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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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Transcript

Jen:  [00:39]

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today’s episode is going to be a difficult but an important one for me. So you all know that I have a daughter who’s heading towards being three and a half and a while back, we did an episode with Dr. Christia Brown where we talked about how the differences between boys and girls at a young age are almost entirely based on culture and socialization rather than on genetic factors and that’s still true, but I wanted to take the next step in thinking about this because it seems to me as there are the impacts of culture become magnified rather than diminished as girls get older. And the effects of that culture are really not kind to our girls. And I’ve seen this firsthand myself. Those of you who listen to my episode with Dr. Atle Dyregrov on the topic of talking with children about death know that my mother died when I was young and what I didn’t mention in that episode was that she was anorexic and she actually starved herself to death.

Jen:    [01:32]

So we talk about a lot of topics related to child development on this show. And for the most part I kind of feel as though I have some wiggle room and whether or not I get them right. But today we’re gonna talk about raising emotionally healthy girls, and I really feel as though this is one issue that I cannot and must not screw up. So this is a must listen episode if you have daughters, but if you only have sons I’d say don’t turn us off just yet because a lot of the things that make raising girls so difficult are related to how we raise our boys. So we’re going to cover a lot more detail on that topic in another episode very soon.

Jen:     [02:06]

So here to guide us through some of the issues related to helping girls develop a positive body. Image is professor Renee Engeln who is an award winning professor of psychology at Northwestern University. She’s the author of Beauty Sick: How The Cultural Obsession With Appearance Hurts Girls and Women. Her work has appeared in numerous academic journals and conferences and she speaks to groups across the country. Her TEDx talk at the University of Connecticut has more than 400,000 views on YouTube and she also blogs regularly for Psychology Today. Welcome Professor Engeln.

Dr. Engeln:    [02:35]

Thank you for having me.

Jen:  [02:37]

All right, so your book is called Beauty Sick. What is beauty sickness and what are some examples of it?

Dr. Engeln:     [02:43]

For me, beauty sickness is what happens when you get so worried about how you look when you get so caught up in the mirror that you don’t have the time and the energy and the resources left to put into the things that you really care about, to things that matter more to you than how you look.

Jen:   [03:02]

Is this really a thing that there are people who cannot literally focus on what they’re doing because they are spending so much time thinking about how they look?

Dr. Engeln:   [03:11]

So I think we want to think of it as a continuum, right? So I don’t know any woman who can never focus because she’s always thinking about how she looks, but I have yet to meet a woman who hasn’t had those moments where you get distracted in the middle of an important meeting or where you’re late to something because you just can’t get your clothes looking quite like you want them to look or where you’re exhausted because you had to get up earlier in order to do more makeup and put more effort into your hair. So we pay these costs and a lot of little ways throughout the day and throughout our lives, but they add up to a cumulative effect.

Jen:    [03:48]

Yeah. I remember an example from the book about, I think it was girls and boys together at a prom event and the girls were all dressed in something that has to be hitched up and hitched down or something would be revealed and that’s sort of a facetious example, but if you imagine that it happens on a somewhat lesser scale on a daily basis in offices when you’re wearing heels and a skirt that you have to make sure you sit in the right way and…

Dr. Engeln:    [04:10]

And it, it takes you out of the moment, right? Yeah. I always tell people when I give that example of those girls I saw in that restaurant, I don’t care that they’re wearing strapless dresses or skirts are short. That’s not the issue. The issue is that it kept pulling them away from what they were doing. It kept interrupting their conversations. It’s like carving a little piece of your consciousness off and then dedicating it to solely monitoring how you look to make sure everything’s in place and everything looks okay and we don’t really see men having to focus on that in the same way women do.

Jen:   [04:46]

And I’m thinking specifically of one of the examples in your book about a girl who’s… The pseudonym she chose is “Artemis.” Can you tell us about her?

Dr. Engeln:   [04:55]

Artemis was a high school girl when I talked to her. She was around 17 years old and Artemis estimated to me that she spent 50 percent of her mental energy thinking about how she looked and for her she was particularly focused on her body size. She thought she was too heavy.

Dr. Engeln:   [05:12]

She wanted to be thinner. She used the term brain space, which I really liked. So she said half my brain space is for thinking about my body; half of it slept for thinking about school. That’s how she experienced herself as being sort of carved up and this is the same girl who told me when I asked her about some of the goals she had, she said, well, I can’t really think about those goals. I can’t think about getting my brain where I want it to be until I get my body where I want it to be. That’s the kind of pressure we’re talking about.

Jen:    [05:40]

Okay. Because women tend to think that if I was just a bit thinner, my experience of the world would be different and better in some way. Right?

Dr. Engeln:  [05:49]

And let’s be honest, there’s a lot of stigma in this culture around weight. We focus on appearance a lot, but it’s not true that changing how you look is going to magically open the door to happiness. If there’s no evidence that that is the case. There’s a great big literature on that out there on happiness and well-being and finding meaning in your life and the things you can pursue to get there. None of them have to do with spending more time in front of the mirror and they all have to do with spending less.

Jen:   [06:19]

Okay. So I’m thinking social media probably plays a fairly large role in all of this these days. Is that true?

Dr. Engeln:   [06:27]

Absolutely. I say this in my book. I feel bad about it, but I mean it that I thank my lucky stars I did not have to be a young girl or an adolescent girl at a time when there was social media.

Jen:   [06:38]

Me too.

Dr. Engeln:   [06:40]

It is unbelievably hard and when I talk to young girls and teenagers and even young women through adulthood about what they face on social media, it is not a healthy scene out there. I had a girl who came to hear me talk, tell me that she posts a picture on Instagram and if she gets 50 likes then she can feel okay about how she looks that day, but if she doesn’t get 50 then she knows she doesn’t look okay and will spend the whole day worried about it. And this is not a healthy way to live. Right. Instagram likes are not a cure for low competence. If that worked, we’d only have to do it once; we’d throw a picture, you’d get some likes and you’d think, oh, right, I do feel good about how I look, but it’s never going to be enough and every time you post one of those pictures where you’re trying to look sexy or skinny or perfect or filtered or whatever you’re doing, it’s also making everyone who sees that picture, think about how they look and wonder if they look good enough and it perpetuates that cycle of focusing on how we look and how other women look. It takes up a lot of our mental energy.

Jen:  [07:54]

I was just watching your TED talk before I got on the phone with you and I saw you demonstrate the pose that women. Can you describe it?

Dr. Engeln:   [08:05]

I learned this from my students and it’s been a while, I think since they first showed me me; maybe even 10 years or so and it started with skinny arms, skinny arm. I feel like a lot of women know at this point when I see pictures of women online on Instagram or Facebook, it’s rare that they don’t have skinny arms, so that’s when you purchase your hand on your hip and get your arm out at a real sharp angle. Right? And my students tell me that so that your arm doesn’t smoosh against your body. Right? So it makes your arm looks skinnier and I think, oh, okay, that’s one thing.

Dr. Engeln:    [08:34]

And then they tell me there’s more, right? You have to turn slightly to the side, you have to pop your knee, you have to pull your chin out just a little to make sure you don’t have double chin, and then you need to tilt your head at just the right cant. And what they told me is that they do this automatically now when someone pulls out a phone. Someone’s going to take a picture. It’s just the pose you get into. It is hard. If you know people who are going to prom or homecoming or things like that and you see pictures online, it will be hard for you to find a picture without skinny arm.

Jen:    [09:04]

Yeah. I don’t look at a ton of prom pictures, but I had noticed there are a few younger people that I’m friends with on Facebook and I had seen them in this sort of standard position and hadn’t realized it had become so common and once you know what it is and you know all the components of it. You see it everywhere.

Dr. Engeln:   [09:21]

You see it everywhere and I think some people say, well, what’s so wrong with that? When I got headshots done for my book, the photographer told me of course, “At all weddings we tell women to pose like that because they’re just happy with how their arms look.”

Jen:   [09:32]

I was happy to see in your jacket and cover that you do not do skinny arm.

Dr. Engeln:   [09:38]

In fact, I had them crop one of my pictures because it had a little bit of a skinny arm look to it and I’m just like, I’m not gonna do it. I’m not going to do it. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to look good in your pictures, but I think we want to step back and say there is something wrong when our young women and our adult women start to monitor their body poses the same way that professional models and celebrities do. You shouldn’t have to be thinking about it that much.

Jen:     [10:08]

Yeah. Okay, so why do we think about it that much? What is our cultural obsession within this?

Dr. Engeln:  [10:13]

So I think it starts from an evolutionary seed, right? There are people who say, well, you’re never going to get rid of the focus on appearance, and I’m going to say, absolutely, I think that’s true, but what we’ve done is we’ve taken the basic human tendency to be aware of how other people look and magnified it in a way that earlier generations never could have imagined, right?

Dr. Engeln:     [10:36]

We have never had this much focus on appearance. Every perfected media image you see; everything on Instagram and Facebook. The messages we hear about women and how they look and the way it’s talked about constantly, it really has become a cultural obsession and there are a lot of elements women worry about when it comes to their bodies, but the dominant element for a lot of women is thinness; it’s the first focus, right, and it’s hard to get away from that. When you live in a culture that tells you this is important, this is what we’re looking at, and we will shame you if you at all deviate from the standard that we’ve set up, it’s hard not to be sensitive to that. It’s not vanity, right? It’s responding to a culture that’s just hammering you with this message over and over again

Jen:  [11:31]

And what role do you see for parents in all this. You know, I can see the pictures on the magazine covers on the newsstand and the kinds of people who are acting in and yes, they perpetuate a culture where thinness is seen as the ideal, but parents have a role to play in this too, right?

Dr. Engeln:    [11:47]

Parents absolutely have a role and a parent can have good effects and bad effects on this. The way I think about parenting is that you know what your values are. You know what kind of human beings you’re trying to turn your children into, right? The sort of qualities that you want to nurture and do you also know if you’re honest, that you’re going to at some point have to send them out into a world that maybe doesn’t value and reinforce those qualities, so the best thing you can do as a parent is to give your kids everything you have early on to show them what matters to you, to show them what your values are, and then you hope that it sticks. And unfortunately what often happens is that mothers are still feeling the pain of their own body image struggles and their daughters hear that pain, they see it, and what they learn is this is what it means to be a woman.

Dr. Engeln:   [12:39]

What it means to be a woman is to never, ever be happy with the way you are, right? It means to always think you need to lose 10 pounds or 20 pounds or whatever. It means standing in front of the mirror and poking and grim is saying and sucking in. It means wearing clothes that hurt you. Clothes that make you less able to move in the world and it means spending your money and your time trying to meet this beauty ideal. That’s what our little girls learn and when they learned that young, they carry it with them. We see body image struggles in five year old girls in seven year old girls. I’ve had a colleague not that long ago, show up to my office and say, my seven year old daughter told me that she’s fat and ugly. What do I do? When I ask women and young women, where did they learn to talk that way about their bodies? Almost always they tell me they learned it from the women in their lives, that they heard their mom talk about her own body that way. Or sometimes it’s a grandmother and her sister. We don’t mean to pass these things on, but I think it can happen.

Jen:     [13:46]

So that seems to me to be a very explicit kind of teaching. I mean the parent has never saying, you know, this is how you need to think about your body, but by saying those things and doing those things when the child is around, it seems to me to be fairly explicit. So I’m thinking, okay, if I don’t ever weigh myself when my daughter’s around, if I don’t ever really look at myself in the mirror, I don’t look at myself that much anyway, but if I just never do it when she’s around, if I never talk about my body weight or her body weight or anybody else’s body weight, is that sort of absence of the negative images, of the negative ideas enough? Or does there have to be some kind of balance of positive ideas as well?

Dr. Engeln:  [14:26]

I love that absence. That’s a good first step.

Jen:     [14:31]

It’s a good start, okay.

Dr. Engeln:   [14:33]

Words matter. When we talk about something a lot, what we’re saying is this is important to us. When we dedicate a lot of conversational energy to it, so if we just stopped talking about how we look and about how other women look and you mentioned that and that’s really key too, right? It’s not just don’t disparage yourself, don’t disparage other women and stay away from the complimentary body talk too. Just talk about other things, but you can add some positive elements to talk about bodies in a different way. Right? Talk about bodies in terms of how we care for them, not how we whittle them into shape or punish them. Right? But how we take good care of them so that they’ll help us do what we want to do or talk about bodies in terms of their function in terms of getting stronger in terms of being able to move us around in the world, help us reach our goals. That’s the kind of body talk that’s helpful.

Jen:    [15:26]

And it seems as though also providing experiences could be really powerful as well. I actually, I got back from a 10 day backpacking trip in the north cascades national park a couple of weeks ago and my own sense of…as someone who has struggled with this over the years, my own sense of what my body can do and the amazing things it can do; I can put a backpack on that has everything I need in it for a substantial period of time and walk wherever I want to go and be completely self sufficient and just achieve incredible things and that’s the kind of experience that I got because I put myself in that situation and it seems as though if we can give our daughters those kinds of positive experiences as well as the things that we talk about, it could be helpful. What do you think?

Dr. Engeln:    [16:09]

I mean it with no hyperbole when I say that, I think our bodies are amazing and I think it’s important to stress that not everyone can do what you just did. Not all of our bodies are perfectly abled and many of us might struggle with illness, with chronic pain, with some type of disability. Your body is still amazing. I always remind people the arms that you’re worried that they’re smashing up against your body and looking too fat: those are what we use to hug the people we care about and your hands are what you use to express yourself and you don’t have to do a marathon to recognize that there is space for gratitude towards your body and when you start thinking about it that way, it opens a ton of doors. You can often do way more than you thought you could. The term I use a lot is “instruments not objects.” Your body is an instrument in this culture. When everyone’s looking at your body and talking about your parents all the time, it starts to feel like a decoration. It starts to feel like a thing you put on to show others. It is not your body’s fundamental purpose for being there is so that it can help you do things. You are an instrument and I think we want little girls to hear that message early; that they can do things.

Jen:     [17:29]

Yeah. Okay, so if I’m sort of starting down the right path of giving her the right messages, I’m thinking about external influences and in your book you described a pivotal moment that you went through when you started to realize that other people were looking at your body and you mentioned that you were at a party, you were wearing a dress and someone said, oh, you shouldn’t do somersaults like the other kids are doing. Because it wasn’t ladylike. And I went through a sort of similar moment myself. I was kind of older than you were… At my school we had to wear a special uniform for gym class and I’d forgotten mine one day and the gym teacher was looking through a box of clothes that had gotten left behind to find something that I could wear. And she asked me what size my waist was so she could find the right size skirt.

Jen:   [18:14]

And I was a pretty skinny kid and I didn’t even really think about it too much and I actually hadn’t measured myself before so I didn’t know. And I was like 24 inches? And the teacher was, you know, I guess we would kindly say that she was solidly built and she just kind of looked at me and resignedly said, I remember when I had a 24 inch waist and so you might think that my mother having died in the way that she did when I was young, I was pretty naive because nobody told us what had happened for a number of years. So it was really that interaction with that teacher. that was the first time I’d ever realized that your waist size is something that you could think about in that way. And so I guess it’s sort of a long winded way of saying I can do what I can, my husband can do what he can do to surround our daughter with these positive messages. But what if it’s some random comment from somebody that maybe is an insignificant person in your life otherwise that totally undoes it all? So what can we do about that?

Dr. Engeln:    [19:10]

These moments can be so powerful, right? And I love your story because what happened was you heard a woman tell you that she mourned the loss of a certain body shape. That’s a powerful thing to hear. Wait, I’m still going to worry about this when I’m older, right? I. I’m not ever going to get a break. It’s never going to be okay. That’s a terrible thing to hear. Sometimes people ask me, why are you so focused on individual behavior on what we can do individually? Part of that is because I’m a psychologist, that’s what we do, but part of it is because we have a lot more control over our own behavior than other people’s behavior. And so you’re right, your daughters will go out out in the world, and you cannot control that offhand fat-shaming comment. What you can do is try to inoculate them the best you can. To give them other platforms, other areas that they focus on, other sources of self esteem. So when those hits come in, they don’t hurt quite as much. And when your daughter gets a little older, the other thing I say is get her ready to be angry. Get her ready to be angry about living in a world where women hurt in this way because it is not fair and it is worth her asking who benefits benefits from women feeling bad about how they look. She doesn’t. You don’t. Let her question that let. Her find a source of power there. Someone asked me a while ago as a friend who’s about my age, I’m 41 and the friend said, I’m really afraid of aging. She said, there’s been a lot of power in my attractiveness.

Dr. Engeln:   [20:53]

I get a lot of attention. I like it. It’s reinforcing and I’m going to lose it and I’m scared. And what do you tell women about that? What do you do about that? And the answer to that actually relates to what I would suggest for little girls. What I say is that you build a foundation for your little girls that’s so strong, so full of other areas of interest and other attributes that even if a little of it gets knocked away, that has something to do with her appearance, she’s still got a good strong base to stand on that she knows that other things matter that that is not the sum total of who she is.

Jen:   [21:30]

Okay. I want to go back to something you said a minute ago. You said “who benefits from women thinking like this?” And I mean in a way we know who benefits, right? It’s people who were trying to sell us stuff to be thinner.

Dr. Engeln:   [21:41]

Absolutely!

Jen:    [21:41]

And I’ve thought about this in a number of ways. I worked in sustainability consulting for a number of years and so thinking about the environment and why people do the things they do related to the environment and when I think about companies that pollute the environment or that have these products that try and convince us that we’re not thin enough or whatever it is, you think about them as a company but companies aren’t monolithic; they’re made up of people and a lot of people who work at those companies are parents and they’re worried about their daughters.

Jen:  [22:11]

And I actually worked at an advertising agency for awhile and pay my way through school and working there, although to my knowledge we didn’t actually produce any material that I would be ashamed of, but I wonder what goes through the minds of people, but particularly women who work on these kinds of ad campaigns that give these messages to our girls when they have children of their own. If there was somebody out there working for a company doing this right now, what would you say to them? I think many of them are trying to keep their jobs to support their families.

Dr. Engeln:   [22:42]

We understand that, but I also think we have a tendency not to think critically about these issues and we see it all the time when a company will release an ad that gets a terrible reception. I’m thinking of the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad somewhat recently and you think who was in the room; who approved that? Because you’re right. It’s just people. Right? A bunch of people saw that and thought it was okay. Part of it is that we haven’t learned to really ask ourselves to stop and say, what are we communicating here? What are we telling people about what it means to be a woman or a good woman, a successful woman. So that’s part of it is I think there are people who don’t want to do harm and might be doing so accidentally, but I do think there are also people that know that making women feel vulnerable is a great way to sell products and there are whole industries built on it. Your eyelashes aren’t long enough. Your lips are not plumping up. Your skin is not fair enough or not dark enough or it has cellulite and you need to lose weight despite the fact that all available evidence suggested diets don’t work long-term for most people. To keep you buying. They have to keep you feeling bad. If you woke up in the morning feeling good about how you looked, I think of how many fewer products you would use.

Dr. Engeln:   [24:02]

Yeah. It’s sad to think about that. Yeah. I obviously don’t have an answer to what we should do about it moving forward, but maybe maybe if anyone’s listening who does work in these industries, just start asking questions about why, why we’re doing this.

Dr. Engeln:    [24:18]

Or start a business if you have the resources and the inclination. Right. This is another really powerful way for women to make an impact when they’ve had enough is to say I’m going to start a business that does things differently.

Jen:    [24:30]

Yeah. All right, so offer our little tangent again and back onto we kind of were what people that we know say to our children, to our daughters. So I mean I make a confession to you and to my listeners: I have never told my daughter that she is beautiful or pretty and sometimes my husband just cannot help himself and he blurts out, “you’re so cute.” Or sometimes he just mouths it to me: “she’s so cute,” but then I just give them a filthy look and he doesn’t say it again for a while. And so we try and be really careful about the messages we give to our daughter. But one of my listeners emailed me and said, we have two grandmothers who were close by and they just will not stop with the “You’re so cute,” “You’re so pretty” comments. And so I think based on our conversation so far, I am on the right track by not commenting on this, but secondly, if there are people who are important in our daughter’s lives and our grandparents should be, their grandparents should be important in our daughter’s lives and they are projecting a very different message than the one that we think is important, to what extent do we just kind of step back and let them have their own relationship with our children and to what extent do we draw the line and say, you know what? This is an issue that I feel so strongly about that we need to have a conversation about this and how do we have that conversation?

Dr. Engeln:    [25:44]

Of course it’s going to depend on the grandma. I’m lucky enough to still have to have my grandmothers with me and I can tell you that one of them thinks my book is ridiculous and she thinks that she thinks that in a very sweet way. She’s very proud that I wrote a book. She thinks that we should talk about how beautiful girls are and women are and that that’s good for them and that makes them feel good. Right? She doesn’t understand the bigger picture. And the first thing she says about any woman she meets is in reference to her appearance, she’s pretty; whether she’s not pretty. She’s 94. I’m not going to change that. here’s nothing I can say to change that. So in those moments, maybe the best you can do if she says “you’re so pretty” to your daughter, say “pretty hard working!” “Pretty generous!”

Dr. Engeln:   [26:30]

Nice. I like the “pretty” part. Do you have a similar addition for cute or that’s… It seems a little harder.

Dr. Engeln:   [26:34]

Cute is difficult, right? Because cute often seems to refer to behavior. So like sometimes I think your husband’s saying she’s so cute.

Jen:     [26:41]

It’s what she’s doing. Yeah.

Dr. Engeln:    [26:42]

Maybe she’s doing cute things and that word is a little harder, but I also know that a lot of the women who are doing this really just haven’t thought about it. I’ve talked to some grandmothers who said I just didn’t think about it in this framework. I thought I was doing something good for my granddaughter’s self esteem. I was doing it on purpose even because I never felt pretty enough and I thought maybe if I tell her all the time, she’ll feel like she is. People telling you pretty is actually not going to make you feel pretty right.

Dr. Engeln:   [27:11]

We don’t have evidence for this. I still remember my mom telling me at some point I was beautiful and me saying, “Oh my God, you have to say that because you’re my mom.” It’s not enough. If you don’t believe the 50 likes on Instagram, you probably don’t believe grandma either.. It’s not going to solve the problem, but I think people are often more open to change and we give them credit for and I think when you frame it in terms of values, it can go along way. So if you say, we’ve decided that in our household we really don’t value focusing on someone’s appearance, so we’re working really hard not to talk about appearance anymore. I wonder if you could help us and I think people would be more on board than you think. They maybe just haven’t considered it before. And should you limit contact with people who aren’t?

Dr. Engeln:  [27:57]

You know, I don’t think grandma telling your daughter that she’s beautiful is the end of the world. It’s not that I never want any girl to hear that she’s beautiful. It’s that I want it to be just a blip on the radar and not an overwhelming force of nature. I want it to be just one more thing.

Jen:   [28:17]

Should I ever tell her then?

Dr. Engeln:   [28:18]

You know, I wish I had data on a lot and the truth is I don’t know a number. I don’t know how much is okay. I think it all depends on context and so it’s hard to say, but when parents ask me that, well, how often should I tell her she’s beautiful. Usually I say, well, less than you are now.

Jen:    [28:39]

I’m on the right track for that then!

Dr. Engeln:   [28:40]

But I can tell you that I have a 19 month old niece, Gabriela and she doesn’t live nearby, but I Facetime her a lot, which is very fun and I decided when she was born that I would never mention how she looks, this is going to be my role as her aunt. I’m going to talk to her about everything except that and some people said, oh, it’s so mean. She’s going to think she’s ugly. That’s ridiculous, right? There’ll be plenty of people in her life that will talk to her about how she looks. I’m going to talk to her about everything else and I agree with you and your husband’s perspective that it can be hard because she’s cute! Kids’ clothes are cute too, often.

Dr. Engeln:  [29:26]

But I think when you see that little girl and your first instinct is to say how pretty, how cute, how adorable she is. It just takes practice to stop it and I have to work on it and I think it’s worth working on because that is not the first thing that comes to mind when we see boys. So it’s not that we never talk about boys being cute or handsome or whatever, but it’s not the first thing we say. It’s not our go-to comment. Quite frankly. It’s the same way with adult women. You meet a woman and you’re supposed to compliment something that she’s wearing or how her hair looks. Right. It takes practice to get away from that. We can do it.

Jen:     [30:03]

Yeah. So I am just thinking about what we could do instead. We could ask a girl. I mean my daughter’s a bit young for this right now, but when she’s a bit older, what book are you reading or what are you interested in right now? Or something like that instead?

Dr. Engeln:  [30:15]

Yeah, absolutely. Questions are the way to go. It’s a great way to engage children and to learn more about them. I think in general we do too much telling to children and not enough asking. I ask my niece, what are you doing? What does that toy, what are you playing with? How do you feel today? And she can’t talk that much, but she’s hearing those questions and the message is: I care about what you’re thinking. Yeah, I care about what doing, I care about how you feel, but I’ve never given you any inclination that how you look is what matters.

Jen:    [30:47]

Okay, so I hope this isn’t beating a dead horse here. We’ve talked about pretty much everybody on the planet and how they interact with our daughters, but we haven’t talked about their fathers yet, assuming they have a father who is in the picture. A couple of listeners wrote to me, one who is a father and wanted to know if there’s anything special that he should be doing to support his daughter’s healthy body image development and another woman who wrote and said, how can I communicate about these issues with my husband? He’s sympathetic, but he does not truly understand what it’s like to be a woman in America. So what would you say to our husbands?

Dr. Engeln:  [31:19]

It’s hard to share that understanding if you haven’t been there. But if you’re in a trusting relationship, you should be able to say, “trust me, this matters.” This hurts and you don’t want our daughter at age 10 telling you she’s ugly and fat and crying. So trust me on this, what can fathers do? They can do a lot of the same things mothers can do. Mothers have the added power of being able to role model their own body acceptance and send messages about womanhood in that way. But fathers can mentor that too, right? They can role model body acceptance as well. They can role model focusing on health, on strength, on things like that instead of on what your body looks like. They can also watch how they talk about other women. Not talking about who’s hot, who’s sexy. They can model a way of respecting women, of seeing them as full human beings.

Jen:     [32:15]

Who are good at things other than just looking pretty.

Dr. Engeln:     [32:17]

Absolutely.

Jen:    [32:17]

Okay.

Dr. Engeln: [32:18]

When I talked to a lot of women for my book, I talked about the relationships with their moms a lot, put some of the women who were in the healthiest place, I would say in terms of body image – I think part of how they got there, based on their stories is they told me that they loved the way their fathers interacted with their mothers and I would say, well, does your Dad call your mother beautiful? Did he call her pretty? And they would say, no, he didn’t have to. I saw it and the affection that he showed, I saw it in the way he treated her, the way he’d reach out and touch her arm, the way he’d smile when he looked at her. Those moments stand out. They stick with you over your lifetime.

Jen:     [32:56]

Kids really do notice fricking everything, don’t they?

Dr. Engeln:     [32:59]

Mhmm…More than we would like.

Jen:    [33:02]

Yeah. Okay. So you alluded to this a little bit already, but what happens when your daughter starts to ask, “am I pretty,” you know, my daughter’s just started calling things like necklaces that she makes and drawings that she makes pretty and I assume at some point this is going to morph and she’s gonna ask, “am I pretty? Do you think I’m pretty.” What do I say?

Dr. Engeln:     [33:21]

It’s really tough. Right? So when they’re younger, like your daughter is now my first impulse, and maybe this is the psychologist in me again, but my first impulse is to ask a question like, “oh, is being pretty important?”

Jen:    [33:34]

Gosh, I should carry that with me everywhere. It’s the, it’s the answer to so many things. We talked to a sex educator while back and you know, you get a difficult question about sex and your first question is supposed to be “why do you want to know?”

Dr. Engeln:  [33:47]

if you don’t want to make your daughter for like you’re blowing her off, but at a really young age, girls will throw around these terms without having really thought about that. So why not be the one to help her think about them? Is it important to be pretty? What does being pretty mean to you? And see if you can start to shape some of her ideas about prettiness. Maybe broaden those ideas and you can say things like, “oh, of course I think you’re pretty, but I also don’t think it matters that much because here’s what I think matters that much.” And, and sort of push in that direction when your daughter is older, I think you’ll probably have that day and I think it’s a really hard day for parents when she comes home and she does not feel pretty and she hurts and she wants you to help her feel better.

Dr. Engeln:     [34:33]

You can tell her she’s pretty. You can not. It’s not going to make a difference. What makes a difference in that moment is hearing her and listening and acknowledging her pain. You can tell her that you’ve hurt to over those issues before that, you know, it is hard to be a woman in this culture. You can think with her about some ways that you can fight back some ways that you can feel better. When I studied this a few years ago, I had a student who was really interested in mother daughter interactions around body image and we asked daughters who were maybe around 18, 19 at the time, “if you came home and said something like this to your mom, what did she say to you and what do you wish she had said?” And overall with the girls told us is that their mother said things like, “no, no, you’re beautiful.”

Dr. Engeln:  [35:18]

Or if the girls came home and said, I’m so fat, they said, “well, let’s go on a diet then.” They just wanted it to fix it up, patch it up. And what the girls told us is that they wanted more than that. They wanted to be asked questions. They wanted to be asked, why are you feeling this way? What happened? Right? What triggered this? Not just put a BANDAID on it. Right? But say let’s really look at where it hurts and let’s look at who hurt you and why. That’s a really powerful tool.

Jen:    [35:45]

As you were explaining that, it dawned on me that it’s a sad day when I feel more anxious about having that kind of conversation with my daughter. Then about a conversation about death.

Dr. Engeln:    [35:54]

Or sex ed…

Jen:    [35:59]

Oh yeah. Sex ed. I’m fine. Yeah. We use correct body part names. I’m fine with sex ed, but the day when she comes home and says so and so called me fat or so and so said, I’m ugly. Yeah, that’s extremely anxiety provoking for me.

Dr. Engeln:      [36:12]

We don’t want our daughters to hurt the way we’ve heard. And I think it’s a terrible thing to know that no matter what, at some moments they will, but we can still give them a lot of padding. You can give them that secure base to come back to. I think that’s one of the most important things you can do as a parent.

Jen:     [36:30]

Okay. So you’ve mentioned a couple times now that telling people that they are pretty telling children, daughters that they’re pretty doesn’t help. And so that reminds me of Dove’s campaign for real beauty.

Dr. Engeln: [36:44]

[Loud sigh.] That was a sigh I reserve just for Dove’s Real Beauty campaign.

Jen:   [36:48]

Yeah. Okay. That’s The Dove Sigh. Okay. Then please tell us your thoughts on the Dove Real Beauty campaign.

Dr. Engeln:   [36:52]

So I should first admit I have been moved by some of their videos. Absolutely. I get it. In a world where people make you feel ugly all the time, of course you like this idea that you could be made to feel beautiful, but I think Dove is going about it wrong and they may have very good intentions here. I think they probably do. But you are never going to help women feel better about their appearance by focusing more on appearance. When you say, Oh, you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful. What you’re saying is the most important thing you can be is beautiful, beautiful matters, and whatever you were thinking about before that, forget that. Start thinking about how you look and it does this doubly burdensome thing. It says, okay, so you live in this culture that makes you feel ugly because there’s a ridiculous beauty standard that most of us are never going to touch. But now it’s also your job to still find a way to feel good despite that,

Jen:    [37:52]

And we have a product that can help.

Dr. Engeln:    [37:54]

And it’s cellulite cream.

Jen:     [37:59]

Yes, it is.

Dr. Engeln:    [38:00]

You should also know that our parent company is one of the major providers of skin lightening creams in South Asia and Africa and also the parent company to Axe, which has made perhaps the most overtly misogynistic set of commercials we’ve seen that in a long time.

Jen:     [38:17]

Yeah. So it’s not that Unilever is an angel in this regard. They’ll still trying to sell us more stuff, but the underlying point is you want to feel as though you can make a difference and have a positive impact on a girl by saying, Oh, you, of course you’re beautiful. Even if tells you you’re not, but it does not help.

Dr. Engeln:    [38:39]

I’ve not seen evidence that it helps. Now I have had women say my Dad never called me beautiful and that hurt, but what I hear is I did not feel secure in my dad’s love. I don’t think just calling your daughter beautiful is the cure here. I think there’s something bigger going on.

Jen:  [38:58]

Yep. Okay, so I guess a slight non sequitur, something that I wanted to mention that I saw in the book was you talk about fat talk and which year lab renamed negative body talk. And I actually hadn’t ever heard of that before and I wonder if it’s just because I was missing that critical link with other female members of my family and once my mom was no longer around and I was also really introverted so I never had friends that I could have those kinds of conversations with. But can you tell us what this fat talk or a negative body talk is?

Dr. Engeln:     [39:29]

Yeah. If you talk to young women, they know what this is. They don’t know the term. All you have to do is start the conversation with them by saying like, “oh, so fat today.” And they know exactly what they’re supposed to say.

Jen:    [39:42]

And what are they supposed to say?

Dr. Engeln:   [39:43]

They’re supposed to say, “No you’re not. You’re not at all. You look great.” And then they’re probably going to throw in, “Look at me, look at these thighs.” And it’s going to go to this back and forth of like, I’m ugly, I’m ugly. No, I ugly. And then no one feels better. At the end of it. It’s the worst conversational outcome ever. It’s like you said something because you were hurting. You ended up accidentally making another girl hurt too, and you both still feel bad.

Jen:   [40:12]

So why do we do it?

Dr. Engeln:   [40:13]

So when we study this, what a lot of women say is that they think it’s gonna make them feel better and this makes sense. I think particularly for women in this culture, when you’re hurting, you want to tell someone and I think that’s a good instinct usually. If you’re depressed, if you’re anxious, absolutely you want to reach out and talk to someone about how you’re feeling, but body talk is different. If you say, I’m so depressed today, I’m really hurting, your friend is not going to be like, oh, you’re not depressed. I’m depressed. I mean, I hope not your friend’s kind of a jerk if that happens. But with fat talk it’s different. Because there’s this sense that we know women aren’t really supposed to feel good about their bodies. We preach body confidence, but we often don’t like it when,

Jen:     [40:58]

But you are supposed to be happy because it’s your God-given right to Americans to be a particularly, I think to be happy.

Dr. Engeln:  [41:04]

It is your responsibility. That’s how we think about it in this culture is that if you’re not happy, you also have to feel bad about not being happy. It’s a terrible thing. But when it comes to fat talk, it can hurt other people and so there are good reasons not to do it right. It turns everyone else’s attention to how they look and you probably didn’t mean to do that, right? It doesn’t tend to really change things like you’ll occasionally hear girls use it to develop some where they’ll say, “oh, I ate too many donuts and I’m getting fat,” and their friend might say, “okay, well we’re going to go to the gym together, like starting tomorrow. We’re going to the gym every day” and what they usually say so they never follow up on those things, or maybe they do for like a day or they make the plans and then they celebrate the plants by getting ice cream. These aren’t really leading to sustainable health behaviors and read what they send the message of is that it’s okay to talk about women this way. If I talk about myself that way, how can I ask you not to do it? How can I ask strangers on the Internet not to do it, or political figures or celebrities.

Dr. Engeln:     [42:11]

So don’t do it then. I guess I just don’t. It’s Nancy Reagan style. “Just say no to fat talk.”

Jen:   [42:20]

Okay. Alright. So as we sort of head towards a conclusion here, I want to try and end on a more optimistic note. So let’s shift and talk a little bit about what we can do to help our daughters develop a healthy relationship with their bodies. And I know that one thing that has been tried is media literacy programs because these messages about beauty and thinness and even what girls are capable of are everywhere in the media. Can you tell us what these interventions generally consist of and whether they’re effective?

Dr. Engeln:   [42:51]

There are a lot of media literacy interventions and some are more effective than others, but how I would summarize it is that even the best interventions had pretty small effects. So they’re focused on teaching girls to argue back, right? When they see these kinds of images say, wait, what’s going on here? Is that airbrush? Is that real? Is that healthy? Or they’re teaching you to be critical. I am all for raising our children to be critical consumers of media. I think that’s really important, but there’s an interesting paradox when it comes to media images of women is that sometimes what you see is that the more critical you are of them, the more you’re focusing on them. Does that make sense? So sometimes even in a study, if you bring someone in and say, well, you know, look at this image and criticize it, what you’ve done is asked her to look at it; you’ve asked her to pay attention to it.

Dr. Engeln:   [43:40]

We’ve seen some of this research too on whether putting warnings about airbrushing on magazine images… So sort of like consumer warnings “airbrushing ahead.”

Jen:    [43:51]

This model is actually 20 pounds heavier than she looks.

Dr. Engeln:    [43:53]

Yeah. And it can actually backfire.

Jen:     [43:55]

Oh really?

Dr. Engeln:   [43:56]

What happens is that you look and say, “Oh really? I wonder where they did it.” And then you’re really focusing on the arms, the thighs, and the stomach. And the next thing you know, you’ve unwittingly given that image more power.

Jen:  [44:08]

And you’re like, “Do my arms look like that?”

Dr. Engeln: [44:12]

And you’re getting this subtle hint like, wow, this matters enough that someone paid to make it look this way. This must be really important. I’m all for media literacy, but I’m also just for less media of that sort. Just get it off your eyeballs as much as possible. Turn away it off, mute it, unfollow, don’t read it. Try to choose media. That leaves you feeling stronger and healthier instead of the other way around.

Jen:  [44:40]

And I’m wondering if you can tell us a couple of the comments that you saw when you presented girls and young women with pictures of obviously airbrushed, obviously thin women. What kinds of things would they say?

Dr. Engeln:  [44:52]

When I first started this research a long time ago. I really thought media literacy was the key. Like I was like, this is what we need to do.

Jen: [44:58]

And specifically when we say “media literacy,” we’re talking about understanding the messages that the media is trying to give us…

Dr. Engeln: [45:04]

Right. And criticizing them, and fighting back a little bit. So we showed images like I’m just sort of full page magazine images. Maybe it’s a model in a bathing suit, and I wanted to see how the women who really argued against those images were different from the women who didn’t. There’s some women would look at them and they would say, “oh, for God’s sake, eat a sandwich.” They’d be like, “women’s bodies don’t look like that. You don’t have to look like that. She’s airbrushed, this isn’t healthy.” And they would just go at it. But then shockingly, what I found is that then they would often say a few lines down, “oh, I really wish I looked like that.” The one that always stands out to me is “her shoulders are airbrushed. I wish my shoulders looked like that.” And I think, “WHAT? You just said, they weren’t real.” But knowing it’s not real, it doesn’t mean you don’t want it. We want all kinds of things that we know are fantasy and that includes the fantasy body. So that’s why I think our best hope is to just not see it as much.

Jen:  [46:07]

Okay. All right. So two steps there then: not see it as much. But what you have to see, you know, you’re out. You’re driving past the billboard, your daughter sees it, you can’t unsee it. Then the media literacy and the critiquing the image comes into play?

Dr. Engeln: [46:21]

Yeah, absolutely. I think I’d always go back to that question. Say I wonder why someone made that image they were hoping to do wonder who it helps.

Jen:  [46:29]

So tell us about something that works. I know you did an online intervention to reframe the way that women think about their bodies. Can you tell us about that?

Dr. Engeln: [46:36]

So if I had to settle on two things, one of them we’ve talked about a little already and it’s focusing on function. Okay. Alright. So when we asked them to focus on their bodies, even in a positive way, when we asked them things like, “what’s the sexiest part of your body?”

Dr. Engeln:   [46:50]

“What part of your body do you really like how it looks?”, they often end up feeling worse, right? Because what they do is they’re just focusing then on their body and they start thinking about all their flaws. But when we ask women, “what’s the best thing you do with your arms?” Or “what do your legs allow you to do?” “What does your body give you?” When we ask them questions like that, they end up feeling better, not just about their body overall, but even how their body looks. So when you think about what your body does, you will also feel better about how you look. So one is focusing on function, but the one we haven’t talked about yet is self-compassion.

Jen:  [47:26]

Yeah. I was going to end with that because I love that one.

Dr. Engeln: [47:29]

We’ve done some really just heartwarming research on this lately. Some of the students who work in my lab or sometimes say all his lab is so depressing, because you’re always finding all these awful things and it’s like “we got statistically significant results and they’re really awful.”

Dr. Engeln:  [47:46]

So this was our first really happy data, our self-compassion data. And we asked women to come in and write letters to themselves and there were different conditions, but one of the conditions as write a self-compassionate letter to their body where they would take the perspective of an unconditionally loving friend, right, and they would recognize our common humanity and our struggles and our imperfections, but do it in a compassionate way and I could sit all day and read those letters, and in fact, a lot of the women who wrote them in our study, they asked if they could bring them home. They liked them too.

Jen:  [48:23]

They probably needed to read them again.

Dr. Engeln: [48:25]

Yeah. They wanted to keep them and I don’t blame them. I want to read them again and they’re not even my letters. They were stunning. The beautiful things, the beautiful ways I could think about their body when given that framework would just take your breath away. The things that they appreciated and the gratitude they felt and the kindness they showed. We know how to show kindness. We’re just not so good at showing it to ourselves and we are particularly not good at showing it to our bodies. If you are a woman in this culture, you’ve been taught to hate your body, to punish your body, to turn your body into something else, to constantly measure it up against the standard. It feels really different when you say, “Hey, body, I know it’s been hard, but you have done your best for me.” That feels really different. We have them spend 10 minutes on those letters and they felt a lot better afterward.

Jen: [49:21]

Yeah, it sounds like it would be an awesome exercise to do and I almost wish I had done one already and could read it to you now.

Dr. Engeln: [49:28]

I’ll send you the prompts.

Jen:  [49:30]

That would be great. We’ll put it up in our show notes and anyone who’s listening who wants to do that can go ahead and do it. So yeah, I found a similar results… I saw somebody posted in a parenting group a while back on “my child has really low self esteem. What can I do to improve my child’s self-esteem?” And so I started doing research about self-esteem and totally was not expecting to find that. My podcast episode ended up being titled, “Don’t bother trying to increase your child’s self esteem.”

Dr. Engeln: [49:54]

I’m all for it!

Jen:    [49:57]

Yeah. You see it doesn’t have any impact on them. It’s not that important anyway. And self compassion is actually a much more powerful tool.

Dr. Engeln: [50:04]

Self-esteem is almost always dependent on what other people think.

Jen: [50:07]

Yeah. Yeah. So I got to your chapter in your book and was like, “Whoa, we’re already on the same page.” So awesome. Okay. So we’ll make that exercise available to people and also just in case anyone’s wondering. And Dr Engeln says that her lab meetings tend to be kind of on the depressing side and so the people in her lab show each other pictures of puppies to conclude their meetings and so we’re going to have a picture of puppies as the episode image for this episode. So if it seems like a non sequitur, it’s not, and now you’re in on the secret.

Dr. Engeln: [50:41]

Wonderful.

Jen:  [50:42]

Thank you Dr. Engeln; and you’ve made it a lot of fun to discuss what could be a very difficult topic. So I’m very grateful for your taking the time.

Dr. Engeln: [50:50]

Thank you for having me.

Jen:  [50:51]

So Dr. Engeln’s book Beauty Sick, How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women can be purchased on Amazon or in your local bookstore and references for the show today can be found at YourParentingMojo.com/Beauty