079: What is RIE?

So a carer, who could be a parent or a grandparent or a paid childcare provider, puts love into action. The way a carer cares for a child is how that child experiences your love. And the ways we typically care for a child are in everyday activities like feeding and diapering, which Gerber transforms from chores that need to be gotten through as quickly as possible so you can get to the interesting stuff, to being the interesting and important part of caring for a child. We want our children to have the best chance to live fulfilling lives, but can you keep up with all the books and scientific research on parenting and fit the information into your own philosophy on how to raise kids? Welcome to Your Parenting Mojo, the podcast that does the work for you by investigating and examining respectful research-based parenting tools to help kids thrive. Now, welcome your host, Jen Lumanlon. Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.

Today, we're going to talk about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and that is what is known as Resources for Infant Educators, which is abbreviated to RIE, which for reasons I've never understood is pronounced RIE. Now, I'm guessing that those of you who are listening to this right now are mentally dividing yourselves into two groups. Those of you in one group are saying, finally, I'm going to be a parent. And those of you in the other group are thinking resources for infant what? So this episode will really be for those of you in the second group to learn about RIE. And those of you in the first can listen along and nod your heads and email me afterwards if I got any of it wrong. And this is actually probably going to be the first episode in this entire show where we don't really discuss much in the way of scientific research because I actually have an entire episode lined up that delves into what aspects of RIE are supported by the literature. So we're not going to do that here. And I should also acknowledge that I'm going to tell you about the core principles of RIE, but I'm also going to tell you about the parts of it that I didn't or don't practice because I really don't follow any approach dogmatically. So where did RIE come from? Well, I was surprised to learn that it actually originated in the work of Dr. Emmy Pickler, who worked in Austria and Hungary in the middle of the 20th century. She'd seen that working class children who played on the street had lower rates of injuries than middle-class children who played inside under a governess's watchful eye. She also studied with two doctors who focused on treating children as people rather than just as an illness that needed to be fixed and who believed in the importance of being outside, playing a lot and following the child's lead regarding food. So not forcing the child to eat even a single spoonful more than they wanted.

In nineteen thirty, Dr. Pickler married a high school math teacher who held progressive views, including that children should study at their own pace of development. When they had a daughter, Anna, in nineteen thirty-one, they agreed that they would follow her developmental lead. They wouldn't prop her to sit or steady her to walk, and they would allow space and time for her to develop at her own rate. She also began to make the connection between the physical and the mental, asking whether propping children to sit and leading them to walk communicates to the child that what the child is doing is not good enough and that the child should be doing something that he actually isn't yet capable of doing. In nineteen thirty-two, Dr. Pickler opened a private practice in Budapest where she put all these elements together for her clients. And anecdotal evidence from Pickler's now grown daughter, Anna, notes that the children in her practice seemed healthier than other children. Now, around nineteen thirty-seven, a woman named Magda Gerber, who was living in Hungary, had a daughter who got some kind of mild illness and their family's regular doctor was out of town. And Gerber's daughter remembered that her classmate's Anna's mother was a pediatrician, so they gave her a call. So Emmy Pickler came over to Magda Gerber's house and Gerber was just about to describe her daughter's symptoms when Pickler asked her to be quiet and instead asked her daughter herself about her symptoms and invited her cooperation with a physical exam. Gerber was absolutely struck by the revolutionary nature of this approach and she began studying closely with Dr. Pickler. So Dr. Pickler stayed in Europe and after the Second World War, she was asked by the local authority to set up a residential nursery in Budapest to take care of the orphans that the war had left behind. And if you've heard of orphanages in Europe, it might be the ones in Romania in the nineteen eighties that you're more familiar with. The children were confined to their beds for many hours a day and did not have caring relationships with adults and many experienced cognitive delays due to the inadequacy of their care. The children in Pickler's orphanage, by contrast, were supported physically and emotionally, spent much of their time playing and also allowed Dr. Pickler to test her ideas about the natural evolution of gross motor development. A study conducted by the World Health Organization in the 60s and 70s found that children who had been in Pickler's orphanage did not differ significantly from children who hadn't been in an orphanage in any meaningful way. In the 50s, Magda Gerber's family moved to Austria and then the US where she worked as a translator in Boston and then with children in Los Angeles. And in nineteen seventy-eight, she co-founded the nonprofit Resources for Infant Educators with an assistant professor of pediatrics at Stanford named Tom Forrest, who strangely disappears from the R.I.E story pretty much immediately after that. Gerber continued to work at the R.I.E organization in Los Angeles until her death in two thousand seven.

So as we move out of the history of where R.I.E. came from and into the meat of what R.I.E. is, let's start with a definition. What the heck is an educator? So Magda Gerber coined this term, refer to, quote, one who educates children in a caring manner. She didn't want to use caregiver or caretaker because a carer neither gives nor takes. Although I would argue that she might not have used the word educate if she thought a little more closely about that word too. To me, learning is something a child does, whereas education is something that's done to another person. So a carer who could be a parent or a grandparent or a paid childcare provider puts love into action. The way a carer cares for a child is how that child experiences your love. And the ways we typically care for a child are in everyday activities like feeding and diapering, which Gerber transforms from chores that need to be gotten through as quickly as possible so you can get to the interesting stuff to being the interesting and important part of caring for a child. So let's talk about what this looks like at the earliest stages of your baby's life and we'll go forward from there. So the R.I.E. approach to infants seems to me to be in pretty stark contrast to the theory of the fourth trimester that's been popularized by Dr. Harvey Karp. Dr. Karp argues that unlike many animals who emerge at birth ready to run around, human babies are more like fetuses than infants. They don't really become alert until about three months of age. They cry a lot, especially in the evening, possibly due to a gradual accumulation of stress throughout the day. And this crying is apparently absent in cultures where babies are carried all day long with constant holding and rocking and frequent nursing. For this reason, Dr. Karp recommends swaddling, calming a baby by putting them on their side, shushing loudly, swinging, and allowing the baby to suck as a calming mechanism. On the flip side of that, Magda Gerber acknowledges with a rare biblical reference that, quote, the newborn baby up to about age three months old is between heaven and earth, not quite here yet. A parent's job is to help the newborn make this transition into the world. How can this be done in a respectful manner? There are several keys in doing this. The most important ones include observing your baby in order to understand her, helping her form attachment by talking to her and letting her know what you're going to do, being slow and gentle with her and waiting before intervening, end quote. So there's a lot there, so let's break that apart a bit. Observing the baby, I think, can be one of the hardest things for Westerners to do since we're so accustomed to needing to do something instead of just watching.

But it's by watching that you understand the baby's body language and can begin to read their signals, which will enable you to do what attachment researchers like Dr. Arietta Slade, whom we talked to a few weeks ago, would call sensitively responding. In other words, respond appropriately to her needs, not just guess blindly at what she needs and do whatever you can to make the crying stop. Forming attachment is pretty clear.

The parent needs to come when the baby cries and also develop a predictable daily schedule, which helps to develop trust. Gerber believed it's important for a parent to be home with the child in the early years. The sensitive early care outside the home can be arranged, but parental care is preferable. Although she does say it's better for a parent to work and arrange for high quality care than for the parent to stay home and be miserable in doing that. Gerber believed that talking with your child is critical, although she did not appreciate what is known as child-directed speech or motherese, which is the high-pitched and drawn-out vowels that parents typically use when talking with infants. As someone who has always found child-directed speech to be kind of annoying, I was relieved to learn about this when my daughter was an infant, although I will say that when I mentioned this to Dr. Roberta Golinkoff recently, she said that she had done a study with one of her students, which found that even when parents don't think they use child-directed speech, actually do use different intonation with their child than with other adults, even if it isn't quite as exaggerated as the speech that some adults use when talking to babies. Another important part about talking with your child is telling your child what you're going to do. I've seen a video of a pretty young infant, no more than a few months old, and when the parent says, I'm going to pick you up now, the baby's neck actually stiffens because she understands what's about to happen. So we might think that an infant is just a helpless thing, but observations like that can help us to understand that they do actually listen to us and watch us and they can respond to us if we know how to look for that response. Gerber says we also need to think about what we say through our hands, which are the primary way that our babies feel our intentions and our love. If we rush through diapering silently and with rough hands, it conveys a very different message to the baby than if we participate in these interactions slowly and gently. Gerber has a pretty interesting stance on babies crying.

She views it as a child's language that communicates her needs to her parents. Rather than trying to stop a child from crying by distracting her or rocking her or shushing her or any of the other things that Dr. Karp would say, Gerber says we need to try and figure out why she is crying so we can help her. Gerber says that crying is the only way a child can express her feelings or discomfort and that babies also cry to discharge energy. So that just because a baby is crying doesn't necessarily mean they want us to fix something. Although I will add, I have not actually seen any evidence of that statement. We should absolutely address anything we can think of that we can fix, but if we've done those things and the baby's still crying, we should just hold the baby, tell her quietly that we're trying to understand what she wants and don't try and rock or bounce her, which really communicates more of our nervous energy than doing anything to help the baby. So as you can see, these are two pretty disparate views of a child's first few months. Dr. Karp sees a baby as helpless in those first months. They aren't really capable of doing much for themselves, least of all regulate their own crying, so we need to do it for them. Importantly, Dr. Karp bases his observations on colicky babies, but then applies them to all babies as if all crying is a bad thing and the parent's only goal should be to extinguish the crying. Gerberg, by contrast, sees an infant as a fully capable being right from the moment of birth. I was actually surprised to find that the concept of the fourth trimester doesn't have more support in the research literature given how pervasive it's become in popular culture. There are a number of papers suggesting the concept of the fourth trimester, but nobody really providing much evidence either for or against it. In reality, I think this is going to differ by the individual child. The reality may lie somewhere between the two, and as much of the concept of the fourth trimester is about the parents as about the child. Some children come out much more ready to spend time alone than others. I see pictures in online communities of parents practicing RIE of babies who are just a few days old spending quite a bit of time alone on a comfy blanket, watching the sunlight move on a wall or waving their hands in front of their faces. While other babies scream as soon as the parent puts them down and just seem to want to be held. And some parents have a higher tolerance for apparent discomfort in their baby than others. Some parents can let a baby fuss for a minute or two and see if they can solve their own problem while others feel as though they must pick up the baby immediately. To find some kind of balance, I would encourage you to observe your baby and learn their different cries, and that will enable you to understand which kind of cries indicate needs that should be met as soon as possible, and which just might be frustration that they can work through by themselves if you give them a minute.

So as we get out of the immediate infant period, Gerber offers eight qualities of a good parent in her book, Your Self-Confident Baby, and so I'll go through each of these. Firstly, feel secure, but don't become rigid. Your child changes over time, so your parenting needs to change too. Make sure your own needs are met so that you can relax into flexibility. Secondly, be accepting, but set limits. This one can be really hard for parents, acknowledging all of our child's emotions and not just the positive ones. It's okay for your child to be tired or frustrated or angry some of the time. It's even okay for the child to express those emotions, but what is not okay is for the child to express them in ways that you consider to be unacceptable, for example, through hitting. Gerber says, quote, Desires should be acknowledged and accepted, but rules enforced. As the child gets older, this idea extends to aggressive behavior that's a normal part of toddlerhood. If the child tries to hit you, block her by gently holding her arm and say, I don't want you to hit me. Hitting hurts me. You may choose to offer a pillow or something else to hit, or you could offer that she goes outside to throw a ball really hard. If she continues to hit, move away. You can say, I'm gonna sit over here because I don't want you to hit me. I'm here for you when you're ready. It's okay to not be 100% calm all the time. If you overreact when a child hits, then they will do it again to get a rise out of you, but you don't have to pretend like something doesn't irritate you when really it does, or the child's gonna be confused by your face and your tone of voice not matching your words. If your child hits another child, you can ask your child to look at the other child to see the effect of their actions. With a neutral voice that doesn't inflict guilt or blame, you can say something like, look at Zachary, he's crying. When you hit him, it hurt his arm. Helping a child to develop this awareness of others' feelings is a much more effective route to empathy than forced apologies. But to the child who was hit, you can say, Mackenzie hit you. Yes, it looked like it hurt. If you reflect rather than offering sympathy, the child won't learn to seek attention by becoming a victim. Thirdly, be available but not intrusive. This means spending time with your child without dictating what they do. One way I've seen this described is something that's called once-nothing quality time. It's different from once-something quality time, which is a way of describing caregiving acts like diapering as a form of quality time. But in once-nothing quality time, you're just spending time with your child with no agenda, using the time to observe and participate in the child's play if the child chooses to involve you and in the way that the child chooses to involve you without you providing direction. Fourthly, be patient, but be true to yourself. This means trying to be as patient as you can with your child, but if something really bothers you, then set a limit on that behavior. So a limit might be no screaming in the house because it really, really annoys you, or no shoes on the couch because then the couch will get dirty. In addition to being patient, I would add, say yes unless there's a good reason to say no. This will allow your child a framework or a boundary that they know they must not stray beyond. But within that framework or boundary, they have a great deal of freedom to spend their time as they wish.

It also means that you don't have to say no all the time and that any limit you do set will be an easy one to hold. It's the waffling on the limits, for example, saying, no, no, don't do that, and then the child whines and then you say, okay, you can do it. That makes children test us so much. If you do need to say no, offer your child a couple of choices about what they can do instead and make sure both of those choices are acceptable to you. Fifthly, be realistic but consistent with your expectations, which means adjusting your expectations according to what the child can deliver. Don't expect an eight-month-old to be able to keep all the food on the table, but do expect an 18-month-old to do it. And don't be afraid to end a meal if they start throwing food. It can be harder to do this when you're tired or frustrated. And one of the reasons I love RISE so much is because Gerber acknowledges the parent's needs and that the parent will be a better parent if those needs are met. So try to get enough sleep and relaxation time and also time away from your child so you don't feel drained when you're with them. Sixthly, have the wisdom to resist new fads. One thing we often see on the show is some new study publicized with a clickbait title that immediately implies there's a radically different way we should be parenting our children and we should start doing it right away. And my Facebook feed is inundated with things I can buy for my child from mindset journals to Montessori-based toys for infants so that you don't have to wait to start a Montessori-based education until the child is old enough to go to daycare. Gerber says that simplicity, observation, and unhurried time never go out of style. And she also proposes a baby's first toy being a napkin, gathered up and held in the center and then propped on the floor to catch the baby's interest. No expensive subscriptions to services that will deliver the optimal toys to your house every month are required. Seventh, achieve a balance between quality time for your child and for yourself. Did I already mention that I love this aspect of RIE? I see a lot of parents arriving in groups for RIE parents saying that they tried attachment parenting, by which I mean the parenting method promoted by Dr. Sears, not the scientifically valid concept of attachment theory that we discussed with Dr. Arietta Slade. And they're just exhausted by responding to the baby's every cry. Yes, we need to respond sensitively as often as we can, but it's also true that leaving a warm, fed, clean baby alone in a safe place while you take a shower is not going to cause irreparable harm, even if they are unhappy about it for a few minutes. Eighth, achieve a state of self-respect and give equal respect to your children. So respect your own strengths and weaknesses and likes and dislikes. Don't try and turn yourself into a person that you're not because you think that that person would be a better parent. If you're satisfied and happy, you're more likely to interact with your child in a respectful way. One concept that somehow didn't make it into the eight key ideas list is letting the child develop at their own pace, which we touched on a bit earlier. So RIE practitioners won't prop a baby into any position they can't get into by themselves. The idea is that sitting up isn't the big milestone that parents make it out to be, and neither is standing up really or walking. They're each small events that mark progress in the child's ability to move their body. The baby's ability to move from their back to their side is just as momentous for the child and then from the side to the front and then from their front to their back again. So RIE practitioners wouldn't move a baby into a position they can't get into by themselves for two reasons. Firstly, because the baby learns as much about how their body works by trying to get themselves into that position and then eventually achieving it as they do by sitting or standing or whatever the activity is. And secondly, because if we put them in that position, they get the message that my parent thinks that the way I'm moving by myself is not good enough for some reason. Honestly, I'm on board with the general idea of this, but RIE practitioners will also extend it out to every other aspect of a child's life, especially emotional expression.

So as we mentioned earlier, if the child is angry, we won't let them hit, but the verbal expression of anger is just what the child needed to do at that point in time. This is certainly an approach that's geared towards success in a very individualistic society. And as someone who finds the US to be just a bit too individualistic for my taste, I do struggle a bit to balance this right the children have to have and express their feelings with consideration for others as well. So the eight key points give you some guidance that can be used throughout the first couple of years with your child, but where I find where RIE really comes into its own is once the child becomes mobile and capable of getting into some mischief. I find that RIE really gives us some awesome tools to deal with this period. And if we start using those tools now, we might find that interacting respectfully with our child becomes a habit that we don't wanna stop when our child officially ages out of RIE principles at age two. Gerber focused on those first two years because she thought it was particularly important to have a respectful relationship with a baby before it could advocate for itself. But of course, respect doesn't just turn off when the child turns two. Because if you've been talking with your child through diaper changes and doing them slowly, and explaining what you'll do before you do it, then some of the RIE approaches to caring for mobile children come sort of naturally. So if your child bonks an arm or a leg on the table, you likely won't dangle a set of keys in front of their face or encourage them to look at the pretty flower as a way to distract them and stop them from crying. But you're likely to be much more comfortable acknowledging, oh, you bonked your arm, that must've hurt, would you like a hug? And then sitting with your child for as long as they need. If you've let your child struggle for just a moment when they're young, rather than rushing to them every time they fuss, you're more likely to allow them room to experiment with doing things by themselves and try different approaches if the first one doesn't work and perhaps even fail sometimes. Gerber says that rather than giving the message, quote, when you were in trouble, you scream and I rescue you, we would like to convey the feeling, I think you can handle it, but if not, I'm here, end quote. So to illustrate what that actually looks like in practice, I'm gonna read you a passage from Gerber's book called Dear Parent. Nathan's first climbing experiences were a set of low wooden boxes in his room. These crates are turned on their sides and serve as floor level storage for his toys. At about eight months, Nathan began attempting to scale these crates. He would pull himself to standing, lean his body over the waist high crate and try to score him up. One afternoon, after about a week of trying, he figured out the mechanics necessary to achieve a kneeling position on top of the crate. Although I was a little nervous seeing him up there, he was so pleased with himself that I swallowed my anxiety and moved close to him without interfering. After a few moments, Nathan decided it was time to get down, but how? He looked at the floor and at me and began to whine. I stayed close and responded to his complaints with quiet, encouraging remarks and made no offer of physical help. For three long minutes, Nathan tried various methods of dissent, rejecting each in turn, frequently looking at me and whimpering. When I didn't rescue him, he would return to his work. Finally, he got his legs over the edge, feet on the ground and was off into the other room. He had solved the problem. 30 minutes later, he crawled back into the room, to the crate, climbed up to the top, paused an instant and then climbed down and crawled away without looking at me once. It was as if he wanted to be sure he had mastered that skill. I thought that was such a great example of understanding a child's needs and allowing the child to gain competence and confidence in their own way, in their own time, without swooping in to help when help really wasn't needed. One element that becomes even more important as the child gets older is independent playtime.

You might've started this by placing your infant on a soft surface and just letting them be while you do your own work close by. But as the baby becomes more mobile, you might need to institute different ways of promoting this quality time. RIE practitioner, Janet Lansbury, introduced the concept of the yes space, which is a space where your child can be left unattended that's completely safe. And if you happen to get locked out of your house for half an hour while your child was safe in their yes space, you would know that they would be fine. It's called a yes space because it's so safe that you never need to say no to your child when they're in that space. Often this is a child's room with a gate across the door, or it could be a sectioned off corner of a living room or a similar space. Some RIE practitioners advocate for having your child spend much of their day in their yes space, except when you're engaged in once something quality time or once nothing quality time, because this practice helps your child to develop independent play skills that benefit both them and you because you can get other stuff done while they're doing it. We actually never did this full time by ourselves, although we were able to develop a habit of having our daughter in her room with the gate across the doorway for half an hour or so after breakfast and another half an hour or so after lunch. The key to this is to be consistent and to build up the time if you haven't been doing it until now, but you'd like to start. So the child may protest at first, but if you believe that this time is important to both of you, then you can see their protests as a choice that they make on how they're going to spend that time rather than an indication that something is wrong. If they do protest, you can say, I hear you, I'm busy right now, but I'll come and see you in a few minutes. So one area that we did not follow RIE is around the introduction of solid foods because we really wanted to try baby-led weaning, which is where you introduce real solid food to the child rather than spoon feeding them purees. So RIE can get you into a bit of a pickle here because many children whose parents follow RIE principles tend to achieve milestones like sitting unassisted a bit later than children who are propped, although RIE practitioners of course would argue that the baby has learned a lot more about themselves by going through that process of learning to get themselves into a sitting position rather than being propped. And children also tend to be more stable and less likely to fall over if they've learned to get into that position by themselves. But many children are getting interested in food at around six months and might not be ready to sit unassisted until a couple to several months later. So the official RIE way to introduce food is to have the child who can't yet sit up in a semi-reclined position in your lap and spoon feed them purees. But that wasn't really something that I was interested in doing. So my daughter's grandparents were living with us for a couple of months when we introduced foods and they had been propping her up to sit. So we just sat her up and gave her pieces of banana and steak and anything else that we were eating that she was interested in. So you can't really do that if you follow RIE to the T. So you have to make a decision there about what stays and what goes. If there are RIE groups or classes available in your area, you might be intrigued to see the way that snack time is handled. A small low table is provided and each child gets a stool. The class leader brings out bananas and each child may eat as much banana as they like as long as they're sitting down. But if they leave the table, they can't have any more food. So this helps parents set the expectation that while children can do pretty much whatever they want as long as it's safe during playtime, there are certain times of the day like meal times where we expect people to behave in a certain way. By providing the low table and stools, you give the child the freedom to decide how much food is enough for them. But the parent sets and keeps the rule that once the child gets up, no more food is given.

The children also have small cups, perhaps shot glasses for the youngest and beakers for toddlers with small pitchers so they can pour their own drink. You might be surprised at how civilized these sessions are. The children don't throw food or tip their cups over on purpose, although our daughter sometimes did at home, but she quickly learned that was a fast way to end a meal. And children also learn to follow their body's own cues about hunger and satiation if we allow them to eat exactly the amount of food they would like and not force them just to eat one more bite because we think they haven't had enough. You can often spot a wry parent out at a park because they'll be the one who doesn't lift their child up to reach the monkey bars and who doesn't rescue their child from a high spot on the climbing frame, but instead guides the child to use their own skills to get down. A wry parent will also likely be willing to let children work out disputes over toys on their own. As long as children aren't hitting, the parent might say, I see two children who both want the ball. What's your plan? The child who is playing with a toy gets to keep using it as long as they like until they're ready to give it up, at which point the next child takes a turn. If parents force a child to share, the really only thing the child learns is that when the parent says share, the child knows they're going to have to give up whatever they're holding onto and want to keep. As children become more verbal, they can begin to articulate their reasons and see how this can lead to solutions that work for everyone. When my daughter was about three and a half, we went to the beach with a group of friends and she and another child about her age both wanted a bucket and were starting to pull it in opposite directions. I said, it looks like you both want the bucket. Carys, what do you want to do with it? She said, I want to put sand in it. And I asked her friend why he wanted it. And he said he wanted to carry some shells that he had collected in it. So a bandana was procured for him to carry the shells and Carys filled the bucket with sand and everyone was happy. And they didn't just learn how to navigate that situation, but they also gained a skill that I've seen her use many times since then. And she tries to come up with solutions to problems that she and I will have that will work for both of us. So that's your crash course in R.I.E We haven't looked at a lot of the scientific evidence behind R.I.E because really this is one woman's idea of how to raise children based on another woman's research on children in an orphanage. It's not like anyone took the best of what we know about child development and organized it into an approach called R.I.E Although if you've been following the show for a while, you will note that a number of the ideas I've discussed in this episode on topics like sharing and what to say instead of you're okay are actually supported by scientific research. So in our next episode on R.I.E, we'll actually do a deep dive into the extent to which the main principles of R.I.E are supported by science or not in some cases. In the meantime, there are a few resources you can use if you'd like to learn more about R.I.E The main one is Janet Lansbury's blog, which you can find at janetlansbury.com and I'll link to that in the show notes. There's also an awesome face group that I helped to admin with some other folks called Toasted R.I.E, which has the motto, it ain't R.I.E, but it ain't wrong. As you might guess, it's not a place where everyone follows R.I.E 100%, but it is a good place to come and find out how R.I.E can fit with your approach to parenting.

I'm actually splicing in an edited comment into this episode about how to join the group because Facebook recently changed its group policies. The group was getting bombarded with spam requests and the only way to reduce them was to make the group secret, meaning nobody could find it instead of closed, which means that you could find it, you just had to apply to join it. But you had to toggle it back to closed again within 24 hours or Facebook would make you be secret forever and so that actually ended up happening to us. We forgot to switch it back one time and we got stuck in secret mode. So we created a workaround so you could still find us, but fortunately that's actually no longer needed because Facebook has let us switch the group back to closed again. So it's still private and your mother-in-law won't be able to see what you post in the group unless she's in the group too, but you can actually find it. So if you'd like to join us in learning more about how to use R.I.E alongside your own approach to raising children, then do search for the group Toasted R.I.E That's T-O-A-S-T-E-D and then R-I-E and come join us. And finally, you can also join my new free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group and ask your R.I.E questions there. You can just search for that, Your Parenting Mojo on Facebook. Thanks so much for listening. You can find information about Magda Gerber's books that I've described today, as well as all the other resources at yourparentingmojo.com/whatisRIE Thanks for joining us on this episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Please subscribe, rate and review the show on iTunes and sign up for our mailing list at yourparentingmojo.com to receive a free gift. Seven relationship-based strategies to support your children's development while making parenting just a little bit easier on you. For more respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive, we'll see you next time on Your Parenting Mojo.