars you think it’s worth (five is always a good numberJ) and jot down a couple of lines about what you think about the show. Shows that have more ratings and reviews appear higher in the iTunes listings, which will encourage more people to listen, which makes me happy. Thirdly, if you know of other parents who could benefit from learning what we’re learning, please let them know about the show. Send them a link in an email or put it up on your Facebook or twitter feed (if you’re on twitter you can find me at A kid is for life). And finally, I really do love hearing from listeners, especially if you have an idea for a topic for the show. If you do, then please drop me a line at jen@yourparentingmojo.com and if there’s enough scientific research available on the topic then I’ll do an episode just for you. Also drop me a line if you have any other feedback for me or would just like to chat.

Alright, on to today’s topic, which is called “how to support your introverted or shy toddler.” Unlike the episode I did recently on tantrums, which was mainly for you guys since we haven’t struggled with them too much, this episode is very personal to me. I have a triple whammy of personality characteristics that are socially undesirable (in the U.S. at least) – I’m an introvert, I’m shy, and I’m also a highly sensitive person (and I never even knew the last one was a “thing” until a few weeks ago).

Since my daughter is only two and is in the stage where children tend to play alongside each other rather than *with* each other it can be a bit difficult to tell which personality traits are really hers and which are just a function of her current stage of development. But I’m starting to see some signs of introversion and shyness, so I wanted to get a handle on the research not so much so I can diagnose her, but more so I know what to watch for and how I can support her, because American culture is very much geared toward the success of extroverts. Somewhere between a third and half of the population in this country may be introverted so if you have two or three children then chances are one of them is introverted. Listen on to hear more about how introversion and shyness are not the same thing, and what the research says about how we can support our introverted and shy children.

I got the idea for this episode after I read the book “Quiet” by Susan Cain. I’ve known I’m an introvert for a long time – I took classes in Psychology after finishing high school in England and we took Eysenck’s personality inventory – there’s a link to a free online version you can take yourself in the references for this episode – and I was basically off-the-charts introverted. So I’d heard of the book “Quiet” when it was published in 2012 but didn’t pay it much attention because I figured I didn’t need to be diagnosed – I already knew I was introverted. But someone recommended it to me as an example of a book that makes scientific research very accessible to a non-scientific audience, so I read it from that perspective – and I ended up learning a lot about myself in the process.

The first point that I want to make is a very important one, and that is that introversion and shyness are not the same thing. Because it is so important and kind of non-intuitive, I’m going to say it again – introversion and shyness are not the same thing. The basic meaning of an introvert is that it’s a person who gets their energy from being in environments that provide low levels of stimulation, which often means being alone rather than being with other people, whereas extroverts find being in environments with high levels of stimulation, like when there are a lot of other people around, very energizing. Introverts might have good social skills and can participate in parties and events but after a while they wish they were at home tucked up on the sofa with a cup of tea and a good book. Susan Cain lists characteristics of introverts in the book. Some of these are that they prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk but enjoy deep discussions. The part of this that caught my attention was that I hadn’t realized my introversion affected parts of how I deal with the world that aren’t directly related to going to parties. While I often have five or six books on the go at once (virtually all of them child development books these days!), I do prefer to dig deeply into one. And I work in consulting, where it’s common for someone to call a meeting and show you some powerpoint slides and get you to react to it immediately, whereas I would really prefer them to send the deck in advance so I can take notes and have some time to process before I give my thoughts.

So what’s the difference between introversion and shyness? The book “Quiet” says that while introversion is a preference for environments that aren’t overstimulating, shyness is a fear of social disapproval or humiliation. Shyness is inherently painful, while introversion is not. A lot of people get them confused because they overlap to some extent; I’d always thought that my shyness is part of my introversion. But it’s possible to be a shy extrovert (like Barbara Streisand who has a massive stage presence and apparently awful stage fright), or a non-shy introvert (like Bill Gates, who prefers his own company but isn’t afraid of the disapproval or humiliation of others that is the hallmark of shyness). And a key point is that while shyness and introversion are very different to the person experiencing them, to the outside world they look much the same. A shy person may be afraid to talk to other people at a party while an introvert may just be overstimulated – but the other people at the party can’t tell which it is, and all they see is someone who isn’t interested in talking, and thus must not be very interesting themselves either. Or maybe they’re just stuck up. Or both. What makes shyness “painful” and problematic is that it can get in the way of achieving things that we want to do. I might wish I could go to a networking event to advance my career, but maybe I’m too afraid of what people there would think about me. In that case, my shyness is getting in the way of something I want to achieve, especially if I’m looking for a new job.

I was actually surprised that there is a decent amount of research available on introversion and shyness, and quite a bit of it is longitudinal which is even more surprising – it’s pretty unusual for researchers to follow children for any length of time because it makes a study so expensive. It seems as though most of the research on both introversion and shyness in children eventually comes back to the work of two doctors named Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, who worked out of the New York University Medical Center from the 1950s through the 1970s. Their study is considered to be a classic assessment of the idea of temperament, which underlies many other personality traits like introversion and shyness. We have to take their results with a bit of a grain of salt because while 141 children is quite a lot for one study it isn’t much compared to the population of children in the world, or a country, or even New York – and these children were drawn from 85 families, 78% of which were Jewish, the rest Protestant or Catholic, with 60% of the fathers and 40% of the mothers having both college and postgraduate degrees. The researchers don’t say *why* their population was so homogenous but they did attempt to validate the findings using a sample of 85 low-income children in Puerto Rico some years later. Thomas and Chess identified nine dimensions of temperament which they grouped into three major categories. “Easy” children were characterized by having regular bodily functions like sleeping and bowel movements; they were adaptable, usually in a positive mood, and would approach rather than withdraw in a new situation. The “difficult” child was described as having irregular bodily functions, not very adaptable, withdrawing rather than approaching in new situations, intense, and often irritable or fussy. The third category was the “slow to warm up” child who seemed much like an easy child except that he would initially withdraw in response to a new situation and would be slow to adapt but would come around eventually. About 35% of the children in the study didn’t fit into one of these patterns. Of the remaining 65%, 40% were classified as “easy,” 10% were “difficult,” and 15% were “slow to warm up.”

The famous psychologist Jerome Kagan moves the research one step further by doing some tests on 500 White infants (although he doesn’t say what religion they were) at age 4 months, 2 years, 4 years, 7 years, and 11 years of age, with the sample size dropping to 237 children by the time they were 11 years old. The central thesis of the study was that in the test at four months, children who kicked their arms and legs around or cried when they were presented with unusual things to look at, hear, and smell did this because they had inherited a trait that made a certain part of their brains very excitable. About 20% of the children did pump their arms and legs and cried, and these children were called “high-reactive.” 40% of the children showed the opposite pattern- minimal arm and leg movements and no crying – these were called “low-reactive.” 25% didn’t move around but did cry a lot and were called “distressed.” 10% moved around a lot but didn’t cry; these children were called “aroused.” And the remaining 5% of children were difficult to classify. The theory goes that children whose brains quickly become highly stimulated (which is indicated when they move around and cry) will seek out situations where they don’t get too much stimulation – in other words, they will become introverts. And the children whose brains need more stimulation before they get to an optimal level of arousal become extroverts, because they need more stimulation, both social and non-social, to get to that optimal level. Now I should note that Jerome Kagan is interested in the biological basis of temperament, and even he acknowledges that your genetic predisposition to prefer or avoid stimuli is not your destiny. About 33% of the high and low-reactive children displayed the pattern of behavior they were “supposed to” as predicted by their infant temperament when they were interviewed at age 11, while 16% behaved in ways that were inconsistent with expectations – a ratio of 2-1, but much less than 100%. The researchers noticed that the infants who had been high-reactive were mostly serious and didn’t smile at every one of the assessments from 4 months to 11 years. More low reactives smiled and laughed frequently at every age. Many low-reactives, but few high-reactives, smiled and laughed within the first minute of entering the lab at 11 years of age, and smiling at 11 years was predicted by smiling at two years. So if not all of the high-reactive children become introverts, what’s going on? It’s called the moderating effect of the environment, and a lot of that is the moderating effect of parents.

So how do these parents support introverted and shy children? Regarding introversion, it’s really a matter of setting up your child’s life so he gets the amount of stimulation – both social and otherwise – that he needs. There’s evidence that many introverts are also highly sensitive people – people who notice and perceive things more strongly than others do. There are quizzes you can do to test this in yourself and your child as well – there’s a link to one in the references. I had no idea I was a highly sensitive person until just a few weeks ago when my husband handed me one of those checklist articles from Buzzfeed or somewhere similar that described the characteristics. I usually hate those things so I tried to make him take his phone back but he insisted I read it, and I was shocked to find that it basically described me. I cut the tags out of my clothes because I can’t stand them itching me. I always want him to turn the TV down. I regularly notice continuity errors in films. I notice manners. I’m sensitive to criticism. Now not all introverts are also highly sensitive, but when we talk about supporting an introvert we should also consider the possibility that she experiences things more acutely than you might as a parent, and thus if you think you’ve ratcheted down the stimulation enough then consider the possibility that it’s still too much for her.

I think my two year-old may be an introvert because a lot of the time she seems to prefer staying home to going out or doing other activities. Sometimes when we have music on she asks me to turn it down because she thinks it’s too loud, even though I don’t think it’s that loud (and I’m highly sensitive!). So when I put music on I make sure not to put it on too loud. And we don’t keep a busy schedule here – she does go to daycare while I’m at work, but on the weekends we do a lot of relaxing around the house. We don’t rush from one class to the next; a busy day for us would be to go to another child’s birthday party *and* go grocery shopping on the same day. I get my need for alone time in the weeks I work from home, while my husband gets his need for socialization by going to the office most days. I do wonder whether my daughter is getting her need for alone time met during her time at daycare; the school does have a quiet nook where a child could pull curtains around himself and be alone for a bit but I’m guessing that the structure of the school day means that most of the time the children are engaged in some activity. It’s something I plan to discuss with her teachers.

I have to say that while the majority of the book “Quiet” was exhaustively referenced, the chapter on how to support an introverted child was not. The references page for that chapter are based on interviews with teachers, school administrators, child psychologists, and a list of seven books, three of which have the word “shy” in the title which I thought was pretty surprising given that the author spends a good chunk of the book telling us how introversion and shyness are not the same thing. I was disappointed to find that two of those books specifically on shyness contain no references at all, which is how I evaluate the quality of a book – I don’t want to just trust the author’s word; I want to know she’s basing her recommendations in research. The third of these books that I got was Jerome Kagan’s book on temperament which, once it starts to talk about environmental influences on temperament, begins to mix in mentions of shyness with what seem to be descriptions of stimulus-avoiding introverts. So my exploration of how to support shy children is unfortunately necessarily linked to the research on shyness and temperament and introversion, because it’s very difficult to separate them out in the research.

Psychologists Barbara and Gregory Markway point out that as with many personality traits, including introversion and extroversion, we can think of shyness on a scale. On the left side is someone who is shy but basically secure and successful – she gets through situations like giving a presentation if she has to; she attends parties of her peers she knows well; she might say she’s ‘stressed out’ when she transitions to a new school, but she’s able to adapt and in a month or two she’s basically doing fine. You can see how this connects up to Thomas and Chess’ description of the ‘slow to warm up’ child. Moving over slightly and we see the child who is shy and has some problems because of it; maybe she wishes she could be more outgoing but doesn’t know how. Next over is the specific social anxiety disorder, which produces a paralyzing anxiety in a highly stressful social situation like giving a performance. Then there’s what’s called “mild to moderate generalized social anxiety disorder,” where the child shows physical symptoms of anxiety like headaches, stomachaches, and panic attacks. Finally, all the way on the right of the continuum is “severe generalized social anxiety disorder” which includes children who have selective mutisum, where they refuse to – or physically cannot – speak in certain situations, refuse to go to school, or become depressed. I think my daughter falls at the left end of this continuum; she is definitely slow to warm to new people and didn’t like her new daycare much for the first week or so, but she seems to have settled in OK. She sometimes plays ‘peek-a-boo’ with the other children but just as often she likes to sit on a rock in the playground that she seems to have picked out because it has a commanding view of the whole area, from which she will observe the other children, occasionally running over to see what a small group is doing before returning to her perch.

One thing that I left out of the behavior descriptions of shyness for the sake of making it easier to follow was the extent to which the interactions with parents impact where children fall. The parents of the “shy but basically successful” child are described as “accepting her shy temperament and have never made a big deal out of it. They try to encourage her to break out of her comfort zone and try new things, but they’re not overly pushy.” The “shy but showing some problems” child has parents who like to throw parties and “become upset when the child doesn’t come out of her room to talk with their guests.” The child with mild to moderate generalized social anxiety disorder has a family who moves around a lot, making it hard to make friends. Now the last thing I want to do here is to make anyone feel responsible or guilty for any trait in their child that they perceive as negative. I’m certainly not trying to say that if your child has a diagnosable anxiety disorder that you gave it to them, either generically or in the environment that you provided. If your child already falls over on the right side of the scale then now might be a good time to consider finding some professional help to help their child master social anxiety, which is really beyond the scope of this podcast. What I want to spend the rest of the time doing is thinking through, for myself as well as you, the idea that if your child is over on the left end of the social anxiety continuum right now, whether it’s a result of genetics or the kinds of environment you’ve raised them in until now, then there are things you can do to try to make sure they don’t keep moving toward the right of the continuum and maybe even push them back to the left a little more. I don’t want to say that all shyness can or should be cured because some people find it quite adaptive – perhaps a researcher gives a better presentation in front of an audience because she is shy and doesn’t want to fail, so she puts in extra time and effort to prepare. But to the extent that shyness – and even introversion – hamper your child’s ability to live her life, I believe it’s worth doing what we can to support her in managing them. I’ve culled some ideas from a review of quite a number of books and research papers, and I’ll go through the seven overarching ideas that seem worthy of putting into practice. If you’re looking for books, I’ll recommend a couple: Susan Cain’s Quiet is very well-referenced and very readable as well. Marti Olsen Laney’s book The Introvert Advantage has a short chapter on raising introverts although it’s not as well referenced and, like Susan Cain’s, tends to rely on books about shy people when describing how to raise an introvert. But if you’re pretty sure your child is introverted and you’d like to learn more, I’d say both are worth a read.

So, on to the tips:

Introverted children may be both more susceptible to quality of care by parents and also by daycares and schools. This was dubbed the “orchid hypothesis” by an article in the Atlantic, drawing on research by Jay Belsky and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis. The idea is that children who were perceived as “difficult” infants are more likely to be positively affected by high quality parenting and childcare, and more likely to be negatively affected by low-quality parenting and childcare. The environment seems to have a larger impact on these children than it does on most others. High quality parenting was determined to be maternal sensitivity to child non-distress, lack of intrusiveness, positive regard, supportive presence, lack of hostility, and respect for autonomy. Supportive childcare was determined by a researcher who observed interactions between the caregiver and the child. So this is not to say that you need any really special skills to be a good parent to an introverted child, but if you can be generally supportive of your child and put him in a childcare situation where he’s able to develop a good relationship with a teacher, then there’s a good chance he will thrive. And if those things don’t happen, there’s a good chance he will do rather less well.
As a parent, don’t project your own fears onto your child. Just because I hated lunchtime at school because everyone went off into their cliques and I didn’t have anywhere to go doesn’t mean the same thing will happen to my child. Maybe she kicks a ball around by herself at lunchtime because she wants to and enjoys a bit of time being alone. So talk with your child and make sure you understand what’s going on in her mind before you assume it’s her painful shyness that’s preventing her from socializing.
Try not to let your own limitations become limitations for your child. The awful thing about playdates for introverted parents is that you end up having to socialize with the parents of the other child during the playdate. Rather than having a playdate with a different child every week, perhaps you could see if you have anything in common with the children that your son or daughter seems to like to spend time with, so you can potentially get beyond the small talk and actually develop meaningful relationships with the parents. A fellow parent who lives just up the street from me said ‘hi’ to me when we saw each other out and about a couple of times, and then she asked for my email address so we could keep in touch. I tried to be tactfully cool in my responses because I figured we probably didn’t have much in common other than the fact that we both have kids and live on the same street, and I *really* didn’t want to have to be “mommy friends” with someone. She persisted, though, and it turns out we have a *lot* in common – now we have a casual dinner at one or other of our houses every couple of weeks, and we’re totally easy around each other – nobody dresses up, and nobody tidies up, and we all just say what we think. That friendship turned out to be the complete opposite of what I thought it would be, and I’m grateful that I have it.
Introverted people tend to take longer to form and express ideas, which can make people think they’re not smart. One set of researchers asked students to assess their own ability to respond to new ideas quickly and say what’s on their minds, and then rate how intelligent, engaged, and competent their classmates were. The students rated the people who could respond quickly as more intelligent, engaged, and competent early in the semester. But later in the semester the ratings partially reversed, firstly because the intelligent introverts became more comfortable and started to speak up in class, and secondly because the unintelligent extroverts were discovered to have “exuberance that exceeds their insightfulness.” So where introverts have a one-shot chance to make an impact, like a job interview (maybe a few years down the road), it’s worth trying to put up a front and at least appear to be extroverted. But in the long haul, don’t worry so much – if you’re smart, people will eventually realize it whether you speak up a lot or not.
Introverts may find their communities in different places than extroverts. One study found that introverted people feel they can be the “real me” by meeting people online or in other remote ways (kind of like I do through this podcast), whereas extroverts locate their “real me” through traditional social interaction. If your child is old enough to be online and finds or creates his own community then don’t worry as much if he doesn’t have a big group of real life friends as well.
Provide opportunities for your child to socialize in traditional settings, and set things up for them to be successful, but don’t push it too hard. So if your child is invited to a birthday party then maybe you can go at the beginning before too many other people get there, which can be much less overwhelming than entering a room that’s packed with people. The general principle of trying to overcome fears in this way calls for the exposure to the social situation to be gradual, repeated, and prolonged. So try a small birthday party before a wedding with 100 attendees. And even if the party isn’t successful from your perspective and your child still shows shy behaviors, keep trying. Don’t throw in the towel. Prolonged exposure means you have to do the activity until your child’s anxiety level drops which it will; it’s the way our body chemistry works. So if you walk into a party and your child is terrified because you got there late and lots of people are already there, stick it out until her anxiety level drops. She might need to bury her head in your shoulder for a little while, but the idea is that eventually her anxiety level will drop, and she’ll realize that the situation can be handled. Then in the future the anxiety shouldn’t be as bad and it should come down faster.
Finally, don’t forget that there is nothing inherently wrong with being introverted or even shy; it’s only troubling to the extent that it prevents you from doing the things you want to do within your cultural context. Introverts struggle in America because we’re essentially the most extroverted culture in the world. I found a fascinating diagram in a research paper where countries fall on a scale of introversion and extroversion. There is no more extroverted nation than the United States, even though there are quite a lot of introverts here too. But plop an American extrovert down in Uganda or Indonesia then he might struggle in these most introverted of countries. I guess if I decide I really want to fit in somewhere I could move to Uganda. I always did prefer mountains to beaches.

Thanks for listening – you can find all the references to today’s episode on YourParentingMojo.com, under Supporting your introverted or shy child, and as we talked about earlier, please don’t forget to subscribe to the show and leave me a rating and review, send it out to your friends who you think might find it useful, and drop me a line with any special episode requests.

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