What to Do When Parenting Tools Don’t Work? I know that when you start using new parenting tools, things don't always go according to plan. Your kids don't say what you think they will, or maybe you perceive that their behavior is just kind of crappy, or maybe your partner isn't on board with your ideas. In this episode I address what to do about all of these challenges, as well as how to use the tools I work with to address difficult topics like children wanting ever more snack foods, ever more screen time, and refusing to go to school. We hear from parents who have managed to address tricky challenges - including a child with a skin condition who must take a bath daily and who was successfully extending the dinner/running around/reading books process until bedtime was delayed as well. Once the child's parents came to see what needs the child was trying to meet, bath time suddenly wasn't a problem anymore. I share some realizations that parents have had about their place in the world as they've engaged with my work and how I plan to shift the ways I talk about these issues moving forward. I also invite you to celebrate with my book Parenting Beyond Power's first birthday by baking (or buying) some cupcakes! One of many parents' favorite ideas in the book was the feelings and needs cupcakes, which makes it easy to visualize your most common feelings and needs. We've made some flags you can print and use with your children to identify your (and their) feelings and needs. Share them on social media and be invited to a group coaching call with me later in September, and stick them to the fridge as a reminder of how to connect with your kids - and yourself! https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nTLKzk1pdy9cwJQd2iMJolZNsz0gJL25 Finally, a couple of invitations. The Right From The Start course, which I run with Hannah and Kelty of Upbringing, is now available whenever you need it (rather than waiting for the next cohort to begin. If you're expecting a baby or have a child under the age of one, Right From The Start will help you to get clear on your values and goals around raising your child so you can put the systems you need in place before you get to the really tough toddler years. Parent Annie said: "I am so jealous (but excited for others)... that there is something like this for first time mothers. I wish I had it with my first born as it would have been so helpful for my nerves and anxiety surrounding my new profession of 'child raiser!" Learn more and sign up - you can also gift the course to to a friend or relative who is expecting or has a baby under the age of one. We have sliding scale pricing and a 100% money back guarantee! https://yourparentingmojo.com/rightfromthestart/ And if you're interested in doing explicitly anti-racist, patriarchy-healing, capitalism-busting work with me (which I know isn't for everyone!), I'd love to invite you to join me for the Parenting Beyond Power book club hosted by Moms Against Racism Canada. It's a 'book club' in that we'll be working with the ideas in Parenting Beyond Power (we couldn't think of what else to call it...which is also how I ended up with Your Parenting Mojo!), but it's really a set of six 90-minute group coaching calls on Friday evenings where we'll explore how we've been harmed by systems of power, and how we can be in relationship with our children in a way that's aligned with our values. If you (and maybe the folks in your community as well?) have been wanting to know more about how to take anti-racist action with your kids but weren't sure how to do it, the book club will help you to do it. If you'd like to invite your crew, we can give you a special link and when five people use it to sign up, your own spot will be free. https://yourparentingmojo.com/MARBookclub/?oprid=3464&ref=21952

Other episodes mentioned:

• 179: I Never Thought of It That Way with Mónica Guzmán and Lulu
• 207: How to not be a permissive parent
• 209: How to get on the same page as your parenting partner
• 217: How to end the video game struggles with Ash Brandin

 

Understanding Menstrual Cycle Awareness This episode was...unplanned. :-) A couple of months ago I interviewed Dr. Louise Newson on the topic of menopause. Dr. Newson is a medical doctor and focused very heavily on Hormone Replacement Therapy as a treatment that everyone who menstruates should at least consider, and I knew I wanted to do an episode with someone who doesn't hold that belief as well.   I found Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer of The Red School, and really appreciated their book Wise Power. As I usually do before recording an interview I read their other co-authored book Wild Power, and I realized there was a 'missing' episode on the topic of Menstrual Cycle Awareness. We can't really talk about being aware of the changes that are happening to our bodies during menopause if we don't know what has happened to our bodies throughout our menstruating years.   When I read Wild Power I felt a deep sense of sadness that I was just discovering this now, as my own years of menstruation wind down - but also a deep sense of hope that I can help Carys develop a much closer relationship with her own body than I had with mine.   We'll answer questions like:

• What phases does my body go through each month?
• How can I start becoming more aware of these phases through Menstrual Cycle Awareness?
• How can I align my activities with my energy levels, creativity, and arousal - even in the real world, which wants me to go-go-go all the time?
• How is my inner critic aligned with my cycle, and how can I use its knowledge to help me?
• How can I navigate Menstrual Cycle Awareness if I've had a difficult relationship with my periods and with fertility?

  I'd encourage you to listen to this episode if:

• You menstruate and want to better understand how menstruation affects your life
• You're raising a child who will menstruate and want to prepare them to feel 'at home' in their bodies
• You love someone who menstruates and want to be better attuned to them
• You're raising a child who will never menstruate, but you want them to appreciate menstruation and know how to effectively support people who menstruate.

In other words, everyone will get something out of this episode!   Learning Membership The Learning Membership will open again soon!  The membership helps you to support your child’s intrinsic love of learning, while also equipping them with the skills they’ll need to succeed in the age of AI. You’ll learn how to see and follow your child’s interests so you can support them in deep inquiries.  You won’t have to drag them through it like you would a workbook or a curriculum (so no need to reward them with screen time!) because they will WANT to learn.  They’ll be excited to do it, and they’ll bring you along for the ride. If you already know you’re in, you can sign up for the Learning Membership. Click the banner to learn more! https://yourparentingmojo.com/learningmembership/   Alexandra and Sjanie’s books (Affiliate Links):

• Wild power: Discover the magic of your menstrual cycle and awaken the feminine path to power
• Wise power: Discover the liberating power of menopause to awaken authority, purpose and belonging

  Jump to highlights 00:46 Introducing today’s topic and featured guests 03:39 Menstruation is the monthly process where the body sheds the lining of the uterus, and it also brings emotional, psychological, and even spiritual changes. 17:18 Menstrual cycle awareness is about understanding and respecting our natural rhythms, which can improve our well-being and productivity by honoring the need for rest and reflection in our lives. 31:20 Recognizing and respecting your menstrual cycle can improve your well-being by allowing you to adjust your activities and manage your energy more effectively. 40:10 The inner critic gets stronger during the pre-menstrual phase of the menstrual cycle. Knowing this can help you take better care of yourself and manage parenting challenges. 53:09 Menstrual cycle awareness can help with personal healing and self-care, even for those who face challenges like heavy periods or grief, by fostering connection with one's own body and experiences. 58:52 Wrapping up the discussion   References Alfonseca, K., & Guilfoil, K. (2022, July 19). Should people of all genders be taught sex education together? Educators weigh in. ABC News. Retrieved from: https://abcnews.go.com/US/people-genders-taught-sex-education-educators-weigh/story?id=87021246 Andrews, S. (n.d.). Should schools separate sex ed classes by gender? NextGenMen. Retrieved from: https://www.nextgenmen.ca/blog/should-schools-separate-sex-ed-classes-by-gender

Exploring Marriage, Autism, Race, and Parenting Together Want to know how my autism self-diagnosis has affected my relationship with my husband? (I will apologize to autistic listeners here as an ableist perspective is still something we're working on, and he also uses some outdated terminology probably from an old book he's started twice - but not yet finished - on supporting partners with Asperger's Syndrome.)   Curious about whether he identifies as Filipino-American... or not? And how his perspective on race differs from mine?   Want to hear how he sent a chicken up into space...and then found out what the two pink lines of a pregnancy test mean?   Last year, when we were coming up on our 200th podcast episode, I asked my husband, Alvin, if he would be willing to record a podcast episode. I had envisioned listeners asking the questions and him answering - but he wanted me to join as well!   One of the first things we learned was that Alvin cannot be succinct. (Well, technically speaking, this was not a new lesson for me - and interviewer Iris had tried really hard to prepare him for succinctness by asking for his 'elevator pitch' - but he just couldn't do it!)   So we ended up cutting the episode when it was already over an hour, and we hadn't covered half of the questions listeners had submitted...and interviewers Iris and Corrine graciously agreed to return for a Part 2. So here it is!   Other episodes mentioned

• 175: I’ll be me; can you be you?
• 200: Ask Alvin Anything (Part 1!)

  Jump to highlights 01:22 Introducing this episode 04:28 Alvin talks about how Jen's autism diagnosis helps their relationship, while Jen shares how it helps in their daily life and parenting. 12:47 Alvin and Jen talk about how they decided to become parents. 25:10 Alvin discusses his upbringing in a predominantly White area, his evolving awareness of his Filipino heritage, and how his wife Jen's advocacy work has shaped his understanding of race and culture. 38:13 Alvin talks about his journey from wanting to be seen as White to embracing his Filipino heritage and identifying as a Brown person. 46:32 Alvin encourages dads to be actively involved in parenting, prioritize their partners, and be present in family life. 57:15 Alvin and the hosts engage in a quickfire round of questions, discussing topics from parenting to personal preferences. 01:00:50 Wrapping up

When you’re learning a new skill, information is critical.  Without that, it’s very difficult to make any kind of meaningful change.   But I see a parallel between learning new skills and respectful parenting: I like to say that love between parent and child is necessary but not sufficient - and that respect is the missing ingredient.  With learning a new skill, knowledge is necessary - but not sufficient.   And support is the missing ingredient.   You might remember from our conversation with Dr. Chris Niebauer a while ago that our overactive left brains tend to make up stories about our experiences to integrate these experiences into the narratives we tell about ourselves.   If we’re “the kind of person who triumphs through adversity,” a setback will be taken in stride.  If we’re “the kind of person who has been hurt,” each new individual hurt makes much more of a mark.  The new experiences have to be made to fit with the framework that’s already in place.   Especially when you’re learning a skill related to difficult experiences you’ve had, your left brain wants to keep itself safe.  It might tell you: “I don’t need to do this.  Things aren’t that bad.  I’ll just wait until later / tomorrow / next week.”   And when that happens, you need support.  That support can be from a great friend, although sometimes you don’t want even your closest friends to know that you shout at or smack your child.   Therapy can be really helpful - but it’s also really expensive.   Sometimes the thing that’s most helpful is someone who’s learning the tools alongside you (so they aren’t trying to look back and remember what it was like to be in your situation; theirs is different, but they are struggling too…) who isn’t a regular presence in your life.   There’s no danger you’re going to run into them at the supermarket, or a kid’s birthday party.   You can actually be really honest with them and know it won’t come and bite you in the butt.   That’s what today’s guests, Marci and Elizabeth, discovered when they started working together.  Separated by cultural differences, fourteen(!) time zones, and very different lives, they found common ground in their struggles and have developed a deep and lasting friendship.   If you’d like to work on taming your triggered feelings - and get help from your own Accountabuddy in the process - the Taming Your Triggers workshop is for you.  

Click the banner to learn more!

https://yourparentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers/  

How does trauma affect us?   Yes, we feel it in our brains - we get scared, frustrated, and angry - often for reasons we don’t fully understand.   But even if our brains have managed to cover up the trauma; to paper a veneer over it so everything seems fine, that doesn’t mean everything actually is fine - because as our guest in this episode, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk says: The Body Keeps The Score.   What he means is that the effects of the trauma you’ve experienced don’t just go away, and can’t just be papered over.  Your body will still hold the evidence in tension, headaches, irritability (of minds and bowels), insomnia...and all of this may come out when your child does something you wish they wouldn’t.   Perhaps it’s something your parent always used to resent doing, and made it super clear to you every time they did it for you.   Perhaps it was something you did as a child and were punished for doing (maybe you were even hit for it...your body is literally remembering this trauma when your child reproduces the behavior).   Lack of manners, talking back, making a mess, not doing as you were told, being silly...even if logically you now know that these are relatively small things, when your child does them it brings back your body’s memories of what happened to you.   Dr. van der Kolk helps us to understand more about how this shows up for us.  Sometimes understanding can be really helpful.  But sometimes you also need new tools, and support as you learn them, and accountability.   If you’re struggling with your reactions to your child’s difficult behavior - whether you’re going into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode, the Taming Your Triggers wokrshop can help.  

Click the banner to learn more!

  https://yourparentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers/   Dr. Van der Kolk's Book:

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Affiliate link).

  Jump to highlights: 01:00 Introducing Dr. van der Kolk 01:58 Invitation to the Taming Your Triggers Workshop 02:56 A note on some technical difficulties we had while recording this episode 03:14 People often want easy answers: Talking about why we feel like we need pills and alcohol to deal with trauma and not make use of other methods which seem more beneficial 08:16 "We become who we are based on the experiences we had and these early experiences really set your expectations" 11:53 Dr. van der Kolk’s ongoing research on touch and trauma that looks into the virtually unstudied field of touch 14:42 To effectively deal with trauma, people need to discover who they are and find the words for their internal experiences 16:10 On mindfulness and yoga: the physical focus on movement in yoga may open up some space for mindfulness 20:45 Rolfing : opening up the body so that it is released from the configuration it adopted to deal with trauma 23:07 The importance of words and finding somebody who can helps you to find words as cautiously as they can, without inflicting too much of their own value system on you 25:31 Dr. van der Kolk’s current agenda for kids to be taught to have a language for their internal experience 28:27 Two of the most important scientifically proven predictors of adult function 31:26 Dr. van der Kolk talks about Developmental Trauma Disorder 38:31 The power of peer and community support in healing trauma 41:32 Wrapping up   Links:

• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
• My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
• No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism
• Taming Your Triggers Workshop

  References D’Andrea, W., Ford, J., Stolbach, B., Spinazzola, J., & van der Kolk, B. (2012). Understanding interperonsal trauma in children: Why we need a developmentally appropriate trauma diagnosis. American Journal of Orthopsyhchiatry 82(2), 187-200. Goessl, V.C., Curtiss, J.E., & Hofman, S.G. (2017). The effect of heart rate variability biofeedback training on stress and anxiety: A meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine 47, 2578-2586. Haines, S.K. (2019).The politics of trauma: Somatics, healing, and social justice. Berkeley: North Atlantic. Menachem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hand: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press. Miller, A. (2006). The body never lies: The lingering effects of hurtful parenting. New York: Norton. National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (n.d.). Frontiers in the treatment of trauma: how to target treatment to help patients reclaim their lives after trauma. The Main Session with Bessel van der Kolk, MD and Ruth Buczynski, PhD. NICABM. Tippet, K. (2019, December 26). Bessel van der Kolk: How trauma lodges in the body. On Being. Retrieved from: https://onbeing.org/programs/bessel-van-der-kolk-how-trauma-lodges-in-the-body/ van der Kolk, B. (2017). Developmental trauma disorder: Toward a rational diagnosis for children with complex trauma histories. Psychiatric Annals 35(5), 401-408. van der Kolk, B. (2016). The devastating effects of ignoring child maltreatment in psychiatry: Commentary on “The enduring neurobiological effects of abuse and neglect.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 57(3), 267-270. van der Kolk, B.A., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., & Spinazzola, J. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 75(6), e559-e565. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Penguin. van der Kolk, B., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., & Spinazzola, J. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 75(6), e559-e565. van der Kolk, B. (2006). Clinical implications of neuroscience research in PTSD. Annals – New York Academy of Sciences 1071(1), 277. van der Kolk, B., & van der Hart, O. (1989). Pierre Janet & the breakdown of adaptation in psychological trauma. American Journal of Psychiatry 146(12), 1530-1540.

When we're having a hard time interacting with our family members, it's pretty common for our first reaction to be: "I need this person (or these people!) to change their behavior" - especially when this person (or these people!) are children.  After all, we've been around for longer and we know what we're doing and we were fine before our children started misbehaving, right?   My guest today, parent-of-three Chrystal, had encountered this mentality not just about her children, but also about her husband.  In fact, when she went to couple's therapy with her husband it was with a sense of relief: "Finally, I'm going to find out what's wrong with him, because there's nothing wrong with me!"   She always figured: "If that person didn't act like that then I wouldn't need to react the way I'm reacting...and I legitimately thought that everyone else was responsible for my behavior."   Then she realized that her husband wasn't responsible for how she was feeling...she was.   Now she was ready to make the same leap related to her relationship with her spirited children, but needed new tools.  They would melt down over every tiny issue (not enough honey on the oatmeal!  Now not enough cream!  I don't WANT to get dressed!), and Chrystal found herself constantly scrambling to placate them.   Join us for a conversation about the new ideas she's learned, and how her children now don't cooperate blindly because she's forcing them, but express their agency while finding ways to collaborate that also meet their needs.  They have real agency in her family (they know she'll hear them and respect their ideas) and because of this, the little issues that used to provoke regular meltdowns are easily solved.  And Chrystal is learning how to set boundaries so she doesn't get walked all over - by her children, or by other members of her family.   Want to make a similar shift in your own interactions with your children?  The Taming Your Triggers workshop will help.   Click the banner to learn more!   https://yourparentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers/ Jump to highlights: 01:00 Inviting listeners to join the Taming Your Triggers workshop 04:43 A little bit about Chrystal 11:06 Chrystal’s journey as a parent 13:58 How Chrystal found it difficult to build lasting relationships with parents who were raising their children the same way they were raised and how she found her people in the Taming Your Triggers community. 16:32 The fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses and how Chrystal resonated to the fawn response. 18:22 The first time Chrystal was able to connect what she’s feeling in her body with her belief systems 20:36 As the eldest of eight children, Chrystal felt that it was her responsibility to make sure everyone is happy when her mother couldn’t cope due to severe postnatal depression, and this has continued on with her character now that they’ve grown up 24:51  When Chrystal decided to set boundaries and have it respected, she found out that her family’s issues can resolve themselves without her getting involved 28:14 The profound shift with for Chrystal in terms of what changed in her family after going through the Taming Your Triggers workshop is that she is now able to see situations as more than a win-lose situation 32:20 With two strong-willed daughters and a son who is also energetic, breakfast has been a challenge in Chrystal’s home. She’s learned to apply problem solving to find solutions, but the biggest revelation for her has been that it is okay for her children to have these big feelings 38:15 Chrystal explores the question, “Why should our children listen to us?” as she discovers extrinsic and intrinsic motivation 38:55 A beautiful moment when Chrystal was having a hard time getting her daughter ready for school, and another instance when she was having some friend over their house 47:08 Having the tools is great but it is just better to have a framework to implement it and really being intentional 51:20 Wrapping up with a sense of compassion.   Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Taming Your Triggers workshop
• Upbringingwith Hannah & Kelty
• Nonviolent Communication Podcast Episode
• The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind, by Daniel Siegel

This episode kicks off a series on the intersection of parenting and food.   We begin today with a conversation with Dr. Lindo Bacon, where we bust a LOT of myths about the obesity epidemic that is said to be plaguing people in the United States and other countries that follow a similar diet.   The messaging we get from government entities seems pretty simple: being fat is bad for you. It causes increased risk for a host of diseases as well as early death. If you're fat, you should lose weight because then your risk of getting these diseases and dying early will be reduced.   But what if this wasn't true?   What if this messaging had been established by people who own companies that manufacture weight loss products who sit on panels that advise international governmental entities like the World Health Organization?   What if body fat was actually protective for your health?   We dig into all these questions and more in this provocative interview.   We'll continue this series with episodes looking specifically at sugar, as well as supporting parents who have or continue to struggle with disordered eating, and how to support children in developing eating habits that will serve them for a lifetime, not just get the vegetables into them today.   Jump to highlights:

• (01:00) Introducing Dr. Lindo Bacon and starting our series of episodes on the intersection of parenting and food
• (02:22) Stripping the word ‘fat’ of it’s pejorative meaning and reclaiming the term while acknowledging that it may be jarring for some people
• (03:09) Kicking off the conversation with how we measure health using BMI and how it might not be accurate
• (05:03) The resistance to Katherine Flegal’s seminal research in weight and longevity
• (05:49) The development of the Body Mass Index was with scientific bias to fit the bell curve
• (07:30) Higher body weight does not necessarily mean a person has greater risk of poor health
• (10:59) We actually know that the research is highly exaggerated in terms on the role that it plays on health
• (13:16) Dr. Bacon’s turning point: When they found out that BMI recommendations were created by an organization funded by pharmaceutical companies who produce weight loss drugs and products
• (17:35) Taking the issue one step further with the American Medical Association’s recommendation whether to categorize obesity as a disease or not
• (19:19) The Obesity Paradox is an observation in the research that people who are obese who get the same diseases as those with ‘normal’ weight are living longer
• (21:15) The concept of dieting just doesn’t work according to the data
• (30:33) A story of Dr. Bacon’s and their father’s knee problems
• (34:40) Individual factors only accounts to 25% to somebody’s total health outcomes and social determinants account to about 60%
• (42:05) It is cool right now to be your authentic self but not everyone can so easily be their authentic self when their authentic selves are not valued by society at large
• (45:48) Improving the health of individuals is more communal than individual

  Resource Links:

• Health at Every Size, by Lindo Bacon
• Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight, by Lindo Bacon and Lucy Aphramor
• Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming it for the Better), by Lindo Bacon
• Association For Size Diversity and Health

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want her children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting.   Jen Lumanlan  00:29 If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a free guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What to Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen Lumanlan  01:00 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. I'm very excited about our episode today because we're at the very beginning of what I hope is going to be quite an extended series of episodes at the intersection of parenting and food. And I'm hoping to look at ideas like eating disorders and intuitive eating and how sugar impacts our children and what we should do about that, if anything, how we should approach eating issues with our children more broadly and how we can all be a little bit happier in our bodies. And today we're kicking off this series with Dr. Lindo Bacon whose seminal book Health at Every Size was written over a decade ago now and which exposes how the ideas that most of us believe about body fat and weight are actually not grounded in scientific research. She followed that by co-authoring a book called Body Respect, and her most recent book is called Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming it for the Better). Dr. Bacon earned their PhD in physiology from the University of California Davis, where they currently serve as an Associate Nutritionist. They also hold graduate degrees in Psychology and Exercise Metabolism. Dr. Bacon is industry independent, which means they have pledged not to accept money from the weight loss, pharmaceutical or food industries, which makes them almost unique among non governmental researchers on issues related to weight and food. Welcome, Dr. Bacon. I'm so glad you're here.   Dr. Lindo Bacon  02:20 Thanks, Jen. I'm looking forward to talking to you.   Jen Lumanlan  02:22 And before we get started, I just want to acknowledge that I'm going to follow your lead in your books by using the word fat in this interview and using that in a way that's really been stripped of its pejorative connotations. And many people it seems who are fat, who are now reclaiming the term in this way. But I do acknowledge that it may be jarring to some listeners to hear if they aren't accustomed to hearing it like that.   Dr. Lindo Bacon  02:45 Yeah, I think it's important to name all of that. So thank you, Jen. And I also just want to note for the listeners that if you do feel uncomfortable when you hear the word, then that's something helpful to look at, because that really shows that you've absorbed the cultural ideas about that. And hopefully, we can start to normalize it so that you could feel better about it.   Jen Lumanlan  03:09 Yeah, and hopefully this conversation is going to be a big part of that as well. So I wonder if we can start at the beginning with what I know is a big topic as it were, which is how we measure health. And so this body mass index, or BMI for short, has become the standard measure of how much weight a person is carrying compared to their height. And it's best considered an indicator of how healthy they are in some way. And it's used by everybody from the Centers for Disease Control in the US to the World Health Organization. Is the BMI actually a good measure - I guess I should start by saying of anything at all and then we can go from there and to health.   Dr. Lindo Bacon  03:47 You right. I think that your question already answered itself, but it really does not play much of a role in health at all. And I think that its use has been quite damaging to people. So I wish that the medical industry would throw it out.   Jen Lumanlan  04:03 Yeah. So where did it come from? How did we end up here?   Dr. Lindo Bacon  04:07 Well, it actually was written by or devised by someone who was a statistician looking at insurance, and that it wasn't meant or designed for health. And it was meant to look at what's going on in a population, not what's going on in an individual. And it's amazing when you start to look at the research of how it corresponds to health and you find some really surprising things. For example, it's pretty clear from the...

Many of us haven't been in each other's homes for a while now, but pretty soon we'll be getting together inside again.  And our children will be heading inside, in their friends' houses.   People store guns inside.   Are you certain that nobody owns a gun in any of the places your child plays?   If they do own a gun, are you certain they store it safely?   If not, you need to ask.   That's one issue we discuss in this interview with Dr. Nina Agrawal, a board-certified pediatrician who has expertise in violence against children.  She co-founded the Gun Safety Committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics in New York State, and is leading the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force for the American Medical Women’s Association.   Another issue is the gun violence that is primarily faced by children of color, which turns out to affect a far greater number of children.   And how is this all linked to the Peloton recall?  You'll have to listen in to find out...   Jump to highlights here:

• (01:00) Indoor playdates are ramping up...will your child be safe?
• (02:29) Introducing Dr. Nina Agrawal, pediatrician and co-founder of the American Academy of Pediatrics' Gun Safety Committee in New York State
• (02:58) Understanding how big is the scope of gun violence against children
• (06:15) The Dickey Amendment: Explaining the massive lack of data and research on gun violence and safety
• (11:24) The ways that gun violence affects children that we might not expect
• (12:32) “I get woken up at night to the sound of gunshots.”
• (17:09) The racial disparity in how children are affected by gun violence
• (20:46) More people purchased guns in 2020, and there are more first-time owners too
• (23:39) The statistical likelihood of children coming to harm if they live with a firearm in their household
• (27:00) Just telling kids not to touch guns doesn't work (even if you think of your child as one who is 'sensible,' and you've talked with them about gun safety)
• (30:45) The Asking Saves Kids Campaign helps to keep kids safer
• (33:06) The surprising link between children involved in gun violence and the Peloton treadmill recall
• (36:07) In American culture, banning all guns can't be the answer
• (40:52) Effective Child Access Laws
• (41:45) How to create safer environments for children through building communities

[accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast.   Jen Lumanlan  00:06 We all want her children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research on principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a free guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You & What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen Lumanlan  01:00 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. And today we're going to discuss a topic that I think is about to come into parents' consciousness in a way that it really hasn't as much over the last year. And for some of us, that's a result of our privilege. And I was reflecting that as vaccinations for children become more available, we're probably going to start moving towards indoor play dates without parents being around because when my daughter went into when we went into sort of lockdown, she was young enough that she wasn't really doing playdates indoors with other people in anyone else's houses. And so I never really felt as though I needed to ask, "Are there guns in your house?" because I was always there to supervise. And so of course, over the last year, she's played with a lot of kids on our street, and they're always outside and I can always hear them. And so the danger doesn't seem to be there in the same way for me in those outdoor playdates scenarios. But of course, as vaccinations become available, and these things start to move inside, I don't know which of my friends has guns in their houses. And if I'm kind of uncomfortable asking about this, I'm guessing that a lot of parents haven't even thought about it and don't have it on their collective radar yet. So I wanted to bring that up into our consciousness before we actually need it. And then, of course, there's another issue here as well, that we're going to delve into fairly deeply today, which is that gun violence is becoming increasingly common in a wide variety of settings that children live in and are exposed to, and that this can have really big impacts on them. And that that isn't necessarily talked about or studied nearly as much.   Jen Lumanlan  02:29 And we have a very special guest here with us today to talk about these issues. Dr. Nina Agrawal. She's a pediatrician who is board certified in Child Abuse Pediatrics, and she has expertise in Violence Against Children. She was on the faculty at Columbia University in Child and Adolescent Health. She co-founded the Gun Safety Committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics in New York State, and she's leading the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force for the American Women's Association. Welcome Dr. Agrawal.   Dr. Nina Agrawal  02:56 Thank you so much for having me, Jen.   Jen Lumanlan  02:58 All right. So I wonder if we can maybe start by just understanding how big is the scope of this problem, and piggybacking on that, how much do we know about how big is the scope of this problem, and why don't we know as much as we might want to know?   Dr. Nina Agrawal  03:12 Right, great question. Right now, guns are the leading cause of death in children 1 to 19 years of age. Before it was motor vehicle accidents.   Jen Lumanlan  03:22 Yeah.   Dr. Nina Agrawal  03:23 Now it's firearm. So it's something that's a health issue. It's a public health issue. It's a safety issue affecting all children.   Jen Lumanlan  03:34 Okay. And yeah, I actually hadn't seen those latest statistics, the peer reviewed papers I was looking at from 2018 still showed it in that number two position, so. So that's an unfortunate development over the last couple of years that that position has switched then. And it doesn't affect everybody equally, right? It affects some children more than others.   Dr. Nina Agrawal  03:53 Yes, definitely. Racially, it affects Black children disproportionately. Blacks, and then Hispanics, and then White children.   Jen Lumanlan  04:00 Okay. And I noticed that actually, the way that this data is collected, we might think, Oh, it's fairly easy to understand how prevalent this kind of thing is, how prevalent injuries are. And actually, there's a couple of different ways of estimating it. But the most common way is using data from the Centers for Disease Control, which is sampled from 100 hospitals. And I'm just thinking, Okay, there are 1000s of trauma centers that are dealing with this kind of thing. Can a sample of 100 hospitals give us a complete picture of what the actual prevalence rates for this are?   Dr. Nina Agrawal  04:34 Right? Yeah, as with a lot of injuries in children, it's a combination of hospital data and mass data and media. We're increasingly using media data. There's a gun violence archive that looks at shootings in communities, and then the CDC data. I think one of the problems with the CDC data is that it doesn't include non fatal injuries and only includes fatal injuries. So we're missing a lot of children who suffered non fatal injuries and understanding those so that we can prevent them.   Jen Lumanlan  05:09 Yeah. Okay. And I think when a lot of parents think about guns, one thing that they may be most kind of afraid of the immediate fear is of a mass shooting. Because there's get so much publicity, right? Is that the thing that we should be the most afraid of statistically speaking?   Dr. Nina Agrawal  05:25 Statistically, definitely not. It's 1% of shootings. So much more common is homicide, and suicide, and unintentional injuries. And then mass shootings are a small percentage, but they gain the most immediate attention. And because again, the most immediate attention, they gain the most resources - prevention resources. And so we have children dying every day from homicide and suicide and yet, we're really not devoting the investing in prevention of deaths in those children due to firearms.   Jen Lumanlan  06:00 Yeah, okay. And I think a big reason why we're not investing as much in the pieces of this that really matter are that we don't understand it well enough. And there's a reason we don't understand much about gun violence, right? Can you tell us about that reason.   Dr. Nina Agrawal  06:15 I love telling the story. It's a story that's not known and once people...

New parents often worry about attachment to their baby - will I be able to build it? My baby cries a lot - does that mean that we aren't attached? If I put my baby in daycare, will they get attached to the daycare staff rather than to me?   Based on the ideas about attachment that have been circulated over the years, these are entirely valid concerns. But it turns out that not only should we not worry about these things, but the the research that these ideas were based in was highly flawed.   It's often forgotten that attachment theory was developed in the period after World War II, when policymakers were trying to get women out of the jobs they had held during the war, and back into their 'natural' place in the home.   In one of his earliest papers Dr. John Bowlby - the so-called Father of Attachment Theory - described 44 children who had been referred to his clinic for stealing, and compared these with children who had not stolen anything. He reported that the thieves had been separated from their parents during childhood, which led them to have a low sense of self-worth and capacity for empathy. He went on to say that “to deprive a small child of his mother’s companionship is as bad as depriving him of vitamins.”   But much later in his life, Bowlby revealed that he had conflated a whole lot of kinds of separation into that one category – everything between sleeping in a different room to being abandoned in an orphanage. And in addition to being separated, many of the thieves had also experienced physical or sexual abuse. The fear that spending time apart from your baby will damage them in some way is just not supported by the evidence.   What other common beliefs do we hold about attachment relationships that aren't supported by evidence? Well, quite a lot, as it turns out! Listen in for more.   Link to the book mentioned:

Cornerstones of Attachment Research (Affiliate link).

  Jump to highlights: 03:30 Download the free Right From The Start Roadmap 06:11 Dr. John Bowlby, who is known as the founder of attachment theory 06:40 A brief overview of attachment theory 08:06 What is attachment theory 09:44 A closer look at the word attachment 12:55 Five aspects out of Freud's psychoanalytic theory 14:32 44 Juvenile Thieves - One of the major ideas about separation from parents 17:50 What is the word monotrophy 18:49 The four dimensions that distinguish African-American views of motherhood from American views by Dr. Patricia Hill Collins 20:49 Aka Pygmy tribe in Africa 21:37 What is PIC or Parental Investment in the child Questionnaire by Dr. Robert Bradley 24:19 The Strange Situation Procedure developed by Dr. Mary Ainsworth 30:30 White middle class mothers in Baltimore stand for what attachment should look like in families of all types around the world 33:36 Two main cross cultural studies 40:13 The cognitive thinking component of the attachment relationship 47:29 What is Outcomes 01:01:25 Summary   References Ainsworth, M.D.S. (1985). Patterns of infant-mother attachments: Antecedents and effects on development. Bulletin of The New York Academy of Medicine 61(9), 771-791. Attached at the Heart (n.d.). Talking points/frequently asked questions. Author. Retrieved from http:// attachedattheheart.attachmentparenting.org/faq/ Birns, B. (1999). I. Attachment Theory revisited: Challenging conceptual and methodological sacred cows. Feminism & Psychology 9(1), 10-21. Bliwise, N.G. (1999). Securing Attachment Theory’s potential. Feminism & Psychology 9(1), 43-52. Bradley, R.H. (1998). In defense of parental investment. Journal of Marriage and Family 60(3), 791-795. Bradley, R.H., Whiteside-Mansell, L., Brisby, J.A., & Caldwell, B.M. Parents’ socioemotional investment in children. Journal of Marriage and Family 59(1), 77-90. Buchanan, F. (2013). A critical analysis of the use of attachment theory in cases of domestic violence. Critical Social Work 14(2), 19-31 Callaghan, J., Andenaes, A., & Macleod, C. (2015). Deconstructing Developmental Psychology 20 years on: Reflections, implications, and empirical work. Feminism & Psychology 25(3), 255-265. Cleary, R.J. (1999). III. Bowlby’s theory of attachment and loss: A feminist reconsideration. Feminism & Psychology 9(1), 32-42. Duschinsky, R. (2020). Cornerstones of attachment research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duschinsky, R., Greco, M., & Solomon, J. (2015). The politics of attachment: Lines of flight with Bowlby, Deleuze and Guattari. Theory, Culture & Society 32(7-8), 173-195. Duchinsky, R., Greco, M., & Solomon, J. (2015). Wait up!: Attachment and sovereign power. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28, 223-242. Franzblau, S.H. (1999). II. Historicizing Attachment Theory: Binding the ties that bind. Feminism & Psychology 9(1), 22-31. Gov.uk (2019). Elitism in Britain, 2019. Author. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/news/elitism-in-britain-2019#:~:text=Overall%2029%25%20of%20current%20Members,Senior%20judges%20%2D%2065%25 Hays, S., (1998). The fallacious assumptions and unrealistic prescriptions of Attachment Theory: A comment on “Parents’ socioemotional investment in children.” Journal of Marriage and Family 60(3), 782-790. Leinonen, J. A., Solantaus, T. S., & Punamäki, R. L. (2003). Social support and the quality of parenting under economic pressure and workload in Finland: The role of family structure and parental gender. Journal of Family Psychology, 17(3), 409. Mesman, J., Minter, T., Angnged, A., Cissé, I. A., Salali, G. D., & Migliano, A. B. (2018). Universality without uniformity: A culturally inclusive approach to sensitive responsiveness in infant caregiving. Child Development, 89(3), 837-850. Schaverein, J. (2011). Boarding school syndrome: Broken attachments a hidden trauma. British Journal of Psychotherapy 27(2), 138-155. Schaverein, J. (2004). Boarding school: the trauma of the ‘privileged’ child. Journal of Analytical Psychology 49, 683-705. Silverstein, L.B. (2996). Fathering is a feminist issue. Psychology of Women Quarterly 20, 3-37. Simonardottir, S. (2016). Constructing the attached mother in the “world’s most feminist country.” Women’s Studies International Forum 56, 103-112. Umemura, T., Jacobvitz, D., Messina, S., & Hazen, N. (2013). Do toddlers prefer the primary caregiver or the parent with whom they feel more secure? The role of toddler emotion. Infant Behavior and Development 36, 102-114. Van der Kolk, B. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Penguin. Van Dijken, S. (1998). John Bowlby: His Early Life: A Biographical Journey into the Roots of Attachment Theory. London: Free Association Books Vicedo, M. (2017). Putting attachment in its place: Disciplinary and cultural contexts. European Journal of Developmental Psychology 14(6), 684-699. Ziv, Y., & Hotam, Y. (2015). Theory and measure in the psychological field: The case of attachment theory and the strange situation procedure. Theory & Psychology 25(3), 274-291.  

"Psychological Flexibility" sounds amazing.  Shouldn't we all want that?  After all, psychological flexibility has been significantly positively associated with wellness during the COVID-19 pandemic, and negatively associated with anxiety, depression, and COVID-29-related distress and worry. (But what is it, anyway?!) Psychological Flexibility is about being fully in touch with the present moment and, based on the situation, either continuing or changing your behavior to live in better alignment with your values. Let's break that down a bit: Being fully in touch with the present moment: We spend a good chunk of our lives not fully present.  And there are times when it makes sense - we don't necessarily need to be fully present for every moment of a long drive.  As long as we're present enough to drive safely, we don't need to observe the exact quality of red in the tail light of the driver in front of you. But when we spend most of our lives zoned out on our phones, or rushing from one activity to the next (probably partly so we don't have to sit down and just be), we aren't truly present. Better alignment with your values: We all have values, although perhaps some of us haven't fully articulated them.  We might value raising an independent child, but then step in every time they struggle.  We might value emotional closeness but struggle to actually do it because our parents didn't model it for us.  When we articulate our values, we define what we're working toward. Based on the situation, either continuing or changing your behavior: One of my favorite parts of ACT is the Choice Point: the point at which something doesn't feel right to you.  At this point you get to decide: Am I going to keep doing the same thing I've always done?  Or am I going to do something that brings me into better alignment with my values?   Want to know more?  Dr. Diana Hill, co-author with Dr. Debbie Sorensen, joins me on this episode to discuss their new book ACT Daily Journal: Get Unstuck and Live Fully with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (this is an affiliate link, so I will earn a small commission through your purchase which does not affect the price you pay).  The book walks readers through a series of exercises to help them become more psychologically flexible, through the practice of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).  The concepts in ACT are ones that I've found to be enormously useful both personally and in working with clients, so I'm excited to tell you about them here!   Dr. Diana Hill's Book:

ACT Daily Journal: Get Unstuck and Live Fully with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Affiliate link).

  Jump to highlights:

• (01:26) What is ACT or acceptance and Commitment Therapy
• (02:07) What is this thing psychological flexibility?
• (03:48) What are the components of psychological flexibility?
• (08:07) Cognitive diffusion
• (11:38) The idea that we could believe that our thoughts are not true is mind boggling to a lot of people
• (16:36) Values and parenting in particular is such a good one to discuss
• (18:20) Values are something that are deep within you, that you can pull upon, when you've got nothing left
• (19:10:) The idea of the choice point
• (23:36) Perspective taking is probably one of the most important skills we can do for ourselves
• (27:01) How do we live out committed action
• (33:55) Our children are naturally beginner's mind
• (35:18:) One of the things that actually sets humans apart from robots, is our ability to think outside the box
• (39:58) We can start to teach our children, that it's not about the answer. That there's many ways to solve problems
• (41:51) The IKEA effect
• (45:33) Another thing that's really important with embodiment is modeling

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan  00:03 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research on principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head on over to your YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us   Jen Lumanlan  00:48 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have a guest here today to talk with us about a tool that I actually discovered through her show and I found it to be incredibly helpful both personally and professionally. So our guest is Dr. Diana Hill, and she's co host with three of her colleagues of the Psychologists Off The Clock podcast, and one of her co hosts is Dr. Yael Schonbrun, who we had on the show to discuss work life balance. And then Dr. Hill actually hosted me on Psychologists Off the Clock and we talked about homeschooling and social justice and parenting and stuff like that. And now she's here with us today to discuss one of her favorite topics, which is acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is shortened to act. So Dr. Hill has just published a book with her colleague and Psychologists Off the Clock at co-host Debbie Sorensen, called Acts Daily Journal: Get unstuck and live fully with acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which isn't geared specifically toward parents, but there's so much in it that's going to help parents. So welcome Dr. Hill. It's great to have you here.   Diana Hill  01:45 Thank you, Jen, it's so good to be here with you and my interview with you is one of my favorites. So it's time to have the table's turned here and talk about ACT and and specifically around parenting because it turns out if you're more psychologically flexible as a person, it rubs off on to your parenting, and then that rubs off on to your kids too. So I love to talk more about it.   Jen Lumanlan  02:05 Yeah, awesome. So maybe we can start there with Firstly, what is this thing psychological flexibility? And why does it matter? Why does it make a difference? How does it make a difference in our lives?   Diana Hill  02:14 Well, a psychological flexibility is a construct that's been researched for decades now. And some of the research is actually starting to get into the general public. And what it is, is, it's your ability to stay present, open up to your full life experience, not get hooked by your thoughts, and orient your actions towards your values towards what really matters to you, even when life gets difficult. So you can see how even just that term could be helpful as a parent, right? And   Jen Lumanlan  02:43 keep going. I'm not saying it.   Diana Hill  02:47 And what the research has shown is that there's really these Six Core Processes, ways in which you engage with the world that help you become more psychologically flexible. And when you're psychologically flexible. Not only do you have less chances of developing things like anxiety and depression, but specifically with parenting, some of the meta analyses that are showing up with parenting is that psychologically flexible parents engage in more positive parenting practices, they're less harsh, as well as not super overly permissive, you see less spillover effects of stress onto kids. So they did some studies looking at psychological flexibility during COVID with parents and parents that were more psychologically flexible during COVID. Not only did they have less conflict in their relationship with their partners, there was less impact of the stress of COVID on their kids. This set of processes is turning out to be in the research one of the key factors in human flourishing and functioning in lots of different domains of our lives.   Jen Lumanlan  03:47 Okay, I'm convinced. So what are the components of psychological flexibility?   Diana Hill  03:52 Well, there's six of them and you can kind of think of them Steven Hayes, who's one of the cofounders of ACT or Acceptance  a Commitment Therapy talks about like sides of a box. So six sides of the box, that together build your psychological flexibility. And some of them are fairly familiar to folks we've all heard about being present. That's one of them, being able to stay present in the moment sort of mindfulness, but it's a little different in ACT being present has more to do with being present where it matters, because you can't be mindful all of the time. But in that moment, when your kid is showing, like pulling out stuff from the backpack, and they're showing you a piece of artwork and you're on your phone, this is a time to be present because they're bidding for attention. They're bidding for connection, right? So being present when it matters to you as a parent. A second process is about acceptance. And in Act, acceptance isn't...

We've been in a liminal space for the last 15 months or so, since COVID shutdowns.  (The word 'liminal' comes from the Latin root limen, meaning threshold).   It’s a place where a certain part of our lives has come to an end but the next thing hasn’t yet begun, so we’re in a transitional state.   We're finally starting to see the end of this liminal state but before we can fully emerge into the new world, we need to ask ourselves: what do we want that world to be like?   Do we want to go back to what it was before?   Because the world we had before wasn't working for a lot of parents.  We were constantly rushing our children around from one activity to the next, maybe also trying to balance a career at the same time, attending thirty kids' birthday parties a year and just feeling completely spent, most of the time.   If we don't take the time to think about what we want life to be like when we reopen, chances are it'll look pretty much like it used to.  And that can seem safe!  It's always safer and easier to go back to what we know, rather than forward to what is unknown and scary.   What would something different even look like?   Maybe we would have fewer friends, whom we know much better.   Maybe we would do fewer activities, and spend a bit more time being, rather than always doing.   Maybe we would actually support families financially instead of having a 'families are the bedrock of our society...but you're on your own to provide for it' approach.   In this Mother's Day Momifesto, I explore all of these issues, and encourage you to think about how YOU want to be in this new world.   And if you need help figuring it out, the Parenting Membership is here to help.  We'll support you through the challenges of today (how to prevent tantrums!  raising healthy eaters!  navigating screen time!) while keeping an eye on where we want to go.  Because you need both.   The Parenting Membership is now open for immediate enrollment. Sign up now!   http://yourparentingmojo.com/parentingmembership Jump to highlights: 01:27 The Mother's Day Momifesto 02:04 COVID shutdown 04:28 School reopenings 07:04 18% of women in the US have taken antidepressants 09:29 We try to control our bodies in a variety of ways 12:27 Success is defined for men 19:38 Women working communities 20:25 Plenty of parents and children's needs are not met by the school system 22:47 Intersectionality - the idea that different parts of our identities intersect 25:10 Public transit systems are geared around men 26:17 Contribution of scientific research on COVID 19- women scientists have published 19% fewer papers as lead author 29:26 Standard Body Mass Index calculations are based on the weight of White people 31:41 Nonviolent Communication 34:06 How we can begin to make a difference 44:55 Learning how to meet our own needs is a great place to start 46:44 Reopening of your Parenting Membership will close on the midnight of May 12   References Andersen, J.P., Nielsen, M.W., Simone, N.L., Lewiss, R.E., & Jagsi, R. (2020). COVID-19 medical papers have fewer women first authors than expected. Elife 9 (2020): e58807. Belsha, K., Rubinkam, M., LeMee, G.L., & Fenn, L. (2020, September 11). A nationwide divide: Hispanic and Black students more likely than White students to start the year online. Chalkbeat. Retrieved from https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/9/11/21431146/hispanic-and-black-students-more-likely-than-white-students-to-start-the-school-year-online Brody, D.J., & Gu, Q. (2020, September). Antidepressant use among adults: United States, 2015-2018. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved from: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db377.htm#:~:text=During%202015%E2%80%932018%2C%2013.2%25%20of%20adults%20used%20antidepressants%20in,those%20aged%2060%20and%20over. Brody, D.J., Pratt, L.A., & Hughes, J.P. (2018 February).  Prevalence of depression among adults aged 20 and over: United States, 2013-2016. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db303.htm Cevic, M., Haque, S.A., Manne-Goehler, J., Sax, P., Majumder, M.S., & Orkin, C. (2021). Gender disparities in coronavirus disease 2019 clinical trial leadership. Clinical Microbiology and Infection (in press). Retrieved from https://www.clinicalmicrobiologyandinfection.com/article/S1198-743X(20)30785-0/fulltext Coaston, J. (2019, May 28). The intersectionality wars. Vox. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/20/18542843/intersectionality-conservatism-law-race-gender-discrimination Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist policies. University of Chicago Legal Forum Vol. 1989, Iss. 1, Article 8. Retrieved from https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5780707-Demarginalizing-the-Intersection-of-Race-and-Sex Gurrieri, L., Previte, J., & Brace-Govan, J. (2012). Women’s bodies as sites of control: Inadvertent stigma and exclusion in social marketing. Journal of Macromarketing 33(2), 128-143. Jackson, A.S., Ellis, K.J., McFarlin, B.K., Sailors, M.H., & Bray, M.S. (2009). Body mass index in defining obesity of diverse young adults: The Training Intervention and Genetics of Exercise Response (TIGER) study. British Journal of Nutrition 102(7), 1084-1090. Kassova, L. (2020, September 8). The missing perspectives of women in COVID-19 news: A special report on women’s under-representation in news media. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Retrieved from https://www.iwmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2020.09.16-FULL-COVID-REPORT.pdf Lewis, H. (2021, March 18). It’s time to lift the female lockdown. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/03/sarah-everard-and-female-lockdown/618321/ Livingston, G. (2018, January 18). They’re waiting longer, but U.S. women today more likely to have children than a decade ago. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/01/18/theyre-waiting-longer-but-u-s-women-today-more-likely-to-have-children-than-a-decade-ago/ National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (n.d.). Criminal justice fact sheet. Author. Retrieved from https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/ National Equity Atlas (n.d.). Car access: Everyone needs reliable transportation acces and in most American communities that means a car. Author. Retrieved from https://nationalequityatlas.org/indicators/Car_access#/ Nuttall, F.Q. (2015). Body Mass Index. Obesity, BMI, and health: A critical review. Butrition Today 50(3), 117-128. Office for National Statistics (n.d.). Homicide in England and Wales: Year ending March 2020. Author. Retrieved from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2020#groups-of-people-most-likely-to-be-victims-of-homicide Plank, L. (2019). For the love of men: From toxic to a more mindful masculinity. New York: St. Martin’s. Spohn, C. (2017). Race and sentencing disparity. Reforming Criminal Justice: A Report of the Academy for Justice on Bridging the Gap Between Scholarship and Reform 4, 1690186. Retrieved from https://law.asu.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/academy_for_justice/9_Criminal_Justice_Reform_Vol_4_Race-and-Sentencing-Disparity.pdf The New York Times (2021, April 5). As we look ahead to life after the pandemic, many people are wondering what will be different in our lives. Author. Retrieved from

This episode grew out of a post that long-time friend of the podcast, Dr. Laura Froyen, published in a respectful parenting group that we both work in as admins.  In the post she asked people to share how they felt before and after they discovered respectful parenting, and then she created a word cloud of the results.   The words in the 'before' cloud were perhaps predictable - things like 'worried,' 'overwhelmed,' 'resentful,' and 'guilty.'   And the most common word in the 'after respectful parenting' word cloud?   Exhausted.   What on earth is going on here?   In this episode I explore five important reasons why respectful parenting is so hard - and what to do about each of them.   Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits If you want to make your own transformation from a relationship where your child JUST DOESN’T LISTEN to one where you have mutual care and respect for each other’s needs, then the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you. Go from constant struggles and nagging to a new sense of calm & collaboration. I will teach you how to set limits, but we'll also go waaaay beyond that to learn how to set fewer limits than you ever thought possible. Sign up for the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop.   Click the banner to learn more.   https://yourparentingmojo.com/settinglimits Jump to highlights: 01:00 Why we find parenting so hard 01:18 Most prominent words before parents discovered respectful parenting 01:58 Five reasons respectful parenting can be hard 03:03 1st reason: Our needs that our parents just didn’t see despite doing the best they could 05:22 The trauma of unmet needs 06:09 2nd reason: The long game that is respectful parenting 08:54 Our culture trains us to want results 09:56 3rd reason: Our values and what we want to do in an ideal world 10:39 Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting 13:38 Our child's behavior brings up old trauma 14:10 Shifting the way we see our children 15:12 4th reason: When we see these values that we want to live 16:37 The tendency to engage in negative self-talk 17:58 Self-compassion and mindfulness 19:11 The last (and perhaps not the last) reason 24:47 Super short summary information.

"You're doing it wrong!  You're not asking for consent before changing the diaper!" In this Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode we meet parent Nicole, who has core values related to being empathic, constantly learning, and upholding justice in the world.  These awesome values came together in a difficult way when Nicole became a parent: she had a deep fear of not getting parenting right, so she was constantly reading and trying to find that one piece of information that would close the gap between her struggles and the kind of parent she wanted to be.   The stress of parenting an infant brought out a controlling side of her where she attempted to script every aspect of her (and her husband's) interactions with her child, thinking they had already screwed up parenting because he hadn't asked their child's consent before changing her diaper.   Nicole was raised by a single parent who had had a traumatic upbringing, and Nicole grew up sometimes feeling scared by her mother's oversized reactions to normal childhood behavior.  She knew she wanted more for her children - but didn't know what to do.  Over the last year she's been working on 'reparenting' herself so she doesn't have to parent from a place of fear any more, and can relax into understanding her children's feelings - and her own and her partner's feelings as well.   Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits If you want to make your own transformation from a relationship where your child JUST DOESN’T LISTEN to one where you have mutual care and respect for each other’s needs, then the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you. Go from constant struggles and nagging to a new sense of calm & collaboration. I will teach you how to set limits, but we'll also go waaaay beyond that to learn how to set fewer limits than you ever thought possible. Sign up for the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop.   Click the banner to learn more.   https://yourparentingmojo.com/settinglimits   Jump to highlights: 03:19 Nicole's background 04:36 Nicole's parenting beliefs and values 06:31 Teaching respect by giving respect 08:07 Fear and anxiety of not getting parenting right 09:32 How inter generational trauma show up in your family 11:37 The unexpected reparenting piece 13:35 How talking about death with children led Nicole to my work 15:13 Nicole's experience with the Parenting Membership 18:32 What shifted in Nicole's that made her decide to take the Membership 19:17 Realizing the most unconditional thing you can do for your kids 20:12 Relationships our complex yet we don't think that way when it comes to our relationship with our children 21:08 Nicole's incredible example of how she shows up for her children and handles things differently now compared to before 24:45 Becoming more confident in parenting 26:09 Having the language to talk about our needs 28:39 How Nicole and her husband wants to model conflict to their children 34:44 Wrapping up   Resource links:

• Setting Loving (& Effective) Limits Workshop
• The Parenting Membership

Ditch Punishments and Rewards for Respectful Parenting Do you hate punishing (with Time Outs, withdrawing privileges, or even yelling at) your child?   Do you feel guilty after you punish them, wishing there was a way to just get them to listen?   And do bribes ("If you brush your teeth now, you can have 5 minutes of screen time...") feel just as awful?   But what other choice do you have? Your kids don't listen now, so how could not rewarding and punishing them possibly help?   That's what parent Dr. Houri Parsi thought when I first met her. (Houri's doctorate is in clinical psychology, focused on behaviorist-based reward and punishment systems.) She wasn't ready to believe that abandoning the tools she'd been trained in would create a better outcome, when she measured her success as a parent by whether she got immediate compliance from her children.   She ended up not completely abandoning these tools - because they still fit within her vision and values for her family (her vision is a bit different from mine, which is OK! The important thing is that she is living in alignment with her values!).   But Houri's relationship with her children is profoundly different today than it was a couple of years ago. Her children have deep insight into their feelings and needs, and most of the time they're able to find ways to meet all of their needs. She no longer uses her power over them to get their immediate compliance - and that doesn't mean she gets walked all over either.   Houri sees that this approach has built a deep reservoir of trust in their relationship - but occasionally a parent will slip, and will force the children to do something they aren't ready for. When you hear Houri describe how her daughter punished her husband for forcing an injection before she was ready, you might never look at your own child's misbehavior the same way again.   You'll even find a new way to approach the age-old struggle of tooth brushing in this conversation that gets Houri's childrens' teeth brushed every morning without a fight!   If you'd like to ditch the rewards and punishments (and also know that the teeth will still get brushed!) then I'd love to help you make that happen.     You'll get:

• A new module of content every month
• Access to an amazing community of supportive parents, in what they've described as "the least judgmental corner of the internet"
• Answers to your questions in the community, via a video, or a 1:1 consult for especially thorny issues (recorded to share with the community; there's a library of these available for you to watch as well)
• Group coaching calls where I'll coach you live on your specific challenges (or you can lurk if you prefer...)
• ACTion groups: Up to five parents and an experienced peer coach meet weekly to help you plan how you'll achieve your vision
• A 20 minute 1:1 call with community manager Denise right after you sign up, so she can direct you to the resources that will help you most!

  It's gentle parenting that's also gentle on you (and isn't permissive!). The Parenting Membership is now open for immediate enrollment. Sign up now!   http://yourparentingmojo.com/parentingmembership   Other episodes mentioned: 009: Do you punish your child with rewards?   Jump to highlights: 00:53 Introducing this episode’s topic and guest 04:09 Dr. Houri Parsi has been applying evidence-based parenting methods from the Your Parenting Mojo podcast for two years. 08:54 Dr. Houri talks about their initial parenting beliefs and later exploring respectful and mindful approaches as their children grew older. 16:24 Dr. Houri changed her parenting approach after joining the Parenting Membership, moving away from using rewards or punishments and focusing on understanding and trusting their children's needs instead. 27:11 Dr. Houri initially struggled with giving up rewards and punishments due to her behaviorism background but eventually shifted her parenting approach, opting for a collaborative and respectful parenting style. 39:46 Dr. Houri discussed her parenting style, focusing on aligning with personal values rather than enforcing compliance. 52:18 Dr. Houri encouraged parents to shift from guilt-driven authority to collaborative parenting.

"Do you know what happens to your body when you get older?"   "Um...you get hairy in some places?"   "Yeah...other things happen too.  We'll get you some books."   That was what I learned about sex education when I was seven - I was always grateful that I learned it from my parents (who were pretty terrified to talk about it,  I think) rather than from the other kids at school.  But then the topic wasn't mentioned again until I was about 18, with a vague reference to "being careful" with my first boyfriend, whom I wasn't even sleeping with yet.   Friends: we have to do more than this if we want our children to be able to show up in relationships as fulfilled human beings who understand what pleasure is, how to ask for it, and how to give it.   We need our children to know that sex does not have to equal intercourse, and that there are a whole host of ways to enjoy our (and each other's) bodies without doing this if we don't want to do it (when they're ready for it!).   And we need to help our children understand boundaries so they can protect themselves when they need to - without getting so caught up in the shame that pervades our thinking about sex.  (Since the sex = shame narrative is deeply pervasive in our culture I don't think we can overcome it completely, but we can make a start...).   In this episode we build on our conversation with Charlotte Rose about sex for us parents to go (far) Beyond Sex Ed with sex educator Dr. Nadine Thornhill, whose direct, fun, engaging style will help you to see that you, too, can have conversations about sex and pleasure with your own children.  You can find more information on Dr. Thornhill's work on her YouTube channel where she addresses topics from what happens if the kid walk in on parents having sex to whether first time sex always hurts, as well as on Instagram.   Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits  If you want to make your own transformation from a relationship where your child JUST DOESN’T LISTEN to one where you have mutual care and respect for each other’s needs, then the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you.   Go from constant struggles and nagging to a new sense of calm & collaboration. I will teach you how to set limits, but we'll also go waaaay beyond that to learn how to set fewer limits than you ever thought possible. Sign up for the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop.   Click the banner to learn more.   https://yourparentingmojo.com/settinglimits   Jump to highlights: 00:01 Setting Loving and Effective Limits Workshop 02:18 Where we’re at with our mini-series on issues related to sex 03:34 Introducing our guest, Dr. Nadine Thornhill 04:54 The importance of continuing the conversation about sex beyond the basic topics 09:17 Figuring out what kinds of things I need to teach my children and how 12:22 The value of showing our vulnerability to our children 14:45 Talking about the traditional ways we talk about sex and how can we change that narrative 19:03 Having conversations around pleasure of the non-sexual kind 23:27 Modelling intimacy to our children without overdoing it 25:41 Helping our children set boundaries even when we’re having trouble setting boundaries ourselves 31:53 Dr. Thornhill’s son’s case of the “hangry” and how he came to develop recognizing physical signs before he gets hangry 33:41 Talking about shame associated with the White, Christian view of sex 40:34 Talking about bodies and nudity that doesn’t rely on shame 43:07 Going a little deeper into consent and the Authentic Consent Framework 50:48 The House and the Superintendent Metaphor 53:23 How parents can leave more space and be supportive of the potential suite of options about a child’s sexuality 57:46 Should we wait to teach our children about aspects of sex and sexuality until they ask? 01:02:11 Wrapping up   Guest links:

• Nadine’s website
• Nadine’s e-books
• Nadine’s Instagram
• Nadine’s YouTube Channel

  Episodes mentioned:

• 021: Talk Sex Today!
• 096: How to prevent sexual abuse
• 097: How to support gender-creative children

  Resource links:

• FREE Setting Loving (& Effective) Limits Workshop
•  Sex Is A Funny Word, by Cory Silverberg
• The Nap Ministry
• Outspoken Sex Ed

After dinner a few days ago, Carys randomly started telling us that if we want to understand some of the things she's feeling, we should cast our minds back to when we were children and remember how we would have felt about it at the time.  The conversation continued as we explored more of her feelings when she's having difficult moments, and at some point someone (recollections differ on exactly who it was!) suggested we record a podcast episode about it.   Carys was immediately on board and wanted to do it right away, but we came back to it the next afternoon.  She thinks that parents often don't understand how their children are feeling and she'd like suggest ways to help your children when they're behaving in a way that may seem 'difficult' to you.   Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits If you want to make your own transformation from a relationship where your child JUST DOESN’T LISTEN to one where you have mutual care and respect for each other’s needs, then the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you.   Go from constant struggles and nagging to a new sense of calm & collaboration. I will teach you how to set limits, but we'll also go waaaay beyond that to learn how to set fewer limits than you ever thought possible. Sign up now for the self-guided Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits. Click the banner to learn more. https://yourparentingmojo.com/settinglimits   Jump to highlights: 01:00 My special guest in her podcasting debut 02:18 What helps to understand your kid's feelings 03:18 Feeling the physical sensations of frustration 03:42 What Carys feels when she get 'that feeling' 04:19 Parents don't really understand that children sometimes want to be alone 06:07 Different kids deal with things in different ways 07:34 Our new method for when we disagree on things 10:37 We have rewards now 11:46 Carys's thoughts on problem solving   Links:

• Setting Limits Workshop

Today we build on episodes that we've done in the past on talking with children about the basics of sex (so when you listen to this episode we're assuming you've got the basics covered - things like using anatomically correct names for body parts and taking basic steps to prevent sexual abuse).   This is the first in a mini-series of episodes that digs deeper into topics related to sex.  Here we talk with Charlotte Rose, co-host of the Speaking of Sex podcast by the Pleasure Mechanics, about what and how we adults learned about sex. We talk about the shame that pretty much all of us learned to associate with sex (and how to overcome that), and what we can do to improve the chances of having sex with our partner - even if we're feeling so tired that this currently seems out of the question.   We're setting the stage here to approach sex from a less pressured, more fun perspective - which will help us in an upcoming episode to figure out what we want to discuss with our children about sex, sexuality, and pleasure.   Jump to highlights:

• (01:00) Today's topic and Parenting Membership reopening announcement
• (02:20) Setting Loving and Effective Limits workshop announcement
• (03:55) Chris and Charlotte Rose the Pleasure Mechanics
• (05:16) The primary focus of today's episode
• (06:09) Sex isn't what it used to be before we became parents
• (08:39) Responsive desire and spontaneous desire
• (09:17) Erotic simulation and how there is nothing wrong with your sexual relationship
• (11:54) Creating a culture of pleasure within your relationship
• (14:42) Continual consent - it doesn't always need to lead to sex
• (15:34) Sex is adults at play
• (17:37) Sex educations centered around abstinence, secrecy, and shame and how we move forward from that
• (20:39) A parenting opportunity to create a different culture for our children, so that they have to unlearn so much less with regards to sex
• (22:35) How does shame show up in parents' sexual relationship?
• (25:21) So much judgment about sexuality and how it gets in the way of our connection with our partner
• (29:04) A culture of community care to have these conversations
• (29:49) Initiation and refusal/rejection
• (34:36) Mindful sex: How to enjoy sex more
• (39:27) Finding that balance when having the sex conversation with our children
• (42:23) Giving kids the building blocks so that they can have an experience to healthy sexuality when it is time for them
• (45:39) Experiencing self massage in a non sexual way
• (50:16) Body neutrality
• (51:36) Wrapping up

  Here are the resources we discussed on the show:   Pleasure Mechanics Resources

• Charlotte & Chris' free online course The Erotic Essentials
• Conversation starters about sex
• Podcast episode on spontaneous vs. responsive desire
• Podcast episode on mindful sex (making sex better through focusing on the present)
• Podcast episode on body image

    Other Resources

• AASECT therapist referral directory
• Peer-reviewed article on the 237 reasons people have sex
• Guy Winch's TED Talk on How to Practice Emotional First Aid, as well as more explicit resources on why rejection hurts so much - and in peer-reviewed form too
• Research on mindful sex
• Outspoken Sex Ed

    Made for you by Jen:

• The Parenting Membership
• FREE Setting Loving and Effective Limits Workshop

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want her children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research on principles of Respectful Parenting. if you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen to You, and What to Do About Each One, just head over to...

Do we really know what implicit bias is, and whether we have it? This is the second episode on our two-part series on implicit bias; the first part was an interview with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, former Dean of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and co-creator of the Implicit Association Test. But the body of research on this topic is large and quite complicated, and I couldn't possibly do it justice in one episode.  There are a number of criticisms of the test which are worth examining, so we can get a better sense for whether implicit bias is really something we should be spending our time thinking about - or if our problems with explicit bias are big enough that we would do better to focus there first. Jump to highlights:

• (03:38) Is implicit bias baked into our bodies?
• (06:27) About the Implicit Association Test (IAT)
• (08:13) Criticism of the IAT and Dr. Banaji’s response
• (12:48) Blindspot and the inception of the IAT
• (13:41) We make judgements about individuals based on how they look
• (14:12) We often say things that aren't true, even if we think we are truthful
• (16:01) The premise of the IAT and how it works
• (18:13) Conflicting definition of what implicit bias is
• (19:40) Meta-analysis of implicit bias
• (33:16) Implicit bias on the decline in recent years
• (35:37) The persistent problem with IAT
• (42:59) From macro-issues to the micro-issues of IAT
• (53:54) My takeways

Resources:

• Implicit Association Test

[accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want her children to lead fulfilling lives but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of Respectful Parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  00:59 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we start this week's episode, I wanted to take a minute to thank you for being a part of this parenting journey with me and to share a quick update on where things stand with the podcast after four and a half years now. What is that saying? The days are long and the years are short? It certainly seems to be the case here. And well for some of you listening, this may be the very first episode that you're listening to, there are many others who have been with me for the entire 132 plus episodes that I've created to date. We're close to surpassing a million and a half downloads from all around the world, and my goodness, it's a bit strange to even say those words aloud given that I started the show with basically no idea whether anyone would be interested in listening. And it's such an honor to me when you recommend the show to your friends and to other parents at your daycare or preschool. When you share specific episodes that have helped you to find the answers that work with your family and your online communities. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that developing Your Parenting Mojo, which is now the podcast episodes, blog posts, courses, workshops, membership content is more than a full-time job. I have a very small team that helps me to keep my own sanity and my husband is now involved as well. Maybe one day he'll even listen to as many episodes as some of my most dedicated listeners have. Even my daughter now signs off on her videos at home with the brought to you by YourParentingMojo.com. And as the word continues to spread, more and more parents are making transformative lasting change using the methods that we talked about here on the show. We are big cohort in the current Taming Your Triggers workshop who are supporting each other and understanding the sources of their triggered feelings. And just a week or two in they were already reporting the ability to create space for responses to their children that fit with their values, where that just hadn't seemed possible before. And I'm very happy to share that the Parenting Membership open enrollment is just around the corner and will run from May 2 through May 12 in time for celebrating Mother's Day, while the learning membership is going to reopen later in the summer. The community of parents that have already enrolled in the Parenting Membership continues to grow and it's a great resource of knowledge and support and community to help anyone who's looking to apply the ideas and strategies that you hear on the podcast in your own family at home. So I'll share more as we get closer to open enrollment. But for those of you who want to learn more or to join the waitlist, feel free to go to YourParentingMojo.com/ParentingMembership. And thanks again to each and every one of you who have joined me on this parenting journey over the last four and a half years. I learn and I grow every day as a parent and it's amazing to share all this with you.   Jen  03:38 So let's get into our real topic of the day, which is part two of our miniseries on implicit bias. Today we're going to continue to open a real can of worms that's already half opened, and that I had no idea that I was about to open when I started researching this episode. So I've been interested in the connection between the brain and the body for some time now, and I'm planning a series of episodes to explore this topic in some depth. And one aspect of this is related to knowledge that we hold in our bodies rather than in our brains. And as I started to explore that idea, I was thinking about intuition, which we often experience as a felt sense in our bodies rather than a decision that we make in our brains. And that led me down a path toward understanding the role our gut plays in what we know. But another branch of this path led me to the topic of implicit bias because I was thinking, Okay, if we start relying on our brains a bit less and trusting our bodies a bit more, how can we know that this will lead us in a direction that's actually aligned with our values? What if implicit bias means that listening to our bodies actually takes us away from living our values because our bodies have implicit bias baked in so deeply?   Jen  04:43 Now I've read the book Blind Spot: The Hidden Biases of Good People by doctors Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald some years ago, but I hadn't dug into the research behind it at the time. The book's premise is that we have visual blind spots, which are places where visual information is missing, but our brains fill in the gaps without us realizing it, which can be seen when a person whose visual cortex has been damaged and they can't see an object like a hammer in front of them, but if you ask them to reach out and grasp it, then they'll be able to do it. The author state that a parallel idea exists with non-visual stimuli as well, they say and I'm going to quote "Rather than an effective visual perception, this book focuses on another type of blind spot, one that contains a large set of biases and keeps them hidden just as patients who can't see a hammer can still act as if they do. Hidden biases are capable of guiding our behavior without our being aware of their role. What are the hidden biases of this book's title? They are for lack of a better term bits of knowledge about social groups. These bits of knowledge are stored in our brains because we encounter them so frequently in our cultural environments. Once lodged in our minds, hidden biases can influence our behavior towards members of particular social groups, but we remain oblivious to their influence. In this book, we aim to make clear why many scientists ourselves very much included, now recognize hidden bias blind spots as fully believable because of the sheer weight of scientific evidence that demands this conclusion. But convincing readers of this is no simple challenge. How can we show the existence of something in our own minds of which we remain completely unaware?" The book goes on to describe a test called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, which was designed by Dr. Greenwald and modified by both authors over the years, starting when Dr. Banaji was Dr. Greenwald’s graduate student.   Jen  06:27 And so I'd known about what is the Race IAT  for a number of years, there are actually now quite a few of them on topics ranging from age to religion to body weight. The landing page at implicit.harvard.edu, which is where these tests are housed, doesn't say much about the purpose of these tests. You have to click into the About the IAT page to see the description that "The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts, for example, Black people, gay people, and evaluations, for example, good and bad, or stereotypes, for...

Explicitly, nobody really believes in gender stereotypes anymore, but when we look at the world, and who's where and how much money people make, and so on, it still seems to be there. And the answer to that is yeah, because it's there. It's just not something we say. It’s more of something we do. -Dr. Mahzarin Banaji   What is implicit bias?  Do I have it (and do you?)?  Does my (and your?) child have it?  And if we do have implicit bias, what, if anything, can we do about it? Join me in a conversation with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, former Dean of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and co-creator of the Implicit Association Test, for an overview of implicit bias and how we can know if we (and our children) have it. This episode will be followed by a second part in this mini-series where we dig deeply into the research, where results are complex and often contradictory.  Stay tuned!   Jump to highlights:

• (01:00) An intro of  Dr. Mahzarin Banaji
• (02:58) What is implicit bias?
• (07:48) Differentiating bias that you are aware of and bias that you aren’t aware of
• (08:56) Describing the Implicit Association test
• (18:11) What the research says about where implicit bias comes from
• (24:50) Development of group preference from implicit association
• (32:18) Group bias and its implications towards individual psychological health
• (40:44) What can be done to potentially prevent implicit biases from developing?
• (46:56) Some good progress with society’s bias in general and areas that need working on

  Resources:

• Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.   Jen  00:06 We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting.   Jen  00:29 If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE.   Jen  00:42 You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  01:00 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we're going to look at the topic of implicit bias. Now I've been thinking for a while about running a series of episodes on the connection between our brains and our bodies because I've been learning about that and the wisdom that our bodies can hold and wondering, well how can we learn how to pay more attention to our bodies? And then I started thinking about intuition. And I wondered, well, how can we know if we can trust our intuition? What if our intuition is biased? So I started looking at the concept of implicit bias and it became immediately clear who I should ask to interview Dr. Mahzarin Banaji. Dr. Banaji studies thinking and feeling as they unfold in a social context with a focus on mental systems that operate in implicit or unconscious mode. Since 2002, she has been Richard Clarke Cabot professor of social ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where she was also the Chair of the Department of Psychology for four years while holding two other concurrent appointments. She has been elected fellow of a whole host of extremely impressive societies and was named William James Fellow for a lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology by the Association of Psychological Science, an organization of which she also served as president. Along with her colleague, Dr. Anthony Greenwald. She's conducted decades of research on implicit bias and co-authored the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.   Jen  02:21 I should also say that there are a lot of issues that we only got a chance to skim over at a fairly high level in this conversation, which I'm recording this introduction afterwards, because Dr. Banaji was quite pressed for time. And I'm planning to release an episode that follows up into these issues and dives into them at a much deeper level soon. So please consider this part one of a two-part conversation with you.   Jen  02:42 Alright, let's go ahead and get started with the interview.   Jen  02:45 Welcome Dr. Banaji. Thanks so much for being here.   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  02:48 Hi there.   Jen  02:49 So I wonder if we can start out by understanding a bit more about what implicit bias is. I hear it all over the place, and can you help us to just define what that is, please?   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  02:58 Sure. So implicit bias, quite simply, is a tendency in every human being to favor one individual over another, one social group over another, and to do so without conscious awareness, or without the ability to be able to exert conscious control over the judgement that one is making. So let's just break the phrase down into the two words that constitute it. The word implicit and the word bias, okay? Bias, what is it? It's simply for us a deviation from neutrality, it is privileging one option over another, right? If I say I prefer blue to red, I'm biased in favor of blue, and not in favor of red relatively speaking. So that for us is what a bias is. And implicit just means that that favoring of red over blue or blue over red is something that I'm not even aware of. It's just that when I go into a store, I pick up clothing that is all blue rather than red. That put together tells us that implicit bias is a deviation from neutrality in ways we ourselves would not be happy to see ourselves doing. If it's in the domain of color, who cares whether I prefer blue to red or red to blue but imagine now that it's not blue and red. Imagine that it is a native born child in the classroom, and an immigrant child in the classroom. And even though I as a teacher believe very much that both should be treated equally that is to say, if they do something good, I should reward both equally. If they did something that's bad behavior, I should reprimand them equally, I should encourage both equally to pursue new things in their lives. I should support both of them equally to meet their goals and so on. A deviation from neutrality would mean that I'm doing these things both the good and bad things in order to teach a child something, that I'm doing them selectively, that I'm doing more for one category over another. So that's all biases. And teachers are so well intentioned, just like parents, what they want is the best for all of the kids in their class. And so when we discovered that a teacher may not be aware but is systematically calling on certain people in the classroom, or saying, "Aha!" or "Good idea!" to some rather than others, then we would say it's implicit. And as you can imagine, teachers, by and large, are very good people and so when they're biased it is almost always without their awareness.   Jen  05:41 Okay, so is this lack of awareness perspective, that's really the key, then?   Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  05:45 That's exactly right. And the reason this is interesting is because if you look in almost any society, but let's just take American society or the Western world or whatever, some large group of people, you will notice that explicit forms of bias have been coming down, at least in what people say on a survey. If you say to a teacher, "Do you think that native born children are just inherently smarter than immigrant children?" The teacher will likely say, "No, I don't believe that that is the case at all. I think all children are talented in all these different ways." So if you measure it explicitly, if you say, "Tell me is this immigrant kid better or worse than this native one kid?" You will not see any evidence of bias. But when you sit in the back of the classroom, and you just measure what the teacher is doing, who the teacher looks at who the teacher says nice things to who the teacher calls on, and you see that there is a systematic difference, then we say we must become interested in this, because the child is experiencing these good and bad things the teacher is doing, but the teacher has no awareness. And think about the child. What does the child think is going on? The child might think I'm bad, or I'm good, right? And that's why we should be interested in both kinds of measures, what people say to us directly, and also what they may not be able to say because they don't think they're that way.   Jen  07:10 Okay, I'm wondering if we can just pull that apart

"When she was younger, she wasn't that into reading and that was like a huge deal for me.  I thought: "I'm such a reader. My daughter doesn't love to read." She's still not a big reader, but it's not hampering her in any way. She's blossoming in fifty other ways, but when I get caught in that story, "She's not like me. She's not..." - that's when I'm suffering. So I settle back into trusting, and think: "Oh, she's becoming who she is. Let her be that." -Diana Winston   Meditation is touted as being a cure-all for everything from anxiety to depression to addictions.  But is it possible that all this is too good to be true?   In this episode, meditation teacher - and former Buddhist nun! - Diana Winston guides us through what we know of the research on meditation that's relevant to parents.  It turns out that the quality of much of this research isn't amazing, but this may not matter to you if you're thinking of starting a meditation practice because the opportunity cost (a few minutes a day) is so low and the potential benefits are so high.   We walk through a basic meditation that you can do anywhere, and no - it doesn't involve sitting cross-legged with your thumb and first finger held in a circle and saying 'ommmmmm....'.   I was skeptical about meditation too - until I tried it.  Perhaps it might help you as well?   Ready to break free from the cycle of triggered reactions and conflict in your parenting journey? If you want to: 😟 Be triggered less often by your child’s behavior, 😐 React from a place of compassion and empathy instead of anger and frustration, 😊 Respond to your child from a place that’s aligned with your values rather than reacting in the heat of the moment,   the Taming Your Triggers workshop will help you make this shift.   Join us to transform conflict into connection and reclaim peace in your parenting journey.   Click the banner to learn more! https://yourparentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers/   Jump to highlights 02:36 Introducing Diana Winston 03:39 Defining Mindfulness 05:25 Distinguishing between mindfulness and meditation 06:26 How can mindfulness benefit me? 08:05 Self-hatred as a Western concept 12:27 The practice of mindfulness rooted in religion and cultural appropriation 13:57 The research on mindfulness 17:27 Why is it so hard to study mindfulness? 19:33 Mindfulness vs science as tools of observation 21:26 The benefits of mindfulness to parents and children 28:04 Improving parent-child relationships through mindfulness 30:27 Working in mindfulness practices in the context of communities 35:52 Practice mindfulness now with this quick walkthrough 42:46 Sit Still and It Will Hurt Eventually   Useful links: Taming Your Triggers Masterclass   Books and other resources:

• The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness
• Waking Up App by Sam Harris
• UCLA Mindful App
• Ten Percent Happier App
• Wide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens

  Facebook Group: Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group   References D’Andrea, W., Ford, J., Stolbach, B., Spinazzola, J., & van der Kolk, B. (2012). Understanding inter-personal trauma in children: Why we need a developmentally appropriate trauma diagnosis. American Journal of Orthopsyhchiatry 82(2), 187-200. Goessl, V.C., Curtiss, J.E., & Hofman, S.G. (2017). The effect of heart rate variability biofeedback training on stress and anxiety: A meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine 47, 2578-2586. Miller, A. (2006). The body never lies: The lingering effects of hurtful parenting. New York: Norton. Tippet, K. (2019, December 26). Bessel van der Kolk: How trauma lodges in the body. On Being. Retrieved from:https://onbeing.org/programs/bessel-van-der-kolk-how-trauma-lodges-in-the-body/van der Kolk, B. (2017). Developmental trauma disorder: Toward a rational diagnosis for children with complex trauma histories. Psychiatric Annals 35(5), 401-408.van der Kolk, B. (2016). The devastating effects of ignoring child maltreatment in psychiatry: Commentary on “The enduring neurobiological effects of abuse and neglect.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 57(3), 267-270.van der Kolk, B.A., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., & Spinazzola, J. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 75(6), e559-e565.van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Penguin.van der Kolk, B., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., & Spinazzola, J. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 75(6), e559-e565.van der Kolk, B. (2006). Clinical implications of neuroscience research in PTSD.Annals – New York Academy of Sciences 1071(1), 277.van der Kolk, B., & van der Hart, O. (1989). Pierre Janet & the breakdown of adaptation in psychological trauma. American Journal of Psychiatry 146(12), 1530-1540.

Why do we yell at our children - even when we know we shouldn't?

Why isn't just knowing what to do enough to actually interact with our children in a way that aligns with our values?

For many of us, the reason we struggle to actually implement the ideas we know we want to use is because we've experienced trauma in our lives. This may be the overt kind that we can objectively say was traumatic (divorce, abuse, death among close family members...), or it may simply be the additive effect of having our needs disregarded over and over again by the people who were supposed to protect us.

These experiences cause us to feel 'triggered' by our children's behavior - because their mess and lack of manners and resistance remind us subconsciously of the ways that we were punished as children for doing very similar things. These feelings don't just show up in our brains, they also have deep connections to our bodies (in spite of the Western idea that the body and brain are essentially separate!).

If we don't decide to take a different path and learn new tools to enable us to respond effectively to our child rather than reacting in the heat of the moment, and because our physical experience is so central to how this trauma shows up in our daily lives, we also need to understand and process this trauma through our bodies.

Click the banner to learn more!

https://yourparentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers/  

Jump to highlights:

01:00 This episode’s rationale 03:12 The two ways trauma shows up in broader family relationships 05:27 The separateness of the brain and the body has a long history in Western culture 06:05 Rene Descartes on the schism of mind and body 07:12 The held belief of the mind as superior to the rest of the body 08:09 The inherent bias of data 09:42 The lies our brain tells us 12:54 The so-called 4 ‘truths’ of the physical experience of trauma 16:22 When we are not attuned to the signals that our body is giving us 19:01 Difficulty in identifying feelings for people who experienced trauma 22:16 Saying OK when you aren’t really OK 26:19 The difference between reacting and responding 27:10 Using physical experience to bring order to the chaos in our minds 31:15 The first step to creating a safe environment for your child 33:26 The root of our inability to create meaningful relationships 34:18 Equipping ourselves with the tools to regulate our arousal  

Other episodes mentioned:

• 113: No Self, No Problem
• 069: Reducing the impact of intergenerational trauma
• Responding to the U.S. Capitol Siege
• Dismantling White Supremacy and Patriarchy on MLK Day

  Links:

• Taming Your Triggers Workshop

  Facebook group:

• Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group

  References Boscarino, J.A., (2004). Posttraumatic stress disorder and physical illness: Results from clinical and epidemiologic studies. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1032, 141-153. Fuchs, T. (2018). Ecology of the brain: The phenomenology and biology of the embodied mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hull, A.M. (2002). Neuroimaging findings in post-traumatic stress disorder: Systematic review. British Journal of Psychiatry 181,102-110. Sledjeski, E.M., Speisman, B., & Dierker, L.C. (2008). Does number of lifetime traumas explain the relationship between PTSD and chronic medical conditions?  Answers from the National Comorbidity Survey-Replication (NCS-R). Journal of Behavioral Medicine 31(4), 341-349. Wolfe, J., Schnurr, P.P., Brown, P.J., & Furey, J. (1994). Posttraumatic stress disorder and war-zone exposure as correlates of perceived health in female Vietnam war veterans. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 62(6), 1235-1240. Zoellner, L.A., Goodwin, M.L., & Foa, E.B. (2005). PTSD severity and health perceptions in female victims of sexual assault. Journal of Traumatic Stress 13(4), 635-649.

In this episode we talk with Iris Chen about her new book, Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent.   Iris admits to being a parent who engaged in "yelling, spanking, and threatening with unreasonable consequences" - but far from becoming a well-behaved, obedient child, her son fought back.  The harder she punished, the more he resisted. Their home became a battleground of endless power struggles, uncontrollable tantrums, and constant frustration.   But Iris didn't know what else to do: she had learned this over-controlling style from her own parents: watching TV without permission, talking back to her father, and having a boyfriend before college were simply out of the question when she was growing up.   In her parents' eyes, they had done all the right things: Iris got good grades, graduated from an elite university, and married another successful Chinese-American.   But through interacting with her son, Iris realized that all of these achievements had come at a great cost: a cost that her son was trying to show her through his resistance.  Eventually Iris saw that her son's behavior wasn't the problem; he was simply reacting to her attempts to control him, and that it was her own approach that needed to change.   Now Iris is well along her own Untigering path: basing her relationship with her children on finding win-win solutions to problems, being flexible, and respecting each other's boundaries.   As I do too, Iris sees this path as a journey toward creating a society where everyone belongs.   If you see yourself in Iris' descriptions of her early days as a parent, and especially if you find yourself routinely overreacting to your child's age-appropriate behavior, I invite you to join my Taming Your Triggers, which will help you to understand the true source of your triggered feelings (hint: it isn't your child's behavior!), feel triggered less often, and respond more effectively to your child on the fewer occasions when it does still happen.  

Click the banner to learn more!

https://yourparentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers/   Jump to highlights: 01:34 Children’s dilemma between being seen/heard and being accepted 02:50 The trauma we pass on to our children 04:04 How to tame your triggers 04:59 Confidence in parenting that gives parents a sense of calm 06:39 Iris as a Deconstructing Tiger Parent 08:13 “I thought my responsibility as a parent was to push harder when my child resisted” 09:26 “I saw in my children a freedom to express their resentment in ways that I was never free to” 11:05 The walls that are created between parent and child because children’s authentic selves are not accepted 11:24 Our parents have their own traumas as well 13:18 The Idea of Untigering 14:19 Permissive parenting 16:06 Viewing children as full human beings 18:43 Adultism and Childism 20:05 Is respect something a child needs to earn from their parents? 21:26 Redefining our ideas for success as parents 27:29 Navigating the needs that drive behavior 31:30 Chinese somatization 33:57 The internalization of injustice and suffering 36:50 Holding space for one another and the greater community 41:19 The cascading effect of changing the way we relate to our children   Books and Resources:

• Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

  Links:

• Taming Your Triggers Workshop
• Upbringing Podcast
• Untigering Website

  Join the YPM Facebook Community

• Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group

  Reference Mauner, R.G., Hunter, J.J., Atkinson, L., Steiner, M., Wazana, A., Fleming, A.S., Moss, E., Gaudreau, H., Meaney, M.J., & Levitan, R.D. (2017). An attachment-based model of the relationship between childhood adversity and somatization in children and adults. Psychosomatic Medicine79(5), 506-513.

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

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

  Books and Resources:

• Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell
• 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won’t Listen to You and What to do About Each One
• School Can Wait, by Raymond S. Moore and Dorothy N. Moore

  Links:

• 085: White privilege in schools
• 086: Playing to Win: How does playing sports impact children?
• 117: Socialization and Pandemic Pods

  Join our the YPM Facebook Community:

• Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting.   Jen  00:29 If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen to You and What to do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners and the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group.   Jen  00:48 I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  01:00 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We have an odd person to thank for what has turned into a bit of an epic episode, and that’s Malcolm Gladwell.  His 2011 book Outliers: The story of success opens with an anecdote about the junior league Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants ice hockey teams.  The point of the book is to demonstrate that personal explanations of success that draw on a narrative of self-made brilliance have a lot more to them – that successful people are the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and opportunities that help to give them a leg up in a way that isn’t open to most of us.  In the example of the ice hockey teams in the book (which we’re calling ice hockey for my English listeners, to distinguish it from actual hockey, which is played on a grass field), Paula Barnsley, who is the wife of psychologist Dr. Roger Barnsley, noticed during a game that the majority of the players on teams just like the Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants had birthdays that clustered in a certain way.  Roger Barnsley went home and researched all the junior league players he could, and then the national league, and found that in any elite group of ice hockey players, 40% of the plyers will have been born between January and March, 30% between April and June, and 20% between October and December (Gladwell doesn’t say what happened to the 10% born between July and September).  Barnsley said that “In all my years in psychology I have never run into an effect this large.  You don’t even need to do any statistical analysis.  You just look at it.”   Jen  02:28 The reason for this is that the eligibility cutoff for age class hockey is January 1, which means that children born at on January 2nd are a whole year older than children born on December 31st, which is a large proportion of a young child’s life.  The same effect replicates in baseball and football (which I refuse to call “soccer”), because these also have similar age cutoffs in youth sports.   Jen  02:56 Then there’s a half page of text that really caught parents’ ears – reference to a study by two economists who looked at the relationship between scores on a standardized test, and the child’s age at the time of taking the test, and the effect was found here as well.  One of the authors of that paper, Dr. Elizabeth Dhuey, was quoted as saying “Just like in sports, we do ability grouping early on in childhood…so, early on, if we look at young kids, in kindergarten and first grade, the teachers are confusing maturity with ability.  And they put the older kids in the advanced stream, where they learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better; and the next year, the same things happen, and they do even better again.”  Dr. Dhuey subsequently looked at college students and found that students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6%.  Gladwell concludes: “That initial difference in maturity doesn’t go away with time. It persists. And for thousands of students, that initial disadvantage is the difference between going to college – and having a real shot at the middle class – and not.”   Jen  03:59 Now those words are almost guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of parents, even though the real problem here is the perception that college is the only path to “having a real shot at the middle class,” who responded by holding their children back from kindergarten when their birthdays were within the last few months of the kindergarten eligibility cutoff.  In the U.S., this practice came to be known as redshirting, which is a term borrowed from sports.  In college athletics, which is big business in the U.S., athletes are only allowed to play for four years but they might ‘redshirt’ the first year which means they wouldn’t formally participate in competition while they get bigger and stronger.  Then they can still play four years after that.  But they’re not just sitting out in that year; they’re practicing with the team and getting bigger and stronger, and they wear a red shirt in practice to indicate that they’re in redshirt status.  From what I’ve read on Wikipedia a coach can tell you at the beginning of the year that you’re redshirting but it isn’t confirmed until the end of the season, so if the star quarterback gets injured then the redshirted player can give up their redshirt status and still play.  So that aspect doesn’t come into play in the academic setting, but the practice of holding a child out...

In this short ad hoc episode that was originally recorded as a Facebook Live, I discuss ways that my family is working on dismantling both White supremacy and patriarchy (and having a go at capitalism while we're at it!) this Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend. The best part is that this doesn't have to be heavy work that brings with it a huge sense of guilt. It's about building community that lifts all of us up, and gets us out of the 'stay in my lane' mindset that White supremacy uses to keep us in line. And it also doesn't have to happen only on the holiday itself - this work is just as relevant and important the rest of the year. Prefer to watch rather than listen? Click here to join the free YPM Facebook group and watch the video recording of the episode   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan 00:01 Hello, everyone, it's Jen. And I just wanted to do another live episode as it were in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group because I did one recently for the events after the US Capitol siege. And responding to that, and actually looked at the analytics on it and found that it was one of my most recently downloaded episodes. So, this is sort of just another informal episode. And we'll be back to regular programming next week, but wanted to share some thoughts on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is today here in the US. And I think this is actually the special—the first holiday recorded an episode that I've done ever. So it feels kind of cool to be doing it for this particular day for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. And I wanted to share some thoughts that actually I concepted on a bike ride, which tends to be how these things come about when I have some time to think. And I'm really sort of thinking, “Okay, what is it that parents need to know in this right now? What's important about continuing Dr. King's legacy?” And I talked in the episode from last week about the events in the US Capitol, about the anti-racist work that we're doing, and that is so necessary that has to continue, yes, we have to keep doing that. We also need to do things like learning about the achievements of Black people, both in history and today. And at all that I really enjoy for that is, if you're not watching on Facebook Live, I'm holding up these Black history flashcards. They're published by an organization called Urban intellectuals, which I believe is a Black-owned company. And we've actually been storing them in a little teacup on our dining room table, and my daughter will request that we go through at least one and up to three of them, I draw the line at three because then I don't get to eat dinner at the dinner table every day. And we talk through not just sort of the what are the bullet points on the back of the card that each of these individuals on the cards did.   Jen Lumanlan 01:55 But what does it mean? What does it mean that to say that they were entrepreneurs, trappers, and traders in the 1700s is one of the people that we read about last night was what kind of circumstances came into place to even make that possible when the vast majority of Black people in that period who were over in the Americas were enslaved. What kind of circumstances and personality and situation were involved in this? And so I think that that is really helping us to put some kind of context around. It's not just that there were millions of Black people here in the US, and they were all enslaved, and they were sort of this monolithic entity. But these were individual people who had individual lives and individual concerns, and they made incredibly valued and undervalued contributions to our culture, you know, inventing things and setting up one of the people we read about last night set up the city of Chicago, he founded a settlement that turned into the city of Chicago, the leaders, former leader of Kenya and Ghana, who negotiated independence from the UK. And so obviously, that focus is very much on history. And we also need to be talking about the work that Black people and other people of color are doing on an ongoing basis today. But it's just sort of an additional way that we are making this because of sort of baking these ideas into the fabric of our everyday lives.   Jen Lumanlan 03:18 And then, yes, we need to do our overtly anti-racist work, we need to be talking with our children about these ideas that don't just leave them with the impression that Black people were victimized and victims of their circumstances that they had agency in their lives and continue to have agency in their lives. And don't need rescuing. They don't need us to come and save them, they can tell us what they need and we should be listening to that. But I think it goes even deeper than that because I'm not sure that many of us myself absolutely included, fully understand the ways that White supremacy and patriarchy, and even capitalism show up in our lives. And so we've discussed before on the show, the interview with Dr. Carol Gilligan, and a bunch of times since then, in a variety of other episodes, about how patriarchy operates and how that shows up in ourselves. And one of the ways it does that is through creating separation, both within ourselves and between individuals. And so it separates, it crazy separation in ourselves by setting up these sort of arbitrarily masculine and arbitrarily feminine qualities. So masculine qualities might be things like logic and reason and, and assertiveness and confidence and all these things you stereotypically associate with men.   Jen Lumanlan 04:39 And then the feminine categories might be things like intimacy and tenderness, and unconditional love, and sort of the soft, feminine sides. And of course, the point here is that we all have all of these characteristics. There's nothing inherently masculine or feminine about any of them, but by dividing them, we're able to privilege one set, we're able to privilege the masculine set and say, Well, this is what we should be working towards, which is why we tell our girls that they should go and do STEM careers and, and exceed in traditionally male-dominated fields. But we don't tell either our girls or boys that yeah, it's okay to care about other people, it's okay to be in caring professions, and to want to have that be your life's work. So there's that sort of split within ourselves, but it also separates individuals by, in a way sort of policing our behavior and telling us what's acceptable and what isn't. And one of the ways it does that is by making it really difficult to ask for help, or even to offer help. And because we're all supposed to project this image of, “Well, I've got it together, everything's fine. There's no problem here, things are under control.” And if that's not the case, for any reason, then we can always buy something to help us fix that circumstance, like, we can buy a service, like a cleaner or somebody to outsource a part of the work that we're feeling is not in control too.   Jen Lumanlan 06:07 And so it's not even okay to offer help, I think, because that sort of breaks down the idea that the person you're offering to has it all together. And even if we offer, then the person sort of supposed to say, “Well, yeah, I'm okay, thanks, everything's fine, I don't really know of anything you can do.” And then we as the offer are sort of just supposed to stay in our lane and let it go. And I think the reason for this is that we are under a patriarchal White supremacist capitalist culture. We're not supposed to have this true sense of kind of community, because if we had that, we wouldn't need to buy as much stuff. Because we would just help each other out. And so there wouldn't be this need to just buy stuff to fill the gaps that that we have in our lives because we aren't able to be in true community. For example, my neighbor is running down to the store the other night, she was going already, and she lean down the car window on the way pass and she said, “Do you need anything?” And I had just been to the store early that day. And forgotten to get yogurt and said, “Hey, would you mind get me a quarter yogurt?” And so I didn't need to call down to Instacart. I didn't need to go down to the store again, myself. It was just a simple, you know, do you need anything, and me saying yes, rather than, “Well, I don't want to burden her or, you know, I don't want to go upstairs and get money right now.” And of course, when you do this often enough, the money can just kind of flow back and forth and it becomes less of a big deal. But she offered help. And I said, “Yeah,” in that moment, I would love to have some help. Thank you very much.   Jen Lumanlan 07:41 And so this holiday weekend, one of the things that I'm focusing on most closely, and I think my focus sort of shifts every year as I learn more, and I feel like my the ideas that I want to look at change. So for this year, what I'm doing right now is taking steps to reach out to my community, and specifically a community that was right around me. And so, I emailed the listener for all the people who live on our street. And I told them about all the things that my daughter Carys is interested in, which currently includes salamanders and invertebrates and fungi that are popping up around our neighborhood when it sometimes rains, not so often as it should be at the moment. And asking for their help and finding these things. And so we immediately got inundated with information like, “Is she interested in spiders?” “Oh, I have some orange fungi in my yard. I'll try and remember to bring them over.” We had one neighbor who said, “Hey, can we do a trade? I have a photography...

Sustainable Family Change: Parenting Framework for Lasting Results Here's a little thought exercise: think back to what you were doing this time last year, right around Mother's Day (in the U.S...I know it has already passed in other places!).   What kinds of things were your children doing that were really endearing?   What kinds of things were they doing that drove you up the wall?   What kinds of fights (resistance, back-talk, stalling, tantrums, etc.) were you having with them a year ago?   Are you still having those same fights now (or variations on them)?   Do you wish you weren't still having those fights? That you could get out of the endless cycle of trying an idea you saw on Instagram, seeing a small change, and backsliding to where you were before?   Do you have all the tools you need so that a year from now you can look back and know, without any shadow of a doubt, that things are different now?   Today I'm going to introduce you to several parents who have made exactly this shift, and a framework you can use to make it for yourself.   It's not complicated. There are only five elements to it, and when they're all in place you can make sustainable change in parenting, as well as your own personal issues, work, and anything else you like.   It really is very possible to make sustainable family change in parenting happen by yourself. But all of the five elements have to be in place, and operating consistently, to make it work.   Losing focus on each one of the elements creates a different outcome, none of which are good:

• Confusion
• Anxiety
• Making slow progress
• Frustration
• Being on a treadmill

  If you can see already that one or more of these things are happening for you, the Parenting Membership will help you make the kind of sustainable change you want to see in your family. The first thing you'll do after you join is have a 20-minute private call with my community manager, Denise, who will see which element you're struggling with the most right now, and connect you to specific resources to help.   Many of the parents who signed up this time last year are now in an entirely different place. Things like this are happening:

• Theirpreschoolerscan use a picture-based list to accurately identify their own feelings and needs;
• Parents are recognizing how their own actions are creating shame in their children, and are working to address this;
• Parents see which parts of their co-parenting struggles are theirs to own, instead of blaming their difficulties on their co-parents;
• They can also see which parts arenottheirs to own, make requests to get their needs met, and practice accepting their co-parent for who they are;
• Siblings are fighting less, because they understand each other's needs and can find strategies to meet both of their needs.

  Of course these parents still have hard days...but none of them looks back on who they were a year ago and thinks: "Aside from the fact that my kids are older, I don't really know what's different now from what it was a year ago."   I want this kind of sustainable family change for you, too. It's so much more than taking a short course to learn a new skill. It's a fundamentally different way of being in the world.   The Parenting Membership is now open for immediate enrollment. Sign up now!   http://yourparentingmojo.com/parentingmembership     Other episodes mentioned:

• 042: How to teach a child to use manners
• 175: I’ll be me; can you be you?
• 206: How to find yourself as a parent
• 209: How to get on the same page as your parenting partner
• 210: The power of learning in community

  Resources mentioned:

• Sustainable Change Diagram

  Jump to highlights: 00:56 Introducing today’s topic 02:01 Parent Niloufar's positive transformation in parenting through the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop 08:56 Parent Lucinda, a member for five years, shares how the membership transformed her self-awareness and empathy towards others' needs. 14:21 The elements of sustainable family change in parenting: vision, skills, motivation, resources, and a plan 15:02 Understanding your family values can make parenting easier and more intentional. 21:14 Skills like managing behavior and communication help parents handle challenges. 33:10 Motivation drives positive changes and fosters resilience even in challenging situations. 36:07 Resources are vital for lasting change. The Parenting Membership helps align values with actions by making smart use of resources for meaningful progress and sustainable change. 42:10 A clear plan is essential for lasting change. It acts as a roadmap, guiding actions toward goals and ensuring alignment with values. 50:23 Invitation to the Parenting Membership 53:45 Member’s testimonials

In this ad hoc episode, I outline a response to the U.S. Capitol siege.  I provide some suggestions for ways to talk with your child about the events, but also ask that you take two more steps: (1) examine your own role in these events, even if you condemn them yourself (as I do); (2) take action based on your own position and role in the world to work toward equality. You can find my resources on the intersection of parenting and race here. There's a specific blog post suggesting a script for talking with children about the Black Lives Matter movement (which could be adapted for this situation) here. Showing Up for Racial Justice's Action Hours are here   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan  00:01 Hello, everybody! I am recording live in our Facebook group. And I'm also recording this separately on the camera and on audio only as a way to share this information more broadly across a variety of platforms. I thought it was actually sharing in the group a minute ago, and I am not sure that it was working so I'm just trying to give this another go around. And I think actually, I just got the same message pop up saying that I was not sharing and now I am sharing, so hopefully this is going through to everywhere that it's supposed to be going. So the content of what I want to talk about today is about what has happened at the US Capitol. And it's been a couple of days, it's Friday, today, January 8, and two days after the events happened at the Capitol. And I wasn't really sure what to say and so I didn't want to say anything, I didn't want to say the wrong thing. And I went out for a bike ride this morning and it sort of clarified for me what it was that I wanted to say. And so that's why if you're watching this on video, you're probably seeing a bit of a stripe across my forehead and I'm freshly showered because I kind of came back and was on fire about what it was that I wanted to say. And so you're sort of hearing my relatively raw unedited thoughts. And I'm a little nervous about sharing those with you which is why you probably hear this in my voice. So I want to start with talking with our children about the events that have happened at the Capitol, because I'm hearing questions in Facebook groups and other places online if parents want to have these kinds of conversations with their children, but they don't know how to do it or they're thinking, okay, maybe my children are too young to understand what's going on and I don't want to scare them, and I'm not sure if I'm going to have a conversation with them at all.   Jen Lumanlan  01:57 And so, I have published resources on this before I actually have a post on how to talk with your child about Black Lives Matter. And I think that a lot of the principles that are discussed in there are very similar. And we want to do it in an age-appropriate way, we want to lead with their questions, and so I think ideally, this will come from them being out in the world, and they'll see things that they're curious about, and they'll ask about them, and that will lead into a conversation on these topics. But if we are not out so much lately, as many of us are not and maybe we don't have the news on all the time, and so their exposure to it may be much less than it otherwise would have been. And so well, what can we do when that's the case? And we're not sure how to bring the conversation up? Well, I would say the first thing we can do is to talk about it with a spouse or significant other or another adult over dinner, or over some other period of time where it's natural for you to have a conversation. And to just talk about what's on your mind—what's been in the news today? how is today's developments casting new light on? what we're thinking about what happened at the US Capitol? And pretty soon your child is probably going to say, “What are you talking about?” Or something that indicates that they're interested in this topic and I think that that can be a jumping-off point for you to try and give some background and ideally, that this won't be the first conversation that you will have had on current events like this, and you'll be able to talk about in context, Donald Trump and the policies that he has been enacting, and the ways that he talks to people, and whom he talks to. And so, that will provide you with the context that you need to then describe what has happened.     Jen Lumanlan  03:46 When they have questions, we can answer their questions clearly and directly. And also not be afraid to say when we don't know, because there's a lot that we don't know. And we don't have to put across the impression that we do know everything to our children all the time. I think it's also fine to share how we feel about the events with our children. It's important for them to see that our words and what we're saying match our demeanor, if we are clearly afraid about something, but we're sort of saying, “Oh, don't worry about it, it's fine,” then what they're learning from that is well, “I can see that my parent is not fine, but they're telling me fine. They're telling me everything's fine. Something really important is going on here,” or they may see, “Well, I just don't trust my own ability to judge how other people are reacting because I'm getting these mixed messages and I don't understand which one to prioritize. It must be what my parent is saying. And so I must not be capable of judging how their nonverbal reactions are supporting that message.” And so, I think behind a lot of these questions around what should I talk to my child, what should I say to my child, there's this big issue of privilege and of having the luxury to make that decision and to decide what we're going to say and to be able to make a decision to choose to say things that don't scare our children. And not all parents have the luxury to do this. So, if you're coming at these conversations for the first time, then welcome. There are resources that I've published available to help you there, a number of them are collected at yourparenting mojo.com/race. There's actually one on how to talk with your child about Black Lives Matter and I think that a number of the principles that are discussed in that post are also very applicable here. And the kind of script that you can use to build on their questions will also be helpful as you're navigating this kind of conversation.   Jen Lumanlan  05:50 So, that's the issue of talking with our children about this topic, but I think that there's a broader issue that I want to make sure isn't neglected. Because I think it's really critical to examine what is our role in this system, in the system that has made it feel to some people like Donald Trump is the best option who's available to me, and what he says is what I'm going to do. Because I think that it's really easy to point to those people and say, “Well, those people are racist, and I'm not like them, and it's all their fault, their problem,” and instead, I think that we all need to examine our role in the system that has created these events and to take action related to that. And so what does that mean? Well, I worked for a consulting company for a long time. And I worked in sustainability consulting for a number of years, which I really enjoyed, but it became apparent that there was a point in time where it was obvious people, companies were not willing to pay the premiums that my company wanted to sell this work for. And so, I was on the verge of getting laid off and an executive that I'd worked with previously, who appreciated my work said, “You should come to work on my team,” and I said, “Sure.” And so, we were in a portion of the business where we were selling outsourcing services and other things as well, technology implementation, but we were also selling outsourcing services. And so what I was essentially doing was supporting proposal development work, and so directly involved in selling the company's services related to outsourcing in countries like India and the Philippines, which would take jobs away from American citizens and outsource them to those companies where it's cheaper to operate.   Jen Lumanlan  07:59 And I remember reading in the news several years ago now that my company would force the American workers to train their new replacements on their jobs as a condition of receiving severance pay. And so, you know, I don't want to point to you and say, “You are the problem, you listeners, you watchers are the problem,” because we are all part of this problem. I was selling work that was taking jobs away from people who are many of them now are supporting Donald Trump, and sending that to other countries. And of course, there's a lot of complexity involved here, maybe I was involved in lifting the standard of living for somebody who was in those countries. It's not cut and dry. But I am not uninvolved in this system and neither are you. No matter where you sit in life, you have a role to play in this system. So maybe you're a teacher, and you participate in systems that involve awarding points for children who are reading books, and so that they can collect points and win rewards for reading books, as they're learning how to read. Well, what does that do? It pits children against each other, and it directly undermines the kind of cooperative systems that children from many other cultures learn at home and says that the way of being that you've learned in your culture is not valued here, competition is valued here. And if you want...

When parents first hear about interest-led learning (also known as self-directed education), they may wonder: why on earth would we do that?  And how would my child learn without anyone teaching them?   Many parents start down this path with only an inkling of where it may end up taking them and I think this is true of our guest, Akilah Richards.  Akilah grew up in a typical Jamaican family where children were not allowed to have an opinion about anything - even their own bodies and feelings.  In her book Raising Free People, she writes that:   "Respect, the way [Jamaican parents] define it, is non-negotiable, and the spectrum of things a child can do to disrespect an adult, especially a parent, is miles wide and deep.  Reverence for adults, not just respect, is expected, normalized, and deeply ingrained.  Somebody else's mama could slap you for not showing reverence to any adult.    Physical punishment for the wrong displays of emotion, even silent ones like frowns or subtle ones like deep sighs, were commonplace, expected, celebrated as one of the reasons children "turned out right."  Not only did you, as a child, dismiss any attitudes or anything adults might perceive as rudeness, your general countenance should reflect a constant respect - no space at all for showing actual emotion, if that emotion was contrary to what was reverent and pleasant for the adults in your life - again, especially your parents."   While we may not have grown up with parents who were as overtly strict as this, chances are our parents and teachers used more subtle ways of keeping us in line with behavior management charts, grades (and praise for grades) and the withdrawal of approval if we were to express 'negative' emotions like frustration or anger.   And of course this is linked to learning because compulsory schooling does not allow space for our children to be respected as individuals.  There may be dedicated, talented teachers within that system that respect our children and who are doing the very best they can to provide support, but they too are working within a system that does not respect them.   So how could we use interest-led learning/self-directed education to support our child's intrinsic love of learning - as well as our relationship with them?  This is the central idea that we discuss in this episode.  It's a deep, enriching conversation that cuts to the heart of the relationship we want to have with our children, and I hope you enjoy it.   Ready to Support Your Child's Natural Learning Whether this episode has you considering unschooling, reinforced your commitment to traditional schooling, or left you somewhere in between, one thing is clear: every child deserves to have their natural curiosity and love of learning nurtured.   The challenge for parents isn't choosing the "right" educational path, but knowing how to support meaningful learning wherever your child is.   The Learning Membership gives you the tools to nurture your child's development whether they're in traditional school, homeschooled, or unschooled.   You'll discover how to:

• Turn everyday moments into rich learning opportunities (just like Laura does with her daughter)
• Support your child's interests and curiosity without becoming the "teacher" parent
• Create a home environment that enhances rather than competes with whatever educational approach you choose

  Inside the membership, you'll find research-backed strategies that work alongside any educational setting, helping you become the parent who nurtures learning rather than forcing it.   Your child's curiosity is precious - don't let it get lost in debates about educational methods.   Click the banner to learn more.   http://yourparentingmojo.com/learningmembership   Resources discussed during the conversation: Maleka Diggs' Eclectic Learning Network Developing a Disruptor's Ear, by Akilah Richards and Maleka Diggs Toward Radical Social Change (TRUE) community Akilah's website, Raising Free People Akilah's book, Raising Free People

In this Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode we hear from listener Anne, who has been in my Parenting Membership for a year now.  In our conversation we discussed the anxiety she used to feel about every aspect of parenting, including the things she wanted to teach her son to do (Spanish! Coding!) and how she interacted with both him and with her husband.   She actually joined the Parenting Membership to learn how to become the perfect parent, and I'm sorry to say that I failed as her teacher/guide in that regard.  She is not a perfect parent (and neither am I), but she is now a perfectly good enough parent, and has been able to relax into her relationship with her son because of that.   I hope you enjoy this raw, vulnerable conversation where Anne reflects on the changes she has made in her life over the last year.     [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:03 Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast where I critically examine strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. In this series of episodes called Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, we turn the tables and hear from listeners. What have they learned from the show that’s helped their parenting? Where are they still struggling? And what tools can we find in the research that will help? If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you’ll join us.   Jen  00:59 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we're going to hear from a special guest Anne, who is a parent whom I work with on a regular basis. She's going to tell us about the anxiety that she used to feel to be the perfect parent to her son, which threatened to overwhelm her and potentially even her marriage. She actually joined my membership a couple of years ago hoping it would teach her how to become the perfect parent. And in some ways, she didn't get what she paid for at all. And another she got so much more.   Jen  01:28 Unfortunately, she didn't learn how to become the perfect parent. Instead, she realized there's no such thing as a perfect parent and that trying to be the perfect parent was tearing her apart. She learns new communication tools which we teach as a way of helping parents to get on the same page about the parenting decisions they're making, But of course, they're applicable to other kinds of conversations as well. So now she's able to talk with her husband in a way that doesn't get his back up, that helps him to understand her needs, and she's able to hear and understand his needs, and they can work together to find solutions to all kinds of problems, not just those related to parenting.   Jen  02:02 She's become deeply involved in anti-racist work, and if you join the membership, you'll actually find her leading our anti-racist group activities. When she's learned how to stand up to family members, when they say something that she finds deeply offensive. She used to just be offended and let it slide and be seething on the inside, but she doesn't do that anymore, and she knows how to decide which of these kinds of issues that families disagree on are okay to let go, and which are worth taking a stand on. And she's become increasingly confident over the last few months to take a stand on those things that she knows are important to her. So, she's learning how to set boundaries with people that she's never felt able to set boundaries with before, which is setting a great example for her son who's watching and learning from her.   Jen  02:45 So, in some ways, she's become more rigid where she used to be so flexible that her needs weren't being met. And in other ways, she's become much more flexible, where she used to be very rigid. She doesn't worry anymore about teaching her son coding, or Spanish, or any of the other skills that she wants thought were critical to his success and to her role as a good parent. Instead, she sees her son for who he is, and she's able to meet his needs rather than imposing on him what she used to feel she had to deliver to him in her role as the perfect parent.   Jen  03:17 Anne it's just one of the amazing parents that I've had the honor to work with in my memberships over the last couple of years. Some of them are former perfect parents, other parents who were just about holding it together and have found a similar sense of calm and clarity as they connect with their child's needs and have let all the unimportant stuff go. I'd love to work with you as well, no matter where you are in your parenting journey.   Jen  03:38 To learn more about the memberships go to YourParentingMojo.com/memberships.   Jen  03:44 I'm here today with a listener. Anne. Anne, thanks so much for joining us. It's so great to see you.   Anne  03:48 Hello, good to see you too.   Jen  03:51 So, I wonder if you could tell us maybe a little bit about your family and yourself as well. And, and we're going to talk about kind of a transformation that's happened in your parenting over the last couple of years. So maybe you can just set the stage by telling us a bit about who you are and who you live with.   Anne  04:06 Sure. Yeah. So, my name is Anne. And I have a two-and-a-half-year-old son Anderson. And we live with his father, my husband, Jeff, and let's see. Yeah, I work in STEM and education for university. I really like what I do. That's nice. I have great work life balance. So that's awesome, too. Yeah, we live in Arizona. Flagstaff, Arizona, so it's actually snowing here today.   Jen  04:36 Yes. You're getting all the snow; we're getting all the sun.   Anne  04:40 Yes. Strange weather. Yeah.   Jen  04:43 So, I wonder if you can tell me about some things that are important to you as an individual and, and the values that you really had as you were thinking about having children and starting to raise a child.   Anne  04:55 Right. Yes. So, I actually did quite a bit of thought into this. about two and a half years ready before I had my son. So, I just, yeah, I thought a lot about what kind of world I was bringing him into and what kind of world I wanted to set up for him and what our values might be. So yeah, above all, I believe in just compassion, empathy, equity, respect for all people, including, you know, and that doesn't exclude anyone, even people that exclude other people, for instance. And also, to some degree, just the ecosystem, so the living and nonliving things in our life. And I really, I try to live by that. And I'd like to raise my son to live by that.   Jen  05:46 Yeah. And so, you joined the Finding Your Parenting Mojo membership a couple of years ago, and I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about what was going on in your mind when you made that decision to join? What were you trying to achieve?   Anne  06:00 Oh, yes, good questions. My goals have shifted a little bit. Yeah, at the time, it was my goal, you know, to have my son speak Spanish, and to be versed in coding, and all these things. And I really just wanted to be like the perfect parent. I wanted to, like, give him the stage set for any kind of life that he wanted to live. And that was very exhausting. And yeah, like, not possible, really. So, when I joined, I was really looking to become like a perfect parent. But what it's done is much different than that, right?   Jen  06:40 Yeah, a little bit.   Anne  06:41 It certainly helped me grow as a parent, but it's also helped me shift my perspective as to kind of where I want to put my energy and how to make it effective.   Jen  06:53 Okay.   Anne  06:54 I already...   Jen  06:55 And how did that process start for you?   Anne  06:57 So, it started, I guess, by reading, reading guides, listening to your podcasts, and kind of checking out some ancillary materials, you know, that you have provided. And then also, I think the big leap for me was participating in the membership calls. So, interacting with other people that share the same goals, creating kind of a community. And just seeing the different examples of ways people are doing it, and how they're fitting in and through their lives. It really started to shift things in my life as opposed to just absorbing massive amounts of information.   Jen  07:38 Mm hmm. Yeah, this is a common tendency isn't it? It's when we feel like something isn't right, that we it's just we haven't read the right book yet. We just need more information.   Anne  07:49 Right? Yeah. I read a lot of books. Changed a lot what I was doing   Jen  07:57 Yeah. And so, what do you...

Let's talk problem solving!  Many of us have tried it, but it's so common to get stuck...and to think that the method doesn't work, and then return in exasperation to the methods we'd been using all along.  These often involve coercion, or forcing the child to do something they don't want to do - but what's the alternative?   In this episode we talk with Dr. Ross Greene, who developed the Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (formerly Collaborative Problem Solving) approach in his books The Explosive Child and Raising Human Beings.  I really enjoyed digging into the research for this episode (why do all the papers describing CPS compare its effectiveness to behaviorist-based approaches?) but I ended up really taking one for the team: we didn't have time for all of my questions on the research because I wanted to make sure to address the challenges with problem solving that parents in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group described when I asked them about this topic.   These challenges included:

• How to problem solve with very young children
• What to do when the same issue recurs over and over and the solutions we decide on together don't seem to help
• How to navigate a child not wanting to leave the park when it's time to go
• How to approach a child who doesn't seem to be able to or refuses to communicate their feelings

  Dr. Greene's books

• Raising Human Beings(Affiliate link)
• The Explosive Child(Affiliate link)

  Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits Do you have a child aged 1 - 10? Are they resisting, ignoring you, and talking back at every request you make? Do you often feel frustrated, annoyed, and even angry with them? Are you desperate for their cooperation - but don't know how to get it? If your children are constantly testing limits, the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you.   Go from constant struggles and nagging to a new sense of calm & collaboration. I will teach you how to set limits, but we'll also go waaaay beyond that to learn how to set fewer limits than you ever thought possible. Sign up for the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop.   Click the banner to learn more.   https://yourparentingmojo.com/settinglimits   References Note: Direct links to presentations from conferences can be found on Dr. Greene’s Lives in the Balance website: https://livesinthebalance.org/research Booker, J., & Ollendick, T.H. (2019). Patterns in the parent-child relationship and clinical outcomes in a randomized control trial. Presented at symposium, Collaborative and Proactive Solutions as an alternative to Parent Management Training for youth with oppositional defiant disorder: A comparison of therapeutic models. World Congress of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, Berlin, Germany. Booker, J.A., Capriola-Hall, N.N., Dunsmore, J.C., Greene, R.W., & Ollendick, T.H. (2018). Change in maternal stress for families in treatment for their children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Journal of Child and Family Studies 27, 2552-2561. Booker, J.A., Ollendick, T.H., Dunsmore, J.C., & Greene, R.W. (2016). Perceived parent-child relations, conduct problems, and clinical improvement following the treatment of Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Journal of Child & Family Studies 25, 1623-1633. Calam, R. M. (2016). Broadening the focus of parenting interventions with mindfulness and compassion. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice , 23(2), 161–164. Dedousis-Wallace, A., Drysdale, S., Murrihy, R.C., Remond, L., McAloon, J., Greene, R.W., & Ollendick, T.H. (2019). Predictors and moderators of Parent Management Training and Collaborative & Proactive Solutions in the treatment of oppositional defiant disorder in youth. Presented at symposium, Collaborative and Proactive Solutions as an alternative to Parent Management Training for youth with oppositional defiant disorder: A comparison of therapeutic models. World Congress of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, Berlin, Germany. Dunsmore, J.C., Booker, J.A., Ollendick, T.H., & Greene, R.W. (2016). Emotion socialization in the context of risk and psychopathology: Maternal emotion coaching predicts better treatment outcomes for emotionally labile children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Social Development 25(1), 8-26. Fitzgerald, M., London-Johnson, A., & Gallus, K.L. (2020). Intergenerational transmission of trauma and family systems theory: An empirical investigation. Family Therapy 42(3), 406-424. Greene, R., & Winkler, J. (2019). Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS): A review of findings in families, schools, and treatment facilities. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review 22, 549-561. Greene, R.W. (2016). Raising Human Beings: Creating a collaborative partnership with your child. New York, NY: Scribner. Greene, R.W. (2014). The explosive child: A new approach for understanding and parenting easily frustrated, chronically inflexible children. New York, NY: Harper Paperbacks Greene, R.W., & Doyle, A.E. (1999). Toward a transactional conceptualization of Oppositional Defiant Disorder: Implications for assessment and treatment. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review 2(3), 129-148. Hart, R. (1992). Children’s participation: From tokenism to citizenship. UNICEF. Retrieved from: https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/childrens_participation.pdf Kroger, J., Martinussen, M., & Marcia, J.E. (2010). Identity status change during adolescence and young adulthood: A meta-analysis. Journal of Adolescence 33, 683-698. Miller-Slough, R.L., Dunsmore, J.C., Ollendick, T.H., & Greene, R.W. (2016). Parent-child synchrony in children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder: Associations with treatment outcomes. Journal of Child and Family Studies 25(6), 1880-1888. Murrihy, R.C., Drysdale, S., Wallace, A., Remond, L., McAloon, J., Greene, R.W., & Ollendick, T.H. (2019). Parent Management Training (PMT) and Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS): A randomized comparison trial for oppositional youth within an Australian population. Presented at symposium, Collaborative and Proactive Solutions as an alternative to Parent Management Training for youth with oppositional defiant disorder: A comparison of therapeutic models. World Congress of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, Berlin, Germany. Tiberio, S.S., Capaldi, D.M., Kerr, D.C.R., Bertrand, M., Pears, K.C., & Owen, L. (2016). Parenting and the development of effortful control from early childhood to early adolescence: A transactional developmental model. Developmental Psychopathology 28(3), 837-853. Zero to Three (2016). Tuning in: National parent survey report. Author. Retrieved from: https://www.zerotothree.org/resources/1425-national-parent-survey-report

My guest for this episode is life coach and reparenting expert Xavier Dagba, who is here to discuss the topic of boundaries in parenting.   We don't tend to learn much about having boundaries when we're young, because our culture teaches that children shouldn't really need or have them (and those of us who are using respectful parenting approaches are working against the tide here).  This then translates to us not knowing how to set boundaries as adults, and feeling 'walked all over' - without fully understanding why, or what to do about it.   We also talk about the limit between boundaries and limits, an important distinction as we interact with our children.   If you need more support in setting limits that your child will respect (and using far fewer of them than you might ever have thought possible - while still having your boundaries respected!), sign up for the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop.   Click the banner to learn more.   https://yourparentingmojo.com/settinglimits   Other resources from this episode: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.Xavier's websiteFollow Xavier on Instagram

I often hear two related ideas about adults' screen usage around children. Sometimes the parent asking the question guiltily confesses to using screens around their children more than they would like, and to using screens as a momentary escape from the demands of parenting. Or the parent asking the question feels that they have found a sense of balance in their own screen usage, but worries about their partner who frequently ignores their child because they're so focused on a screen. In this episode we interview a luminary in the field of research related to children and screen usage: Dr. Jenny Radesky, who is a Developmental Behavioral Pediatrician and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School.  Her research interests include the use of mobile technology by parents and young children, and how this relates to child self-regulation and parent-child interaction, and she was the lead author of the 2016 American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement on digital media use in early childhood. We'll learn whether you should be worried about Technoference, and some judgement-free steps you can take to navigate your (or your partner's) screen usage around your child.   Parenting Membership  If parenting feels really hard, and it seems like you’ve read all the books and you’ve asked for advice in free communities and you’re tired of having to weed through all the stuff that isn’t aligned with your values to get to the few good nuggets, then the Parenting Membership will help you out. Click the banner to learn more. Join the waitlist to get notified when doors reopen in May 2025.   http://yourparentingmojo.com/parentingmebership     [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen 00:03 Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you’ll join us. Jen 01:00 Hello, everyone. Before we get into the topic of today's new episode, I wanted to let you know about my special Black Friday promotion that I have running now through midnight, Pacific time on Friday, November 27th. For this limited time, I'm offering access to my parenting membership for only $25 a month, and to my supporting your child's learning membership for only $35 a month. Now those of you who know me, and the show might be kind of surprised to hear me running a Black Friday promotion. After all, I get complaints about my left-leaning, anti-capitalist stance all the time. And I thought it would be doubly amusing to talk about this before an episode on technoference, which is when technology like our smartphones interferes with our relationships, because I imagine a number of you are planning technology related purchases for the holidays. Jen 01:43 But I decided to do this for two reasons. Firstly, I know these memberships can help you. I've seen so many parents transform their approach to parenting and get confident in supporting their child's love of learning through the memberships. And secondly, we're in a year when people are looking for holiday gifts that just don't involve bringing more stuff into our homes, and that also can't involve going out to museums and other places that may well be closed. And the parenting membership can really help you go from just hanging on to actually thriving in parenting. And the learning membership will help you make the best use of your time that you're already spending with your children to support their intrinsic love of learning. And third, things are completely aligned with my values. If you miss the Black Friday promotion, they will still be time to enroll at the regular rate starting on December 1st and we'll dive into the content as a group on January 1st. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com to learn more and enroll today. Jen 02:42 Now, whether you take advantage of the Black Friday promotion, or you enroll in December, I believe in helping as many families as possible, and I've tried to make even the regular rates accessible to everyone. I'm confident that anyone who joins and learns the material that I'll make easily accessible for you will support learning and development in their children, find parenting easier, and lay the groundwork for transformational change at home. I want to read you a bit of a message that member Catherine wrote to me about her experience in the parenting membership. So, Catherine says, "the membership has really allowed me to hone in on the doing the concrete actions I want to take and move from the endless swirl of ideas to actually implementing the ones that are based on my values. It's allowed me to stop waiting for perfection when I figured out how to do it all and focus instead on progress. It just really hits the nail on the head of what I need to know. The most recent module we covered on our sense of ourselves as parents has allowed me to perceive so much differently in my day to day life and take in what I'm learning elsewhere in a different way. I've gained so much clarity even in the last week, and noticed a palpable difference in my sense of calm and in my acceptance of my children, my husband, and others with whom I interact in relation to my children." Jen 04:01 So, in my parenting membership, you'll lean on a research-based approach to support your child's development, while making parenting easier. This membership is for children aged around 18 months through the end of elementary school, regardless of where you are in your parenting journey: from the parent who's just trying to survive to the parent who's looking to the future. Your first year in the parenting membership is now only $25 a month through Black Friday, November 27th. In my supporting your child's learning membership, you'll learn how to best support your child's intrinsic love of learning. Most of us want this for our children, but we don't know how and even more how we interact with our children often actually works against this goal. This membership is for parents with children old enough to ask questions through the end of elementary school and who want to set the stage for a lifetime love of learning. Jen 04:52 Ginelle joined the membership because she wanted to support her children's love of learning, but the only way she knew how to do that was to do what school does. To teach them stuff they needed to know. Through the membership Ginelle has learned that she doesn't have to teach for her child to learn. In fact, some of the most powerful learning happens when we just model for our child. Ginelle found that one simple mindset shift has really made a huge difference in her ability to support her child's learning. She says, "Most notably, I find I'm answering my children's questions in a more open way. Sometimes this is with another question. Other times, it might just be a more vague, open-ended answer. It's a change that sounds so basic and common sense when I think about it now, but I needed that extra bump from the membership to actually make me realize it and apply it." Jen 05:41 Special Black Friday pricing for my supporting your child's learning membership is now only $35 a month through midnight Pacific on Black Friday, which is November 27th, and we get started on January 1st. Both of the memberships include all of the information that you need, and none of the fluff that you don't to achieve the easy joy-filled family life that you worked so hard for, but which may seem so out of reach right now. And both memberships include support and community so you can make that next tiny step that you need to take to help you reach your goals. Go to YourParentingMojo.com today to take advantage of these special Black Friday offers the parenting membership for only $25 a month, and the supporting your child's learning membership for only $35 a month. Support your child's learning and development while making parenting easier, perhaps the best gift you could give to your family this holiday season. Thanks again for listening. I hope the rest of your year is filled with joy and activities that are truly meaningful in your life. Jen 06:42 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I've had our topic today on my mind for a while and over the last few months I think it's become more relevant than it ever has been before. And the topic we're going to talk about today is technoference and that's the idea that technology, and specifically mobile phones, interferes with relationships that we have with other people. It can interfere with relationships of all kinds and your might first rest on your partner, and how you perceive your partner's phone use interfering with your relationship, and we'll certainly touch on that. But our primary focus for today will be on how our phones interfere with our relationships...

Sibling relationships can be SO HARD!  Sometimes it might seem that we can't leave them alone for even a second before they're at each other's throats, and on top of this we see their struggles and are reminded of the struggles that we had with our own siblings so many years ago.  This can cause us to overreact in the moment, even when we know it's not helping the situation. I discussed some of the reasons behind sibling squabbles a couple of years ago in a conversation with Dr. Susan McHale of Penn State University.  In today's episode we build on this knowledge by discussing some super practical tools to help parents foster positive sibling relationships.

In this Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode I talk with Kira Dorrian and Deana Thayer of Future Focused Parenting, who host the Raising Adults podcast. The parents of seven children between them, including a set of twins and five in a blended family, Kira and Deana know their way around sibling squabbles.

 

We discuss ways to stop being the person who always has to moderate every disagreement and instead equip our children with the skills they need to find solutions to their own problems.

 

Jump to highlights:

02:37 Laying the foundation of possible sibling relationships by Daena Thayer.

04:35 Sibling relationship is the first peer relationship by Kira Dorrian. 05:53 How to prepare your kids for sibling rivalry? 12:02 Problem solving with children. 15:28 Teaching your child active listening. 20:01 Doing what’s best, not the easiest. 23:23 Problem solving in school. 25:55 How to deal with conflict as children grow older. 30:52 Social exclusion in schools and the calendar of character traits.

If you’ve been a parent for a while, or maybe even if you haven’t, you probably saw an article on Holding Space making the rounds of online communities a few years ago.  In the article the author, Heather Plett, describes how she and her siblings were able to hold space for their dying mother in her final days because a palliative care nurse held space for them.

The article outlined some principles of holding space, and I think it really resonated with a lot of people – possibly because so many of us wish we had been held in that way, and we find ourselves trying to hold space for others in that way without a lot of guidance or support.

I kept that article in the back of my mind, and last year I took Heather’s 9-month in-depth course on holding space, and she’s just released a book called The art of holding space: A practice of love, liberation, and leadership.  In this episode we discuss what it means to hold space for others as parents, and how to raise our children to be able to hold space for others.   Links mentioned in the episode The Art of Holding Space: A Practice of Love, Liberation, and Leadership (Affiliate link). The Centre for Holding Space Website [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:03 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  00:59 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. If you've been a parent for a while, or maybe even if you haven't, you probably saw an article on holding space making the rounds of online communities a few years ago. In the article the author Heather Plett describes the death of her mother and how she and her siblings were able to hold space for her mother, because a palliative care nurse was holding space for them. The article outlines some principles of holding space. And I think it really resonated with a lot of people possibly because so many of us wish that we had been held in the way that in that way. And we find ourselves trying to hold space for others in that way without a lot of guidance and support.   Jen  01:38 And so, I kept that article in the back of my mind. And then last year, I took Heather's nine-month in depth course on holding space. And she's just released a book called The Art of Holding Space: A Practice of Love, Liberation and Leadership that she's here with us to discuss today. Welcome, Heather.   Heather  01:52 Thank you, Jen. It's good to be here.   Jen  01:55 And we should mention we were just chatting beforehand. Heather was mentioning her voice is a little raspy today because she's in the middle of recording the book for the audio edition. So that should hopefully be available very soon. And I also just want to mention before we get started that we may mentioned today, some topics that might be difficult for some people to listen to. These could include the topics of suicide and stillbirth. And so, we're not going to delve deeply into them. But if you're in a place where you would find hearing about these topics, any more than I just mentioned them any disturbing to you in any way, you might want to consider listening at a time when you feel well resourced, or perhaps with a friend.   Jen  02:29 So that said, Heather, I wonder if you could start by getting us on the same page, and maybe just helping us to understand what does it mean to hold space for someone?     Heather  02:38 Well, holding space is really what we do when we show up for somebody without trying to control the outcome of whatever they're going through, without placing our judgement on them or projecting our own narrative on them. It's really trying to hold them in a way that is fully supportive of the journey that they're going on and giving them the autonomy to be going through their own journey.   Jen  03:01 Okay, and so you describe that as structure, kind of three nested bowls, right? Can you help us to picture those bowls and what that's made of?   Heather  03:10 Sure. So, I've been evolving this concept of being the bowl for people and being the bowl is really about supporting somebody through their liminal space, I talk a lot about liminal space as the journey they're going through. And they're in transformation, really, between some old story and a new story. And in the middle of that they need some kind of containment, some support, as they kind of deconstruct their old narrative, and get ready to evolve into the new narrative. And so, the bowl really evolved as the primary metaphor kind of for explaining that. And I've developed this three-layered bowl, initially, it was just one layer, but with time, and the more I taught it, I recognize them, some other qualities were needed. So, in the three layers, and the inside is what you're offering to the person, you're holding space, and there's a number of qualities there. And then what guides you your kind of internal guidance system of what's guiding how you hold space. And then what supports you is the outer layer of the bowl.   Jen  04:10 Okay, and what are some of the really key characteristics of maybe we'll start with the internal layer, and then move to the external layers as we continue the conversation. And so, what are some of those key characteristics of that inner layer?   Heather  04:22 Well, some of those things are compassion and connection is really offering you know, love and compassion to the other person. There's also selective guidance. And I use the qualifier selective in front of some of these quite intentionally because I want to really help people understand that it's, it's not giving them tons of guidance, but it's being using your discernment to pick only the little pieces of guidance that they need. You mentioned the palliative care nurse, for example. And she came with a little bit of guidance to help us understand the process of mum's dying really is what we were supporting. And she just gave us you know, one or two handouts kind of and a little bit of information, she didn't walk in with a whole textbook full of guidance on what to expect when a person's dying because that would have overwhelmed us.   Heather  05:10 And then there's also things like selective nonjudgement. And there's another one where I added the word selective in front of. Initially, I was talking about nonjudgement but then I realized there are times when we do need to use our judgement, we need some discernment. For example, if someone comes to us and tells us they've been breaking the law, well, we need a little bit of judgement to support them and making a wise decision to turn themselves into authorities or make reparations for whatever they've done. So, and that's where we come to kind of the middle layer of the bowl. The middle layer is where we're discernment lies, making those good decisions, and intuition using our intuition to sense what's needed in that moment.   Jen  05:52 Okay. And I was just thinking, as you're talking about the idea of offering some support, but not everything that you know about a subject. I think that's so critical in so many aspects of relationships, and even teaching that I've always remembered one of the most effective lectures I ever attended in my undergrad career was it, it was a guest lecture by someone who was talking about schistosomiasis disease, that's, I remember the basics of it. But it was, you know, passed on to people through a worm infection. And he kind of gave us just the amount that we needed to know. And then the Q&A at the end, it became clear that the depth of his knowledge on this topic was incredible. And he had so deliberately curated exactly what we needed to know and didn't attempt to tell us 'Well, everything I know' about schistosomiasis. And it seems as though that kind of resonates with your experience with the palliative care nurse, and she knew so much.   Heather  06:48 Absolutely   Jen  06:48 And she also knew what you needed.   Heather  06:49 Yeah, very much so. And this is where really, the practice, I talk a lot of in my book, and in my work about learning to hold space for yourself, because when we're in that position of holding space for another person, we have to hold ourselves back, sometimes we have to, you know, soothe ourselves so that we won't project our own stuff on to the other person. And you know, and that requires holding back some of our wisdom, because we may know really, really well we've been through the situation they're in, etc. But...

  Parenting brings unconditional love and fulfillment, but what happens when those feelings mix with frustration, exhaustion, and even regret?   In this episode, I speak with Dr. Sarah LaChance Adams, expert in feminist philosophy and maternal ethics, to explore maternal ambivalence - those complex, conflicting emotions many parents experience but rarely discuss openly. Dr. Adams is the author of Mad mothers, bad mothers, and what a "Good" mother would do: The ethics of ambivalence.   What Is Maternal Ambivalence?   As Dr. LaChance Adams explains, drawing from Adrienne Rich's heartbreaking and beautiful description: "Maternal ambivalence is having extreme emotional conflict in one's feelings towards one's children - dealing with intense love and sometimes intense hate, the needs to be very intimate and close to one's children, but also to have a sense that one needs distance."   This complex experience involves both wanting to be near your child and sometimes feeling an urgent need to "get as far as one can from one's child." What makes maternal ambivalence particularly complicated is that it's not just about feelings toward a separate being. There's also a profound sense of self-estrangement because mothers often feel their children are integral to their own identity. As Dr. LaChance Adams notes, "In this sense of struggle, she's also in a struggle with herself and who she feels she is most intimately and deeply."   This episode builds on our recent conversations with Dr. Moira Mikolajczak on Parental Burnout and with Dr. Susan Pollak on Self-Compassion, exploring how we can love our children dearly while feeling torn between that love and our parental role that often requires putting our own needs aside.   Questions this episode will answer Is it normal to feel love and resentment toward my child at the same time? The podcast breaks down what maternal ambivalence means. It's a back-and-forth feeling between deep love and occasional resentment that many mothers feel but rarely talk about. Dr. LaChance Adams explains why these opposite feelings happen together and why they're a normal part of being a parent. You'll also learn how accepting these feelings might make your relationship with your child stronger.   How do gender, race, and socioeconomic status shape the experience of maternal ambivalence? The episode looks at how maternal ambivalence might be different based on your background. It questions whether this is mainly "a middle-class, white phenomenon." We explore Bell Hooks' view that motherhood wasn't seen as the main obstacle for Black women historically. These mixed feelings may show up differently across racial and economic groups.   How does societal pressure shape maternal ambivalence? The episode explains why our society makes these mixed feelings seem shameful instead of normal. Speaking up about them could change how you parent.   What role do cultural expectations and intensive parenting play in shaping parental guilt?We discuss how society's view of total motherly devotion can become "twisted" and hurt both mothers and children. Modern parenting culture expects mothers to always put their children first, at the cost of their own identity. Listen to understand why you might feel guilty and what you can do about it.   How can parents navigate these conflicting emotions in a healthy way? The episode provides both big-picture and personal strategies for dealing with maternal ambivalence. We build on earlier episodes about parental burnout and self-compassion. Discover practical ways to accept all your parenting feelings without shame. These mixed feelings don't have to create guilt and shame. They can form the foundation of a close connection with your child.   What you’ll learn in this episode Discover why maternal ambivalence creates an emotional tug-of-war that goes beyond occasional frustration Maternal ambivalence isn't just feeling tired or annoyed sometimes—it's that deep emotional conflict where you love your child intensely while simultaneously feeling overwhelmed or even resentful. Dr. LaChance Adams explains this powerful contradiction many mothers experience, where you might desperately want your child's bedtime to arrive while also missing them terribly once they're asleep. The podcast dives into why these opposing feelings create such inner turmoil for parents and how understanding this tension is the first step toward parenting with greater peace and authenticity.   We unpack the impact of impossible standards on parental identity and self-worth When society expects perfect motherhood—always patient, always present, always fulfilled by caregiving—it creates a crushing weight on parents' mental health. The episode explores how these unrealistic expectations force many mothers to put their needs "on the back burner," leading to a gradual loss of identity. You'll learn how intensive parenting culture undermines parents' confidence, why the undervaluing of caregiving work affects how mothers see themselves, and practical ways to rebuild your sense of self while still being the parent your child needs.   Learn how maternal ambivalence looks different across parents from different backgrounds The podcast examines Bell Hooks' important insight that for Black women historically, "motherhood would not have been named a serious obstacle to our freedom"—unlike how it's often framed in white, middle-class discussions. You'll discover how factors like race, economic status, and cultural background shape how parents experience and express these mixed feelings about parenthood. The episode challenges the one-size-fits-all approach to understanding parental emotions and offers perspectives that may better reflect your own unique experience.   Discover why parents often keep these mixed feelings hidden and how this silence makes things worse. When mothers in online groups admit they're struggling with parenthood, they're often met with judgment instead of support. The podcast explores why this silencing happens and why breaking this silence is actually the solution. You'll learn how shame around maternal ambivalence creates a dangerous cycle that increases parental stress and guilt, and how honest conversations about these normal feelings can create supportive communities where real parenting challenges can be addressed together.   Move past the limiting idea that self-care is just about "being a better parent." The episode challenges the common message that mothers should take care of themselves only so they can be "better parents." Instead, it explores how mothers deserve to maintain their identity and meet their needs simply because they are human beings with inherent worth beyond their parenting role. You'll discover a more empowering approach to balancing your needs with your child's, practical ways to reclaim parts of yourself that parenting has pushed aside, and how this authentic approach actually creates healthier parent-child relationships in the long run.   Dr. LaChance Adams’ books:

• Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a ‘Good’ Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence
• The Maternal Tug: Ambivalence, Identity and Agency 

  Links to resources and ideas discussed in this episode:

• Nikesha Elise Williams
• Mierle Laderman Ukeles
• Hegel’s Dialectic / Speculative Method
• Martin Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit / “how you find yourself in the world”
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Jump to highlights 05:03 Maternal ambivalence is, having extreme emotional conflict in one’s feelings towards my [one’s] children. Dealing with intense love and sometimes intense hate, the needs to be very intimate and close to one’s children or one’s child, but also to have a sense that one needs to get distance to have strong feelings. 08:34 I’m thinking about Bell Hooks’ work, and she had said, “but had Black women voiced their own views on motherhood, it would not have been named a serious obstacle to our freedom as women, racism, availability of jobs, lack of skills, or education would have been top of the list, but not motherhood.” I’m wondering, is maternal ambivalence a middle-class, White phenomenon? Or do you see it in other places as well? 11:27 If a woman lives in a culture where there’s an intense romanticization of the mother-child relationship, and she feels that she can’t express any kind of conflicted emotion at all. And then when you have these things piling on top of each other, then you start to see it gets more and more and more intensified. The more these things compound, the less a woman is able to reflect on these emotions, think about them, share them get relief, get that kind of...

In this episode, Dr. Susan Pollak helps us to apply mindfulness skills to our relationships with our children so we can parent in line with our values, rather than just reacting when our children push our buttons. You'll learn:

• What's the point of mindfulness, and does it matter if we bring our full attention and presence to diaper changes?
• Why we're so hard on ourselves, even when we always try to be kind to others
• Some concrete tools to use when you interact with your children TODAY in those moments when it seems like everything is falling apart.

Dr. Pollak is a psychologist in private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a long-time student of meditation and yoga who has been integrating the practices of meditation into psychotherapy since the 1980s. Dr. Pollak is cofounder and teacher at the Center for mindfulness and Compassion at Harvard Medical School and the Cambridge Health Alliance, and has just stepped down as President of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, a position which she held since 2010. She also writes regularly for Psychology today on the topic of integrating mindfulness into daily life.   Book mentioned in the episode:

Self-Compassion for Parents: Nurture Your Child by Caring for Yourself (Affiliate link).

Other episodes related to this topic: Parental Burn-Out No Self, No Problem Helping children to develop compassion Patriarchy is perpetuated through parenting Mindfulness tools with Mindful Mama Hunter Clarke-Fields   Some key points from the interview: (04:08) Many of us, present company included, we're not raised to be kind to ourselves. (10:47) Mindful self-compassion acknowledges that we need to start with mindfulness. (I've been teaching this course for over a decade, and I've seen that) a lot of people just can't start with compassion because it's foreign for most of us to treat ourselves kindly. (53:59) Allow yourself to rest for a moment feeling that you have distance from the storm, some space from the turbulence to recognize that you are not the storm. (paraphrased) (59:03) It's such a common misconception about mindfulness that you have to sit still and not think about anything. And, you know, people are relieved to know that [mindfulness] is not about stopping our thoughts. It's really about finding a different relationship with our thoughts. [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen 00:03 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us. Jen 01:00 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. In this episode, we're going to draw threads together from across a number of recent episodes. Most obviously it picks up on our interview with Dr. Moira Mikolajczak where we discuss parental burnout. After that episode concluded Dr. Mikolajczak and I emailed a bit about tools that could potentially help parents, and the primary one that she found useful was the idea of self-compassion. And that's what we're going to discuss today. This topic also picks up on our conversation with Dr. Chris Niebauer about the stories that our left brain tells us by giving us some concrete strategies on how to do that. And it builds on a conversation we had about three years ago with Dr. Brendan Ozawa-de Silva on the topic of compassion. We also touch on issues related to patriarchy and go deeper into some of the mindfulness tools that Hunter Clark-Fields shared with us recently. Jen 01:50 And here to do all of this with us is Dr. Susan Pollak, who is a psychologist in private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a longtime student of meditation and yoga and has been integrating the practices of meditation into psychotherapy since the 1980s. Dr. Pollack is cofounder and teacher at the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, and has just stepped down as President of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, a position that she held since 2010. She also writes regularly for Psychology Today on the topic of integrating mindfulness into daily life. Welcome, Dr. Pollack. Dr. Pollak 02:24 Thanks, Jen. It's a pleasure to be with you. Jen 02:28 So, we're going to talk a lot about your book. Because it's on the topic of Self-Compassion for Parents. And one thing that I really liked as I was reading through your book, is the idea that it isn't a manual for self-compassion. It doesn't teach you step by step what self-compassion is, and then how to apply it. I loved what Dr. Chris Germer said in your foreword and he said, I'm going to quote, "The book connects with the direct experience of parenting through detailed examples, personal anecdotes, and elegant exercises to transform parenting struggles through the tools of mindfulness and self-compassion." So that said, we're definitely going to be digging into some more of those things for as we go today, but I'm wondering if we could start by having you help us to understand what is compassion. And from there, what is self-compassion, and also this idea of mindful self-compassion that I know is really important to your work? Dr. Pollak 03:21 Okay, and let me first just respond to your kind words, because my feeling is, there's no recipe for parenting. And I know you're a parent. I am a parent of two kids. And as of just a week ago, a grandmother, Jen 03:39 Congratulations! Dr. Pollak 03:40 Thanks! So, I think it's really important for your listeners to, to realize that one size doesn't fit all. Jen 03:49 Yeah. Dr. Pollak 03:50 You know, I'm not going to be able to give you a recipe for how to be the perfect, compassionate, mindful parent, you know, you have to figure out what works for you, and what works for your kids. Jen 04:07 Yeah. [caption id="attachment_6394" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Many of us, present company included, we're not raised to be kind to ourselves.[/caption] Dr. Pollak 04:08 So that said, let me jump into just some really workable definitions. And let me tell you, I really don't like psychological jargon. So, let me speak in English. So, one way to understand compassion is to really look at the root of the word, which is Latin, and it means to suffer with. Okay, so that's kind of theoretical, what it means in real life, is to really see somebody and to connect with their pain, or the difficulty they're having. So self-compassion, and this is a pretty radical concept, is learning to be kind to yourself. Again, it's that simple. So many of us, present company included, we're not raised to be kind to ourselves. So, it can feel weird, awkward, foreign, like "What? Be kind to myself? No, no, I have to push myself. I have to drive myself. What are you talking about?" So, for me, that concept of being kind to myself felt foreign. And, again, an easy way to think about it is, when you're having a hard time, think about what you say to yourself. And I don't know if your inner language is like my inner language, but to be very self-disclosing. I used to say, "Oh, Susan, that was stupid." Or "Oh, Susan, you're an idiot." or "Oh, how could you have said that?" You know, "You've really blew that." So, it was this constant soundtrack of criticizing myself. Dr. Pollak 05:56 But think also, what you might say, if a friend told you that for someone you really cared about that she had done, or he had done something similar to what you did. And you probably wouldn't say to your friend, "Oh, John, that was so stupid. I can't imagine you said that. How could you have done that? What were you thinking? What is wrong with you? You are such a loser?" Well, I mean if you said that to a friend, you probably wouldn't have many friends. Okay, so we, we do know how to respond kindly. You would probably say, "Look, John, you know, you're human, we all screw up, you know, everyone is a parent..."...

Are there parts of yourself that you don't share with other people?   Things that you think: "If people knew that about me, they wouldn't love me / they'd think I'm a terrible person / they wouldn't even want to be around me"?   When you mess up, does it seem like it's not that you did a silly/bad thing, but that you are a stupid/bad person?   If your answer to any of these questions is "yes," then you're experiencing shame.   Almost all of the parents I work with are ashamed of some aspect of themselves...but not Dee.   That's not to say that Dee never struggles - far from it. But her struggles seem to feel more manageable to her, and she has a sense of 'right'-ness about her.   If Dee recognizes that she has a need, it never occurs to her to not ask for help from others in getting that need met.   How did this happen? What implications does it have for how we can raise our children so they don't experience shame?   In this episode, Dee shares her story and her top three ideas for raising children in a shame-free environment with us.   If you realize that shame has been a huge part of your childhood (and even adulthood) and you're ready for help healing that so you can be the kind of parent you want to be, I do hope you'll join me (and Dee!) in the Parenting Membership.   We don't just learn how to make parenting easier (although that is a big focus!). We also work to heal ourselves so we can show up as whole people in our own lives.   The Parenting Membership is now open for immediate enrollment. Sign up now!   http://yourparentingmojo.com/parentingmembership   Other episodes mentioned:

• 209: How to get on the same page as your parenting partner
• 212: How to make the sustainable change you want to see

  Jump to highlights 00:59 Introducing today’s topic and featured guest 6:31 Dee talks about her life, interests, and journey as a parent, including travel, family, and retirement plans. 09:24 Dee reflects on her supportive mom, who embraced their behavior as expressions of needs and valued their personalities. 12:39 Dee reflects on her nurturing upbringing, emphasizing the importance of feeling loved and accepted. This foundation drives her to seek intentional parenting strategies. 20:31 Dee learned to negotiate needs and boundaries with her child, leading to mutual respect and a harmonious dynamic. 30:39 Dee shares her experiences in the Parenting Membership community where she finds support and insights through coaching calls, ACTion group, and modules on topics that help her navigate parenting challenges and personal growth. 40:50 Through the Parenting Membership, Dee learned to address resentment, prioritize her needs, and communicate better with her partner for a healthier balance. 01:06:15 Three things Dee suggests for parents to try on based on the conversation. 01:09:39 Wrapping up

Parents often reach out to me to ask how they can support their perfectionist children, who can't seem to cope with failure. I've been on the lookout for someone to talk with us for a while, but just as with our episode on anxiety, it took quite some searching to find an expert who doesn't take a behaviorist-based approach - meaning that if the behavior is fixed, the problem is fixed too. I was really glad to find today's guest, Dr. Paul Hewitt, who is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Hewitt has spent decades researching perfectionism and recently received the Donald O. Hebb award for his distinguished contributions to psychology as a science by the Canadian Psychological Association. He is currently doing research on the treatment of perfectionism, and trains clinicians in the treatments of perfectionistic behavior. In this interview, he tells us what we know about perfectionism, what we still don't know, and how to help our children who have perfectionist tendencies.   Books mentioned in the episode:

Perfectionism: A Relational Approach to Conceptualization, Assessment, and Treatment 

Perfectionism in Childhood and Adolescence: A Developmental Approach (Affiliate links).

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen 00:03 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about. Subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen 01:01 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today we're going to look at a topic that bubbles up fairly often in online parenting groups, and that's related to perfectionism. The typical post goes something like this, my child starts an activity but as soon as something doesn't go exactly the way they hope to maybe a crayon wasn't the color they wanted, or they extended a mark too far on the paper. Or they got an answer wrong on a quiz for school. They screw up the paper in a ball and throw it away. And when this happens on a regular basis, it just seems debilitating. How can I help my child to overcome this now while they're still young, so it doesn't have a big impact on their life?   Jen 01:39 And I was actually in the library a while ago looking for books on another topic for another podcast episode and right next to the one I was there to get was an edited volume on perfectionism. And inside was an essay by our guest today Dr. Paul Hewitt. And when I read that essay, and I delved into his body of work, I knew he was exactly the right guest to speak with us.   Jen 01:59 Dr. Hewitt works mostly with adults. But just as we learned when we covered anxiety a few months ago, it can be really difficult to find someone to interview who doesn't just focus on treating the symptoms of the problem, and instead goes beneath the symptoms to understand the real causes, which is what Dr. Hewitt's work does so effectively. Dr. Hewitt is a professor of psychology, and a registered clinical psychologist who has conducted extensive research on the construct of perfectionism, which is the idea of what perfectionism actually is, and whether it's harmful to people. He's currently doing research on the treatment of perfectionism and trains clinicians in the treatment of perfectionistic behavior. Dr. Hewitt received his BA from the University of Manitoba, his M.A., and his PhD from the University of Saskatchewan, and he currently leads the Perfectionism and Psychopathology Lab at the University of British Columbia. In 2019, Dr. Hewitt received the Donald O. Hebb Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Science for his work on perfectionism.   Jen 02:56 Welcome, Dr. Hewitt.   Dr. Hewitt 02:58 Thank you very much.   Jen 02:59 All right. So let's start with definitions because it seems as though this should be kind of an easy thing to do, right to define what perfectionism is, but the more you start poking at it, the more you realize it's a pretty nebulous concept. So, can you please tell us how you define perfectionism?   Dr. Hewitt 03:15 You're right it on first blush, it feels like something that should be fairly straightforward. And indeed, a lot of people in the literature, treat it as something that's very simple, straightforward - cognitions, or thoughts or attitudes - in reality, I've spent about 35 years doing research and clinical work with people with problems with perfectionism, and my definition has evolved over the decades. At this point, I couldn't really think of perfectionism as a really complex, sort of multi-dimensional, multi layered personality style. So, it's like a character style that people have that really serves a fundamental purpose for individuals.   Dr. Hewitt 04:00 So, it's, again, it's an ingrained, stable kind of personality style that people have. So, it's very generally, you know, we got, we got very specific in terms of what that might entail, and maybe I can work my way through that.   Jen 04:16 That would be great. Thank you.   Dr. Hewitt 04:18 One of the ways to think about perfectionism is that people - children, adults, adolescents, seniors - will have a requirement of perfection that is, some will need themselves, they'll require themselves to be perfect, or they will require other people to be perfect, or both. And when we talk about what we've talked about the need to be perfect, we talk really about perfectionism traits.   Dr. Hewitt 04:49 Actually, before I go any further, let me let me state this. The conceptualization that I've put together with my colleagues over the years has not come just from research or from reading in the literature. It's come from working with patients and it's come from working with people and my patients over the years have taught me what perfectionism is. So, this whole aspect of my work has really fueled everything that I do from the models we've created to the treatment that we've developed to the understandings.   Dr. Hewitt 05:23 So, we can go back to this need to be perfect. We talk about perfectionism traits, and traits are personality characteristics that we have that are stable, they are long standing, they've been there for a long time, often, most of our lives. They don't change very easily. And we've talked about perfectionism traits. And these traits, these perfectionism traits, drive and energies, perfectionistic behavior.   Dr. Hewitt 05:55 So, it's these traits that drive first off the need to be perfect. And there's three ways that we've talked about people needing to be perfect. The first, we've just called self-oriented perfectionism, meaning, I need me to be perfect, I have the requirement that I have to attain perfection. And so that's one element. It's kind of what everybody thinks about when we talk about perfectionism. There's another element whereby individuals don't, I don't necessarily need me to be perfect, I need you to be perfect, or my children, or the other drivers on the road, or my wife, or my students or the world, in general, I need everybody else to be perfect. And I will be harsh and critical of those people when they're not perfect. In the same way, that when I have a requirement for myself to be perfect, I will be harsh and critical of myself.   Dr. Hewitt 06:53 There's a third element. And this one really came from my clinical work, where it became clear that there were people who needed to be perfect, but it wasn't arising from themselves, it wasn't this intrinsic kind of need. It was more that other people require me to be perfect. And it's the perception that other people require me to be perfect. Now that can be absolutely true. Or it can simply be a perception that's not objectively accurate. But nevertheless, the person has that experience of their world where I am expected to be perfect. And that can come again, from spouses from your boss...

I've heard from listeners that what they call "The Dark Horse Episode," the interview with Dr. Todd Rose, that this is one of their favorite conversations on the podcast, and for this reason I'm doing something I've never done before: reissuing that episode.  Dr. Rose and I discussed ways to personalize children's learning to help them truly discover and live their full potential - both academically and personally (and even getting rid of that distinction entirely...).   Check out what listeners who subsequently joined the Learning Membership said in our private community before the membership had even officially started:   https://yourparentingmojo.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/23.png   Click the banner to learn more!   http://yourparentingmojo.com/learningmembership   References Cantor, P., Osher, D., Berg, J., Steyer, L., & Rose, T. (2019). Malleability, plasticity, and individuality: How children learn and develop in context. Applied Developmental Science 23(4), 307-337. Mischel, W. (2004). Toward an integrative science of the person. Annual Review of Psychology 55, 1-22. Osher, D., Cantor, P., Berg, J., Steyer, L., & Rose, T. (2018). Drivers of human development: How relationships and context shape learning and development. Applied Developmental Science, 1-31. Osher, D., Cantor, P., Berg, J., Steyer, L., & Rose, T. (January 2017). Science of learning and development: A synthesis. American Institutes for Research. Downloaded from: https://www.air.org/sites/default/files/downloads/report/Science-of-Learning-and-Development-Synthesis-Osher-January-2017.pdf Rose, T., & Ogas, O. (2018). Dark Horse: Achieving success through the pursuit of fulfillment. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Rose, T., McMahon, G.T., Saxberg, B., & Christensen, U.J. (2018). Learning in the 21st Century: Concepts and tools. Clinical Chemistry 64(10), 1423-1429. Rose, T. (2015). The end of average: How we succeed in a world that values sameness. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Rose, L.T., Rouhani, P., & Fischer, K.W. (2013). The science of the individual. Mind, Brain, and Education 7(3), 152-158.

Ever have a vague sense that your interactions with your child aren't quite aligned with your values...but aren't quite sure what to do about it?   Have you been to a protest and shouted "Black Lives Matter!  Fight the Power!"...and then gone home and forced your child to brush their teeth?   Have you chastised Grandma for 'stealing' kisses from your child because it disrespects their body autonomy...and then pinned them down for a haircut?   You're not alone.  We're in this weird place where we know we want to do things differently than the way we were raised.  But cultural norms are still telling us: we need to be in charge.  (Because if we aren't in charge, who is?)   A conversation with the hosts of Upbringing My guests today, Hannah and Kelty of the Upbringing podcast, see this dissonance more clearly than almost anyone I've met.  In their podcast they explore how we live one way as people (who believe in freedom!  respect!  consent!  empathy!) and another way as parents (timeouts, shame, control, consequences), and how we're unwittingly undermining the very skills and values we hope to promote.   But blaming and shaming helps nobody (not us...and certainly not our children).  By instead approaching the topic with compassion and optimism, we can get out of an us vs. them relationship with our children, and take back our parenting practices from our cultural conditioning, and parent in relationship with our children in a way that's deeply aligned with our values.   Hannah and Kelty describe their RESIST approach (Respect, Empathy, Sync up, Innovate, Summarize, Trust) and also have a new guide to navigating sibling conflict (use discount code MOJO at checkout for 15% off!) on their beautiful website.  If our conversation strikes a chord, I'd definitely encourage you to check out their podcast and weekly Q&As on Instagram.   Parenting Membership  If parenting feels really hard, and it seems like you’ve read all the books and you’ve asked for advice in free communities and you’re tired of having to weed through all the stuff that isn’t aligned with your values to get to the few good nuggets, then the Parenting Membership will help you out.   The Parenting Membership is now open for immediate enrollment. Sign up now!   http://yourparentingmojo.com/parentingmembership  

In this episode we hear from Denise, who claims to have listened to every Your Parenting Mojo episode... Denise is a Filipina living in Madrid, and the intentional, respectful parenting style she's chosen to use is somewhat out of place in both cultures.  She wanted to chat about what to do when her daughter is having some big feelings out in public, and a well-meaning senior citizen approaches and says directly to her daughter: "You shouldn't cry, because you look ugly when you cry." We talk through the immediate issue, as well as all the layers underneath that question, on this episode.  And Denise's children make a surprise guest appearance at the end! You can find Denise on Facebook at facebook.com/DeniseSuarezConCarino [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast where I critically examine strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. In this series of episodes called Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, we turn the tables and hear from listeners. What have they learned from the show that's helped their parenting? Where are they still struggling? And what tools can we find in the research that will help? If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us. Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast and to today's episode of Sharing Your Parenting Mojo. And today I'm here with Denise. And Denise, do you want to say hi and tell us a bit about you and your family?   Denise  01:09 Hi, hi, Jen. I'm Denise. I'm from the Philippines. But I live in Madrid. I have two kids age two and four. And I am also a parenting coach and certified how to talk so kids will listen workshop facilitator.   Jen  01:24 Yeah, so it always feels like we're old friends at this point. And they're never met we've been working together for it's got to be almost two years by now. It was   Denise  01:32 I would say, well for you. You've known me for almost two years. I would say I've known you much longer.   Jen  01:41 Isn't that weird?   Denise  01:44 Yeah, because I started listening to your podcast, I think my daughter must have been like four months old, and she's four now.   Jen  01:57 Okay, now now this is getting really weird. There are a few listeners out there, I know of a few of them by name, who have listened to every podcast episode and I believe you're one of those, aren't you?   Denise  02:08 Yeah.   Jen  02:10 Awesome. So um, so you were curious about coming on to Sharing Your Parenting Mojo to talk about kind of, I guess, an interconnected issue around big feelings and cultural issues and, kinds of stuff related to that, right? I guess that probably comes up a lot for you, because you are raising children in a culture that is not the one that you were raised in yourself.   Denise  02:31 Yep. And all of this really started with you.   Jen  02:34 Oh, my goodness, I'm sorry.   Denise  02:38 It all started with that guide on, I didn't even remember what the name of the guide was.   Jen  02:44 Holding values in the Finding Your Parenting Major Membership. Yeah.   Denise  02:49 Yeah. It all started from there. And there were and the questions that you asked which were just like, what are the cultures that you identify with? How do you want to raise your children in line with these cultures, in what ways are you going to be working against them? For me just really made me realise like, oh, there are really these two different cultures that are at play right now. And even though we are living in Madrid, we are living in Spain, and we have that Spanish culture, it doesn't negate the fact that I'm from the Philippines, and that I have my own, like history and my own culture that I also want to pass on to my children in some way. Maybe not in oh, and that's how I realised just how different it is like, you know, parenting in itself has its own difficulties, but when you kind of like, add in that like extra mix, it just makes it all the more interesting. Yeah.   Jen  03:49 So what kind of situations does it play out in for you them?   Denise  03:52 So this is actually one of the things that I wanted to talk about with you Jen was about. So one of the things that like I'm working against. And this comes from both Filipino and Spanish cultures is the denial of feelings, right? It's the you're not allowed to cry. And so sometimes this happens in the middle of the street and I have my daughter crying and you know, she is all out and I'm there kind of holding that space for her. When an older senior citizen comes along like a very well-meaning one comes to tell my daughter how she shouldn't be crying because she looks ugly when she cries. And so, yeah. Very well-meaning. And so it's kind of like how do I hide this? And, you know, for me, it's very easy to just like, brush up what she says because...   Jen  04:48 You don't know her..   Denise  04:49 Yeah! But these are still messages that my daughter's receiving, right? And it's one of those things where part of the guide, one of the things that we did was to get at what are non negotiables. And that, for me is a non-negotiable. And so it's kind of like how do we handle these types of situations where, really what's going on is so contrary to what we want to teach or what we want them to have or to do.   Jen  05:22 Yeah. So if you don't mind, I'd love it if we could back up just a little bit through your childhood and about how that played out for you. There's a big raised eyebrows there for those of who who are listening. Wide open eyes. So what did you learn about feelings when you were a child then and what would have happened if you had, you know, walking across the street and you have a meltdown in the middle of a street?   Denise  05:47 That would never have happened?   Jen  05:49 Yeah, yeah. So what was it like for you then?   Denise  05:52 It's so funny. I was just speaking to someone else about this a few hours ago, about how in our in my childhood feelings weren't a thing. Like, I guess like they happen behind closed doors. And not just like anger or sadness, just like, in general. I don't remember feelings being a topic of conversation or something that we actually saw in each other. Except, you know, I have three sisters. So of course there was that anger and the jealousy but it wasn't something that we talked about.   Jen  06:29 Yeah. And when you when you said it happened behind closed doors, I just got a flashback actually. Because you've listened to all my episodes I know you know that my mom died when I was about 10. And I remember walking down our hallway upstairs one day and going past my parent's room and my dad was sitting on the bed. He was looking at my mom's jewelry box, and he was crying, and I kept walking because I knew he wouldn't want me to see him crying, or even if I didn't know like, I felt. My impression was we don't talk about this. It's not okay for him to know that I've seen him crying. And for me to go to him and you know, could we ever have a conversation about something that's obviously touching us both so profoundly No, no, I as a 10, or 11 year old? No, I do not know how to initiate that conversation. And I don't know if he saw me. But he never came to me and said anything to me about it. And so yeah, I think this is this is common in so many cultures around the world, isn't it? That we're just, it's not that the feeling isn't there because it is. It's just that we were not allowed to express it. And so, okay, let's move one step forward, then how has that played out in your life, things that you saw happening in your childhood and that you were not allowed to express? How was that brought forward into your life as an adult?   Denise  07:45 By myself like without my kids?   Jen  07:49 Well how has it impacted your relationships, I guess, is   Denise  07:54 Okay, so maybe not an adult yet. We can like pass through the beautiful teenage years of how I, of course, was going through all these emotions and just didn't even know what to do with them, you know? And I remember like, I would speak to friends about it. And I would just be like, I think, God, I have really good friends cause they would just like not say anything, and just like, be there. And so moving on to adulthood. How would that look like it would just be adulthood was fine. It was like no problems. I don't want to talk about my feelings. It's not something that I do. And then it's more just like the kids come and you're like, oh, wait, I have feelings. All these very strong feelings. And then again, because of like your work and all the other work that I've done, I also know that what I have or what I had growing up isn't what I want for my kid.   Jen  08:50

This episode on the topic of materialism concludes our series on the intersection of parenting and money.  Here we talk with Dr. Susanna Opree of Erasmus University Rotterdam, who studies the effect of advertising and commercial media on use, materialism, and well-being. We discuss how children's understanding of materialism shifts as they age, the extent to which advertising contributes to materialism, and the specific role that parents play in passing on this value. Other episodes in this series: This episode is the second in a series on the intersection of parenting and money. You can find other episodes in this series: 038: The Opposite of Spoiled 105: How to pass on mental wealth to your child 107: The impact of consumerism on children 112: How to Set up a Play Room 115: Reducing the Impact of Advertising to Children     [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Dr. Opree  00:00 Basically, if you want to reduce materialism, you need to make sure that's those human connections. And those other values such as generosity, that they are amplified. And so I think what works best if Why do you see young kids to invest in their self-esteem a little bit as well also for adolescence, but I think also teaching young people to be grateful to be grateful ourselves as well for all the things that we have. And really just focus on making those connections. And the tricky thing is that sometimes possessions enable these connections. But I think if we're more focused on what's intrinsic to us, what makes us happy, outside of possessions that then basically the emphasis will shift.   Jen  00:52 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE  Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. And today's episode we're going to bring our series on the intersection of children and money to a conclusion we started out so long ago by talking with New York Times money columnist Ron Lieber about his book The Opposite of Spoiled. More recently we heard from Dr. Brad Klontz, about how we pass on money scripts to our children. And then we talked with Dr. Allison Pugh about the meaning children make out of the messages they receive about material goods. And then Dr. Esther Rozendaal on how children's brains process advertising.  And in between we looked at what research there is on how to set up a playroom, which has of course many links with the items that we buy and use. And so finally, we're here today with Dr. Suzanna Opree to bring the discussion up to a level that kind of draws all this together as we try and understand what materialism is, and how we pass it on to our children and what we can do if we don't want our children to be very materialistic. Dr. Opree is Senior Assistant Professor of quantitative methods in the department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the effect of advertising and commercial media on use, materialism, and well-being. Welcome Dr. Opree!   Dr. Opree  03:00 Thank you for having me.   Jen  03:01 Okay, so I wonder if we could start with something that seems as though it should be kind of simple. And then it turned out that it wasn't. Can you define materialism for us? Because I would, as I was reading through the literature, I found at least six different definitions of it.   Dr. Opree  03:15 Yeah, there are indeed many definitions. Luckily, though, some scholars have already tried to make sense of all those different definitions. And so I myself always go by the work of Richins and Dawson, and they say that materialism is basically three things. So first, it's finding possessions important and just wanting to collect as many possessions as you can. That's the first thing. The second thing is that you actually think that these possessions will make you happier, and not only in the short term, but also in the long run. And so that's basically one of the motivators for actually collecting possessions. And then the third one has to do more with impression management, so to say. So it's that you want to have possessions for adults to basically impress all the others around you. So think of having a big house, having a big car. As for children, and it's that, so getting items that will make you popular among your peers, but also just the belonging and fitting in, which I know you talked about earlier in the podcast series as well. That's important for children as well.   [caption id="attachment_6253" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] According to Richins and Dawson, materialism is basically three things. (1) Finding possessions important and wanting to collect as much as you can, (2) thinking possessions will make you happier, (3) having possessions to basically impress others around you.[/caption]   Jen  04:27 Yeah, yeah, that definitely came out in our episode with Dr. Pugh. So, um, so I'm glad that you are using one of the definitions that I had found instead of springing a new one on me. And so I'm curious as to how you landed on that one instead of some of the others that I mean, one of them says that materialism is a personality trait. Other people think it's a feature of people's identities or a set of attitudes about money and wealth. What is it about this particular definition that speaks to you more than some of the others?   Dr. Opree  04:53 Well, I think it also captures the first two that you're referring to. So when we talk about it as a personality traits I do think materialism is something that's inherent or characters and all of us are materialistic to some extent or another. However, in that research, it's often combined with other character traits. So they talk that materialism is paired with possessiveness, for instance, and non-generosity, envy. And I don't think all naturalistic kids or people actually have these personality traits, but we use possessions as part of our identity. So I do think that part is true, especially in a consumer culture that we have today. Basically, anything you own is a choice. So back in the day, like to my students I always compare it to buying a car. A couple of decades ago, there was one car that you could buy like the Model-T Ford was the only one made available and it had just one color and that was it. Whereas if you go buy a car today, there are so many different each brand has so many different models and so many different colors or color combinations. And that whatever you choose then becomes a signaling of your identity, so to say.   Jen  06:08 Yeah, and I think that's particularly, it's interesting that you brought up the example of cars. I was just talking about this the other day, about how so many cars are essentially the same car with the same chassis, the same engine with a different, you know, wrapper on the outside. Yes, designed to appeal to some particular aspect of our taste. So yeah, and so I'm always trying to look back to previous episodes, and we did one recently on the topic of patriarchy and I was really interested to draw a connection between some research on that and something that I pulled out of the literature on materialism because one of the authors I was reading had argued that materialism and consumerism have feminizing effects on men. And I'm going to quote this by setting up a narrative linking identity or sorry, linking masculinity, rebellion and integrity on one side and femininity, conformity, domestication and commercialization on the other. Production is active while consumption is passive. The consumer is deceived by advertising into purchasing things she doesn't really need, and this femininity is contagious. So men might also find themselves subject to the hypnoidal trance. I mean, what do you make of that? I am trying to square that with the research that says that men are actually slightly more materialistic than women I think.   Dr. Opree  07:25 They are. Yeah, yeah. For me, it was a very interesting point of view, actually a new one for me. So if I actually look at the literature. So Tim Kasser, for instance, has a yeah has worked on the topic of materialism for many years, as well. And he also studies, he linked it to capitalism, basically. And he, I believe, last year also released a book called Hyper-Capitalism, which is great. It's actually a comic book telling you everything about materialism or what you need to know. But what he also explains there, is that he links it to capitalism, but he's saying so materialism

We're delving a little deeper into the topic of mindfulness with none other than the Mindful Mama, Hunter Clarke-Fields!  We discuss Hunter's journey from being triggered just as often as the rest of us, to using mindfulness techniques to center herself so she can parent more effectively.  She even walks me through an impromptu mini-meditation! You can buy Hunter's book, Raising good humans: A mindful guide to breaking the cycle of reactive parenting and raising kind, confident kids on Amazon or at your local bookstore.

One of the questions I see asked most often in parenting forums these days is some variation on: "I’m worried about my child’s socialization now that it looks like daycares, preschools and schools have been closed for several months and will likely remain closed for several more months. Can someone please tell me if I really do need to worry about what the complete lack of socialization with other children will do to my [only] child?” So we'll take a look at that, and then we'll go on to take a look at the other kinds of socialization that happen in school that you may not have even realized happens until we dig into the research on it.   I also let you know about a new Pandemic Pods 'in a box' course.  A lot of parents are thinking of forming what are being called Pandemic Pods - a small group of children who are working together either in some kind of parent care exchange or with a hired teacher/tutor. As I'm sure you can imagine, there are a host of ways to set up these pods in a way that exacerbate existing inequalities that pervade the public school system.  And there are also ways to set them up that might actually help us to begin to overcome some of these issues.  Listen in to learn how! Click here to learn more about the Pandemic Pods 'in a box' course   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today’s podcast episode is on the topic of socialization, because one of the questions I’m seeing most often in parenting forums these days runs along the lines of "I’m worried about my child’s socialization now that it looks like daycares, preschools and schools have been closed for several months and will likely remain closed for several more months. Can someone please tell me if I really do need to worry about what the complete lack of socialization with other children will do to my only child?”  So that’s the main topic for our conversation today. But I also wanted to let you know about some other resources I’ve been putting together for parents who are struggling to cope right now, and this episode is related to those as well. You might have already seen that I have a course called The Confident Homeschooler, which gives you all the information you need to decide whether homeschooling could be right for your child and your family.  It’s based on scientific research, as everything I do is, but it’s not huge and indigestible.  It’s a series of short videos that you could binge-watch in an evening or two, and it gives you everything you need to make a decision about whether homeschooling can really work for you

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

If you want to find out more about The Confident Homeschooler you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com/confidenthomeschooler.     But with many districts announcing that they are moving to remote-only learning for at least the first part of the fall semester, many parents are no longer in a position where they’re choosing whether homeschooling is right for them, they’re doing some form of it whether they want to or not.  And parents are panicking.  They’re panicking about their children’s learning, and whether their children are somehow going to ‘fall behind’ if they can’t make attending school two days a week work, or if they already know from what happened in Spring that their child just isn’t going to be able to sit in front of Zoom calls for even an hour each day. Parents who are in this position are starting to form what are being called Pandemic Pods, and if you haven’t heard of these yet then you will most likely be hearing more about them soon.  They pretty much exploded over social media just last weekend here in the Bay Area, and I expect they’ll move outward from there to other places where schools are closed.  So a Pandemic Pod is a small group of families that are getting together to support their child’s development and learning in some way.  Exactly how that will be done depends on the age of the children; for younger children this might essentially be a nanny share arrangement.  For older ones there would be some aspect of supporting the children’s learning, and this can vary from learning about things the children are interested in to making sure the children complete every assignment sent home by the school district and ensuring readiness for the next grade of learning when school reopens. On the first day people were talking about Pandemic Pods there was a huge rush to form them.  And then the very next day, it seemed like people realized the social justice considerations of what are essentially networks of affluent parents, who are often but not always White, either withdrawing their child from school or providing this extra tutoring to ensure their child stays on track with the school-provided learning objectives.  And there are other considerations like how many families you’ll work with, and whether each family is comfortable really socially isolating so the pod’s potential for exposure is minimized, and whether the children will wear masks all day every day, and whether the caregiver or tutor will wear a mask inside your house all day every day. But I do believe there are ways to set pods up that address many of these logistical issues, as well as the social justice considerations, for two reasons.  I think there can be a bit of a reflexive cry of “public schools are the most equitable arrangement possible, and Pandemic Pods reek of White privilege.”  We’ll get to the public schools issue in a bit, so let’s take the privilege aspect first.  If White people are using their networks to identify resources that not everyone can access then that’s a classic case of what’s called Opportunity Hoarding, which we discussed in depth in the episode on White privilege in schools.  If White people are forming pods and then reaching out to parents of non-dominant cultures and inviting them in to ‘sprinkle a little diversity on top’ primarily for the benefit of our own child then we’re basically just perpetuating White supremacy. (And if this is the first time you’re hearing this phrase ‘people of non-dominant cultures,’ then it’s a term I use to avoid centering Whiteness, and to recognize the power imbalance inherent in systemic racism.) But there are ways to form these pods that don’t do that.  A Pandemic Pod doesn’t inherently perpetuate White supremacy.  The way the pod is formed CAN do that, or can NOT do that.  So if a White parent reaches out to people of non-dominant cultures, maybe parents of other children at the White family’s school, or maybe through a local church and asks what resources parents need access to, then you can open a conversation.  What you may well find is that while you are feeling overwhelmed and panicked because this is the first time our social systems have really completely failed us, that families of non-dominant cultures have robust support systems that have thus far flown under the radar.  So if you ask them what they need, a group of families might already have a long-standing support system and ask you to purchase wifi access for them, and then encourage you not to engage further with them, thank you very much.  They might be deeply suspicious of your motives, as, frankly, I probably would be too if I were them.  But it’s possible that by starting a conversation about what they’re seeing and what are their needs, and what you’re seeing and what are your needs, that you’ll be able to open up a space that is truly inclusive, not just tokenistically inclusive. By making the needs of others at least as important as your own needs, and even centering their needs above yours, you’re doing the real work of dismantling White supremacy here.  This is really it.  You’re listening to the needs of people of non-dominant cultures, and you’re acting on them not out of a sense of duty and obligation and White saviorism, but because your survival and your child’s survival are wrapped up in their survival and their child’s survival.  You will sink or swim together.  This is the work Black people are asking us to do to dismantle the systems that have given us so much power and privilege for so many years. So if you’d like more information on how to form a pandemic pod, from whether you should start one in the first place, to way more of these social justice considerations, to the kinds of questions you’ll want to ask the other families participating, how to identify a caregiver or tutor and what to ask them in an interview, to what the children should be learning and how to know if they are learning, to minimizing costs, then my new Pandemic Pod ‘in a box’ course is for you.  You can learn more and sign up today at yourparentingmojo.com/pandemicpods. Now I do want to come back to this issue of public schools being the most equitable arrangement possible for children, and the idea that if we aren’t supporting public schools then we aren’t doing anti-racist work because it’s intimately connected to the idea of socialization. I think when many parents are thinking of the issue of socialization they’re thinking about it at one level, as I was as well before I started looking into it, so we’ll start there before we go deeper.  We’re thinking about the interactions our children are missing out on...

Work-family conflict can seem unavoidable - especially in the era of COVID when we're either working from home with children underfoot all day, or we're an essential worker who has to leave the house and can't find childcare. In this conversation with licensed psychologist Dr. Yael Schonbrun, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Brown University, and co-host of the Psychologists Off The Clock podcast, we acknowledge that we must enact policies that provide more of a safety net for families.  But even in the absence of these policies, we can make choices that allow us to live in greater alignment with our values, and also find a sense of peace. If you enjoyed episode 113 on Dr. Chris Niebauer's book No Self, No Problem, then you'll find that the tools we discuss in this episode flow directly from that one.   Here's a link to the Choice Point tool that we discuss Here are some Psychologists Off The Clock episodes that discuss Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in greater depth: https://www.offtheclockpsych.com/podcast/acceptance-commitment-therapy https://www.offtheclockpsych.com/podcast/the-heart-of-act https://www.offtheclockpsych.com/podcast/take-committed-action   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I am Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast where I critically examine strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. In this series of episodes called Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, we turn the tables and hear from listeners. What have they learned from the show that is helped their parenting? Where are they still struggling? And what tools can we find in the research that will help? If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide To 7 Parenting Myths We Can Safely Leave Behind 7 Fewer Things To Worry About, subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you will join us.   Jen  00:59 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Regular listeners might remember that a few months ago we talked with listener Kelly and Dr. Moira Mikolajczak on the topic of parental burnout. And we discussed how parental burnout is a constellation of symptoms that can include mental and physical exhaustion and emotional distancing from children, loss of feelings of being effective as a parent. And it can lead to an assortment of risks for both the parent and the child including shame and loneliness and the risk of neglect of the child or violence towards the child. And the feeling that the situation can only be escaped through divorce or abandonment or suicide. And we talked about how one of the big causes of parental burnout is the unrealistic expectations that we put on mothers to somehow sacrifice everything for their child, and also lead a fulfilling life for themselves. In the show notes, I gave a link to an assessment the Dr. Mikolajczak and her colleagues developed to help you figure out whether you might have burnout because it might not be as obvious as you think. And after the interview, I emailed with her and we discussed how powerful self-compassion can be as a tool to deal with burnout.   More recently, I was listening to a podcast that I really enjoy called Psychologists Off the Clock which features four psychologists discussing the principles that they use in their clinical work, and how they can help the rest of us to flourish in our work and our parenting and our relationships as well. And one of the hosts is Dr. Yael Schonbrun, and she is here with us today. Dr. Schonbrun Brown is a licensed clinical psychologist with a private practice. She is also an assistant professor at Brown University. And she is writing a book on the topic of work-family conflict, which can be an important precursor to parental burnout, which is how these topics are connected. So I got to chatting with her about this by email and I realized that not only are a large proportion of my listeners, working parents, but the ideas that she's thinking about are actually applicable to anyone who feels tension between their family and some other aspect of their life. So, she is going to talk us through this and also give us some new tools to deal with the days when our lives just seem a little bit out of control. So welcome, Dr. Schonbrun.   Dr. Schonbrun  03:00 Thank you so much Jen for having me. And I just want to take a quick moment to compliment your podcast, which is awesome. I love that you integrate data and compassion for parents and the work that you put out there is amazing. I am really honored to be a part of it.   Jen  03:11 Oh, thank you. It is great to have you here. So, I am always the first to admit, as far as working parenthood goes, I have it pretty easy. Even when I had a day job, I worked from home and so I never had that struggle of the commute time and the physical rushing from one place to another that I know a lot of parents and families find really stressful, that even though I no longer have a regular day job, as it were, and the podcast and this business is my work, I sometimes feel really conflicted because I really, really, really love doing this work and I also really like spending time with my daughter. But sometimes I feel distracted when I am with her. Often because I am thinking about the writing that I could be doing, or I should be doing. If I was not out collecting fill bugs in the garden, and now that she's not in preschool for nine hours a day. And so, I wonder if you can maybe help us to understand why is working parenthood's so hard?   https://yourparentingmojo.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/young-ethnic-woman-trying-to-work-at-home-with-active-4474040.jpg   Dr. Schonbrun  04:07 Yeah, I think it is great that you're pointing out that not all working parent challenges are created equal. Some of us really are more privileged than others. But it is also helpful to point out that the vast majority of working parents do experience challenges, just as you're describing. So, it's a great question, why is working parenthood so hard for so many of us? And the way that I frame my answer is a little different than the way the popular press typically talks about it. So, I sort of look at it from two different directions. The first is from the outside in, and the second is from the inside out. So, I'll tell you a little bit more about what I mean by that.   So, the outside in is the part of the dilemma in working parenthood that has to do with challenges that exist outside of us that leak into our individual lives. So, these are factors like how flexible and supportive your workplace is and whether your colleagues and work environments support balance between work and non-work time. Whether you have a partner, and if you have a partner: how supportive he or she is capable of being, or willing to be in sharing childcare and household responsibilities, and in supporting your professional effort. Whether your kids have special needs or physical or mental health issues, things like whether you have financial stressors, or whether you live in a country with reasonable family leave policies, and so on. So, the outside-in  factors matter deeply because when those kinds of structures aren't in place in ways that are reasonable and humane, we're going to encounter painful, often insurmountable challenges. And that tends to be what gets talked about most of the time in the popular press, and in most of the books that are out there about work-family conflict. But as a clinical psychologist, I tend to emphasize the importance of the other direction. So, this is from the inside out. So, these are factors that exist inside of each of us. These are human psychological elements, things that make each of us tick, and I like to quote Sigmund Freud here because he famously said, Love and Work are the cornerstones of our humanness. And I like this quote, because it really symbolizes the fact that most of us feel a drive to engage deeply in relationships. And most of us feel a drive to engage in some kind of productive or skillful enterprise, you know, not necessarily paid, but something that is sort of outside of our private family lives.   And these are both wonderful drives. And they are both associated with positive effect with healthy bodies and minds. And they are both individually and jointly able to create rich, meaningful, rewarding life. So, they are both important. But each tends to demand a lot from us and to demand things that sort of pull in opposite directions in which interfere with one another. So, for example, work really wants us to engage in future thinking, to be competitive, to be ambitious to get things done. Rr is parenting really requires us to be present and connected and very patient. And then of course, both roles require an intense amount of time and energy. So, by the fundamental nature of being human and wanting to participate in both work and love, most of us are going to experience conflict between those two roles. And so what a lot of my work focuses on is making sure...

We're almost (but not quite!) at the end of our lengthy series on the intersection of money and parenting.  Most recently, we talked with Dr. Allison Pugh to try to understand the answer to the question "Given that advertising is happening, how do parents and children respond?" In this episode we take a step back by asking "what about that advertising?" with Dr. Esther Rozendaal of Radboud University in the Netherlands whose research focuses on children's understanding of advertising messages.  Can children understand that advertising is different from regular TV programming?  At what age do they realize an advertisement is an attempt to sell them something? And what should parents do to reduce the impact of advertising on children?  It's all here in this episode.   Other episodes in this series This episode is the first in a series on the intersection of parenting and money. You can find other episodes in this series: 038: The Opposite of Spoiled 105: How to pass on mental wealth to your child 107: The impact of consumerism on children 112: How to Set up a Play Room 118: Are You Raising Materialistic Kids?   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:03 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind 7 Fewer Things to Worry About, subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.   Today's episode is a continuation of a series that I'm doing on the intersection of childhood and money. We started by talking with New York Times money columnist Ron Lieber, on his book The Opposite of Spoiled and then continue the conversation with Dr. Brad Klontz about the money scripts that we pass on to our children. Next, we heard from Dr. Allison Pugh who studies the way that parents and children manage in our consumerist culture. Dr. Pugh is a sociologist who is more interested in how people interact with each other than the ways their brains work. And she also takes advertising as a given and says, since advertising and commercialization is happening, how do parents and children respond? But of course, there's another side to the story. And that's the perspective that yes, advertising is happening and what does this mean for our children? How do our children perceive advertisements? Can they understand when a company is trying to sell them something and can we teach them to be more aware about this or is it a lost cause?   Our guest today is Dr. Esther Rozendaal. She's an associate professor At the behavioral Science Institute, as well as an associate professor in communication science at Radford University in the Netherlands. Dr. Rozendaal is an expert on young people's media and consumer behavior and Her research focuses in large part on children and advertising. She obtained a master's in Business Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam followed immediately by an MSc in social psychology from the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, followed by a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, for which she wrote her dissertation on the topic of advertising literacy and children's susceptibility to advertising. Welcome Dr. Rozendaal. Thank you. Thanks so much for being here with us. So I wonder if we can sort of start at the beginning and just say, Okay, why do companies advertise? It seems as though companies advertise products because they want us to buy the products. But how does this actually happen? What kind of changes does advertising bring about in I guess all people, children and adults?   Dr. Rozendaal  02:57 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, of course. First of all, for companies and for their brands, it's really important that we are aware of them, right? So if they want to make money, so if it's of course the core business, we need to be aware of all the products that they are creating that they're selling. So that's actually the fact that we can recognize all those products when we are in shops, or even that we can free recall those products that we can say okay, so I'm in need for a new type of mascara, for example. And now suddenly, this brand pops up in my mind, I'd like to have it so that's actually the first thing they like to create in our minds. And then of course, they want us to like all those brands and products that they are creating in all the surfaces they are thinking about. So once we do recognize those products and brands, and once we also like them, then the next step is of course that we are going to buy those products and that we want to request it So especially with kids, is it's highly important that those children start asking their parents to buy.   Jen  04:11 Yes, every parent's favorite form of advertising this way. Yeah. And so what kind of tactics to advertisers used to influence consumers? And I'm wondering, are these different for younger children and what what age did children just kind of understand these?   Dr. Rozendaal  04:27 Well, there are, of course, several tactics that they're using. And when you look at children in particular, an often used appeal is the popularity appeal. So children are of course highly susceptible to the influence of their peers, and to being popular. So when you look at, for example, the traditional television commercials, one of the tactics that you can see quite often is that they are showing some really popular children surrounded by a group of other children using kind of product or service and being really happy about it and all the other kids smiling and happy. Yeah, they're so happy. And this is actually also a technique that is now used quite often not only in the traditional television commercials but also on YouTube for example. So, there also you have deep popularity appeals. So children are films are also other influencers who are not children themselves. Also, they film themselves in settings in which they are really happy and popular, while using the products and the brands they are advertising. And also a thing which is really used quite a lot. For example, by McDonald's is presenting children with free stuff. Right? So the freebies, the things you can get for free and also this is a technique that is seen online quite often. So also with banner ads. For example, on TV ones websites, there are like, showing things like, Okay, do you want to win a free toy? Do you want to get free tickets for a certain festival, just click here, provide us with some of your personal details, and then you'll get a free toy or two tickets. So this is also something that is highly persuasive for children, particularly, but also for adults. Of course, we also want to have free stuff, right? So these are some of the techniques that are used, but there are many, many more.   Jen  06:31 Yeah, there really are. And I want to delve into one of those a little bit because I think it's particularly hard for us to get our head around by just describing a literature review in a study. So there was a pretty recent literature review that was done in 2016. And it found a general consensus that food advertising is positively correlated with unhealthy food take but there's a lack of insight into the causal relationship. So we don't know if more children who are watching ads are unhealthy or if unhealthy children are watching more ads. And then related to that there was another study that was actually too recent to be included in that one from 2017. And I'm going to quote it says children who watched a movie with more food product placement and branding were more likely to choose the snack most highly featured in that movie than children who watched a movie without significant unhealthy branded foods placement. And so what the researchers are doing here is they were putting the children down in front of the movie album, the Chipmunks. And then after that these children were three times as likely to choose the cheese balls snack that was frequently featured in that movie as cheese puffs which weren't seen in the film. And the children were saying then they weren't particularly hungry. They were told they didn't need to finish the snacks. They still ate on average about 800 calories or half the recommended amount of calories per day for children aged nine to 11. And so the researchers were thinking okay, maybe a child who sees a character often eating a product in a movie may be more likely to automatically choose that product in the future and then casting even further light on that and even more recent study from 2018 this is really an active field found that children, when you explain this concept to them, they initially don't believe that integrated advertising could...

I had originally approached today's topic of Othering through a financial lens, as part of the series of episodes on the intersection of parenting and money (previous episodes have been on NYT Money colunist Ron Lieberman's book The Opposite of Spoiled, How to Pass on Mental Wealth to your Child, The Impact of Consumerism on Parenting, and How to Set Up A Play Room.  The series will conclude in the coming weeks with episodes on advertising and materialism).   I kept seeing questions in parenting groups: How can I teach my child about volunteering?  How can I donate the stuff we don't need without making the recipient feel less than us?   And, of course, after the Black Lives Matter movement began its recent up-swing of activity, the topic took on a new life that's more closely related to my guest's work: viewing othering through the lens of race.   My guest, Dr. John A. Powell, is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties and a wide range of issues including race, structural racism, ethnicity, housing, poverty, and democracy. He is the Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute (formerly Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society), which supports research to generate specific prescriptions for changes in policy and practice that address disparities related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and socioeconomics in California and nationwide. In addition to being a Professor of Law and Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor powell holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion.   Our conversation was wide-ranging and touched on a host of topics and thinkers, which I promised to track down if I could.  These include: Martha Minow's book Making All The Difference Aristotle's theory of Arithmetic and Geometric Equality Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble  Amartya Sen's idea that poverty is not a lack of stuff, but a lack of belonging Dr. Susan Fiske's work on the connection between liking and competence Lisa Delpit's book Other People's Children Dr. Gordon Allport's book The Nature of Prejudice Max Weber's idea of methodological individualism The movie Trading Places (I still haven't seen it!) This blog post touches on Dr. powell's idea of the danger of allyship John Rawls' idea that citizens are reasonable and rational Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Richard Bernstein's concept of the regulative ideal   Dr. John Powell's Book

Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society (Affiliate link).

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen 01:11 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. In today's episode, we're going to draw together themes from a couple of different series that we've been working on over the last few months. One of these was on the intersection of Whiteness and parenting, and the other more recent one has been on the intersection of money and parenting. And one common theme across both of these topics is the idea of seeing someone who's different from you as somehow other than you. And so I'm deeply honored today to welcome Dr. John Powell, who is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties. Dr. Powell is the director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California Berkeley, which supports research to generate specific prescriptions for changes in policy and practice that address disparities related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability and socio economics in California and nationwide. Dr. Powell is Professor of Law and also Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. And is the author of the book Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society. Welcome, Dr. Powell.   Dr. Powell 02:17 Nice to be here, Jen.   Jen 02:19 And so I should also add that we scheduled this interview way back in February, right? Because your calendar is absolutely bananas. And we're just now talking here at the beginning of May. And so to put this in context, when we scheduled this in February, COVID-19 was something that was happening in China and really didn't seem to affect us very much or like it was going to affect us very much. And here in May, obviously, we are in a very different situation. And so I think our conversation today is going to be even more powerful with this additional context of othering that we're seeing related to things like attacks on Asian Americans here in the US, as well as under counting the number of Native Americans who have the virus, and how the whole world is basically shut down for an illness that's killed a small fraction of the number of people that diarrheal diseases and tuberculosis kill every year. Although, obviously the people that those diseases typically kill is very different from the people we are seeing the highest numbers of COVID-19 cases. So I'm sure our discussion today is going to be as this backdrop. And I think it makes it even more timely and even more compelling to listen to. So, I wonder if we could maybe start with a definition because othering is, I'm guessing is a term that's not going to be so familiar to many of my listeners. So can you start by grounding us a little bit and telling us about what is othering, please.   Dr. Powell 03:33 All right, so there's, as you would expect, there are many different ways of thinking about othering and the flip side of belonging, which we'll get to, I guess early.   Jen 03:41 Mm-hmm. Certainly, will.   Dr. Powell 03:42 It comes from many different disciplines, from healthcare, from sociology, from psychology, from philosophy, from feminist studies, from political science, each one has a slightly different variation as to how they talk about it. But one way of thinking about it is just when you do not accept someone else's full humanity and full equality. The bus concept as people are not seen as grievable, or people don't count, or in some way, they're less that. So it could be because there are different levels of othering, you connect othering between husband and wife, but not gonna have genocide in that context. Whereas when you have extreme othering of some groups, it also can lead into genocide. And there’s othering that’s exploitive. So, I was young made to observation that to be superfluous is worse than to be exploited. Because when you are superfluous, you can be subject to genocide. When you're exploited, you're not likely to suffer genocide.   Jen 04:47 Because you have a use to somebody.   Dr. Powell 04:49 Right. So, there are forms of othering, but sort of broad way of thinking about it when someone is seen as less than fully equal, less than mutual, and it can add to that like maybe a threat. In some sense, we're in different slow to some ways of thinking about it.   Jen 05:07 Okay, and so I'm trying to think about this from a psychological perspective and thinking about we've talked a long time ago now about how social groups form and a big part of it seems to be about creating this difference in your mind between what is me, what is myself, and to understand that you have to have something to compare it to some kind of other, how do you integrate that psychological aspect into the definitions of othering that you work with?   Dr. Powell 05:32 Well, the psychological definitions tend to be individualistic. And whereas some other definition certainly when I talked about Judith Butler or when I talked about sociology, Steve Martinot, they’re not psychological in that sense, in the sense that one of the preconditions to think...

Do you have a core group of parent friends who are always there for you? Friends who might not be 100% aligned with your parenting philosophy, but they're close enough that you know that when they do offer suggestions you would at least consider doing them?   And on the days when you just want to just vent and not hear any advice at all, you know that it'll be totally fine for you to vent. They won't take offense and they'll just empathize and reassure you that you aren't a terrible parent; you're a great parent having a difficult day - because they've seen you on your good days as well.   In this episode I'll introduce you to SIX parents who have just this kind of relationship. Katherine, Rachel, Beth, Peju, and Kati live in the eastern United States and Jody is Australia, and they meet once a week on Zoom for 40 minutes, and each of them talks for just five minutes...and in that time, they've become incredibly close friends. The relationships they have with each other are among the deepest and most profound ones in their lives.   If you need a supportive community like this in your life then I'd love to see you in the Parenting Membership, which is where Katherine, Rachel, Beth, Peju, Kati, and Jody met.   The Parenting Membership is now open for immediate enrollment. Sign up now!   http://yourparentingmojo.com/parentingmembership     Jump to highlights: 01:43 Introducing today’s episode 03:19 The Parenting Membership features ACTion groups that meet weekly, offering valuable support and insights into effective parenting strategies. 04:50 The ACTion Group is about parents coming together weekly to share their parenting progress, challenges, and goals in a supportive and accountable environment. 19:21 The ACTion Group's collaborative problem-solving and support for parent Rachel's challenge with her son were showcased, emphasizing a collective effort in addressing parenting difficulties. 26:54 The ACTion Group supports Beth in addressing her holiday break challenge and need for rest, fostering solutions and self-awareness. 33:13 The ACTion Group helps Peju integrate changes by realizing the importance of apologizing to her son and holding herself accountable to her family values. 39:40 The Action Group explored Jody's challenges with his parents, highlighting the shift towards acceptance instead of forgiveness, leading to a sense of relief and reduced emotional reactivity for him. 47:11 The group shared how the ACTion group has positively impacted their parenting journey through accountability, celebration, and community support. They emphasized the non-judgmental environment, learning from each other's experiences, and the value of consistent participation in personal growth. 01:06:59 Invitation to join the Parenting Membership

  School districts are starting to make plans to reopen - some with sneeze guards between desks; some on reduced schedules to accommodate the amount of space needed for social distancing, while some are going online-only for the Fall semester. How will your child cope with this? Did your child adapt well to online learning when schools closed?  Will they find it relatively easy to see their friends but not be close to them?  There are some children for whom these arrangements work well, but for others parents see big trouble ahead. What are the options?  Even if you've never considered homeschooling as a realistic option in the past, it might now be the tool that gets you through the next few months.  But are you terrified that you don't know everything your child needs to know?  And how could it possibly work for your family? Join me for a conversation with Dr. Laura Froyen, who is considering homeschooling her two children next semester - even though she has a Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies and wrote a dissertation on supporting young children in learning to read, she's nervous that she doesn't know everything she needs to know - so if you're worried about this you're certainly not alone! We look at what we know about how long children actually spend learning in school (the answer is going to shock you!), how you can work AND homeschool, and how you can get confident that you really can support your child's love of learning - even if you know your child will eventually go back to school.   Click the banner to learn more about The Confident Homeschooler: http://yourparentingmojo.com/confidenthomeschooler       [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast where I critically examine strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. In this series of episodes called Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, we turn the tables and hear from listeners. What have they learned from the show that's helped their parenting? Where are they still struggling? And what tools can we find in the research that will help? If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE guide to 7 Parenting Myths We Can Safely Leave Behind, 7 Fewer Things to Worry About subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us   Jen Hello, and welcome to Sharing Your Parenting Mojo. We are here with Dr. Laura Froyen today to discuss the topic of homeschooling. She's thinking about whether and how to do it over the next few months. And as we were chatting about it, we figured that some of the things that she's thinking about right now are probably similar to some of the things that other parents are thinking about too. And so we thought, why not just get on a call and discuss them live and share what we're thinking and what we're learning with other people as well. So that's kind of what we're going to do today. So welcome, Laura, do you want to tell us a bit about yourself and your background first?   Laura Absolutely. Thanks for having me and agreeing to answer my questions Jen. So so I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and I have my PhD in Human Development and Family Studies with a specialization in couples and family therapy. I am currently a peaceful parenting and respectful relationship coach and course creator, but I started right out of grad school in an academic job. And so I did my dissertation on how family processes influenced the home learning environment and children's early literacy skills. I'm a big believer in delaying, reading, teaching, active reading, teaching until in a developmentally appropriate age. I've always been deeply curious and, you know, interested in the prospect of homeschooling, but then also not sure if I could ever handle doing it. I have a very strong willed personality, I tend towards control. It's something that being in the respectful parenting world as a constant exercise and letting go for me. My oldest daughter is my best teacher in that way. So I guess I just I'm so glad that I get the chance to learn from such an expert on this, as I'm trying to make a really conscious and informed decision for my family.   Jen And I think the thing that stuck out to me when you were saying that you wanted to talk about this was that you have a PhD in a related topic and you've studied reading, and you still feel unsure about how to best support your child in learning to read. And so when parents are thinking, oh my goodness, I don't know how I'm going to even do this. How do we even support my child? They're not alone, right? Even you're struggling with this.   Laura No, I literally am an expert in how parents support their kids and learning to be at home. And it's still like I my youngest is five, she just turned five. She had a quarantine birthday. And she would be learning to read if she went into 5K in the fall. And I am so intimidated at the idea that no so if we homeschool for this next year for just the fall or kind of whatever, it ends up looking like that she'll go into a school system and I am worried about her being behind because, like it's, we're not in as a Scandinavian country where she wouldn't be allowed to learn at her, you know, reading at a developmentally appropriate age. We're in the US, and it's the reality of it. So yeah, no, of course, parents are not alone in this. I think like I think I have a couple of things that are coming completely normal parent, like even like all of us are, you know, we all are. The experts make mistakes. We have questions, we need support, and it's okay.   Jen Yeah. Yep. Awesome. Well, thank you for, for owning that for all of us. And yeah, I definitely mess up too. And we figure things out as we go. And we move on, we adjust and we move on.   Laura There's something so intense about the idea of like, teaching your kids. So you know, like, I mean, I feel so much more relaxed about parenting, just because I know like, we're resilient. Like our relationship is resilient, like attachment relationships are built to be resilient and, and open a bit. There's just something so intense about being charged with our child's learning, you know, and, yeah, so I'm looking forward to hearing about that from you about, like, what are my options and approaches to homeschooling? What do I need to be thinking about?   Jen Okay. Well, let's start there, because I think that's a really nice place to start. And it's so interesting what you say about needing to teach my child. And that's such a kind of a Western idea, basically, from someone who has been through school and I went through school you went through school, we have this idea that our the teachers role is to know everything that there is to know. And they hold the knowledge. And the child's job is to kind of wait there with this ready and open mind. And the teacher pours the knowledge out of their jug into the student’s vessel. And that's how knowledge is transferred. And so when we're thinking about different approaches to homeschooling, I kind of think on a continuum where traditional schooling is kind of at that end of it is at one end of it. And then there's a whole continuum of potential approaches to the other end where we just see learning as part of life. And so if we kind of talk through what are some of those, well, anything that's curriculum driven, is based on this idea that the teacher knows what there is to know. And their job is to teach the child and so when you're doing this at home, I mean, there are books that you can buy of 100 curriculum options. And you can go through and you can pick one that covers all the subjects that you want to study. And you can pick, you can just decide to focus on reading and math. And just buy those ones, there's any combination of these things that you can do, and build your own approach to it. But it is based on the idea that somebody somewhere knows the essential things that children need to know. And you're kind of saying that…   Laura Like, I don't even believe that. I know!   Jen Yeah, and by saying, I'm going to go with that approach, you're essentially saying, I do believe that I do believe that there is a set of skills that somebody has decreed is the right skills for children to have, and where I don't know what that set of skills is. So I'm going to trust somebody else, I'm going to outsource that aspect of the decision making. And so when we do that, what we're doing is we're kind of absolving ourselves of responsibility for needing to know everything our child needs to know and that can feel good that can feel like a weight off our shoulders. That somebody else has decided this stuff is important. It's not just me. And if I follow this, my child would know what they need to know.   Laura Yeah, you're speaking to me. Because I am such a perfectionist, a recovering perfectionist, I work on my perfectionism every day. But like, I sometimes get paralyzed in doing something new because I want to do it the right way. Yes, I have this concept that there is a right way. And if I could just know the right...

If you heard the recent episode on Parental Burnout, you'll know that our identities can become really confusing when we become parents, especially for women.  On one hand, society tells us that we have to work hard and do well so we can Achieve The Dream.  And on the other hand, we're told that a Good Mother sacrifices everything for her child - including her career.  So what is a parent to do?   This episode brings together a couple of strands of my life that have been existing in parallel for a few months now. A friend of mine introduced me to meditation as a tool that I might find useful to explore when I was struggling with some personal issues. Not only did I find it interesting, but I also found elements of it that helped me to make sense of the situation I was in in a way that I had not been able to do until that point.   Like a lot of people, I had the common perception that meditation consists of sitting quietly on the floor cross-legged with thumb and pointing finger touching, saying ‘ommmm’ but when I looked into the research on mindfulness stress reduction that perception went away pretty fast. It had been shown in the scientific literature to be enormously helpful to people not just in reducing stress but also in reducing the severity of physical symptoms in the body that accompany stress.   But I was still having a hard time reconciling the thousands of scientific research papers I’ve read over the years on how children’s brains develop and some of these new ideas I was learning related mindfulness. And so that is kind of how I discovered Dr. Chris Niebauer and his book No Self, No Problem. After reading it I was able to reconcile those two strands - the psychological research and mindfulness - and I want to share that with you.  Along the way, we'll gain an understanding of the mind that may help us to overcome some of the challenges associated with Parental Burnout - so even if you're not officially (clinically) suffering from burnout, this episode could still help you to better reconcile the different aspects of your life and identity.     Ready to break free from the cycle of triggered reactions and conflict in your parenting journey? If you want to: 😟 Be triggered less often by your child’s behavior, 😐 React from a place of compassion and empathy instead of anger and frustration, 😊 Respond to your child from a place that’s aligned with your values rather than reacting in the heat of the moment,   the Taming Your Triggers workshop will help you make this shift.   Join us to transform conflict into connection and reclaim peace in your parenting journey.   Click the banner to learn more!   https://yourparentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers/   Dr. Chris Niebauer's book No self, no problem - Affiliate link   References Dienstbier, R.A. (1979). Attraction increases and decreases as a function of emotion-attribution and appropriate social cues. Motivation and Emotion 3(2), 201-218. Dutton, D.G., & Aron, A.P. (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30(4), 510-517. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2011). Some reflections on the origins of MBSR, skillful means, and the trouble with maps. Contemporaty Buddhism 12(1), 281-306. Mays, J.C., & Newman, A. (2020, April 8) Virus is twice as deadly for Black and Latino people than Whites in N.C.Y. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/nyregion/coronavirus-race-deaths.html?searchResultPosition=3 Meston, C.M., & Frohlich, P.F. (2003). Love at first fright: Partner salience moderates roller-coaster-induced excitation transfer. Archives of Sexual Behavior 32(6). Niebauer, C. (2019). No self, no problem: How neuropsychology is catching up to Buddhism. San Antonio, TX: Heirophant

One of the things people email me wanting to know about most often is "what does the research say about how to set up a play room? What toys should I buy that will have the greatest benefit for my child's learning and development?" I'd actually been putting off doing this episode for a while, in part because the research base on this topic is thin on the ground - but also because the idea just made me kind of uncomfortable. I mean, we've survived for tens of thousands of years without play rooms - or even dedicated toys, never mind the incredibly beautiful and expensive ones that are available now! - what could I really say about this? Well, now's the time. Perhaps it shouldn't surprise you that this episode is coming in the middle of our series on the intersection of money and parenting. I hope it offers you some reassurance about how to set up your own play room - if you choose to and are able to. And even more reassurance if you choose not to or can't. Other episodes on this series This episode is the second in a series on the intersection of parenting and money. You can find other episodes in this series: 038: The Opposite of Spoiled 105: How to pass on mental wealth to your child 107: The impact of consumerism on children 115: Reducing the Impact of Advertising to Children 118: Are You Raising Materialistic Kids? [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re covering a topic that listeners have been asking for for ages, which is How to Set Up a Play Room. And if you hear some trepidation in my voice, it’s because there’s a lot of it in me. And if you think it’s an incredible coincidence that this episode is coming hot on the heels of a couple of episodes exploring children and consumerism then…I’m sorry to say that this is not a coincidence. I was uncomfortable enough with the topic that I felt I really couldn’t do this episode without covering those other topics as well as a counterpoint. The main reason I’m uncomfortable is, of course, even having the wherewithal to ask the question “how do I set up a child’s play room” represents an absolutely enormous amount of privilege. It says that the person asking the question has so many resources that they can devote an entire room in their house to nothing but a child’s play, and on top of this, they have enough resources to equip the room with a sizeable proportion of whatever toys I suggest that the scientific literature says are necessary to bring about a positive outcome for their child. But when my listeners ask for something I do try my best to deliver. So here we go! While we’ve discussed the benefits of play on the show before in an interview with Dr. Stuart Brown, who is the Director of the National Institute for Play, we haven’t specifically looked at toys and play, or the role of parents in play. And it turns out that the concept of parents getting involved in children’s play, or directing children’s play, or providing materials for children’s play is something that’s pretty much unique to Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic (or WEIRD) countries – plus Japan as well, and possibly China is heading in this direction too. For ethnographic evidence on this topic we look to our old friend Dr. David Lancy, who gathered hundreds of ethnographic studies on child development in his book The Anthropology of Childhood. Dr. Lancy reports that Sisala parents in Ghana regard an interest in children’s play as beneath their dignity. Even the face-to-face position where the baby is held facing the mother that is so common in Western cultures is very rare elsewhere. Western scholars consider talking to and playing with the infant essential to promote the bond between mother and infant, but this activity is rare in many cultures as well – the !Kung people who live on the western edge of the Kalahari Desert not only don’t play with their children but believe the practice may be harmful to the child’s development because children learn best without adult intervention. Gusii children in Kenya may try to get their mother to play or talk but will be ignored, because the mother believes that responding would be simply pointless, as the child is not a valid human being until it reaches the age of ‘sense,’ at around six or seven. A little closer to home, interaction between Mexican children tends to take place through shared work activity, rather than child-centered play. All of these approaches are in stark contrast to the recommendations provided to parents in Western countries - the American Academy of Pediatrics’ clinical report on this topic is called The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds – implying that play has some kind of unique qualities in promoting these parent-child bonds that can’t be replaced by other activities, when anthropological evidence shows that this bonding can occur through other kinds of activities like shared work as well. Dr. Lancy goes on to try to understand the gulf between societies where mothers simply don’t play with children and those where the absence of play between mothers and children is seen as an indicator of clinical abnormality. He sees the discrepancy as primarily driven by differing parental goals – rather than needing to keep the child out of the way or involve them in productive work as soon as possible, Western parents are responsible for developing literate children who have high levels of concentration, self-discipline, emotional self-control, persistence in the face of failure, cooperation with others, attention to adults and to the material that adults deem it necessary for children to learn so they can be successful in school. Dr. Lancy says that “mothers carefully control the toy inventory to facilitate these lessons as well as expose their children to the artifacts of schooling, such as letters, numbers, colors, and “staying within the lines.” In several Asian cultures parents also use play didactically to socialize the child to restrain its own desires and adopt a cooperative and deferential attitude toward others. A failure to achieve these goals brings scorn on the parents and humiliation for the mother, and could have a materially negative result for the parents if they don’t instill enough filial piety and gratitude in the child that will prompt the child to care for the parents for the remainder of their lives and beyond. In addition to school readiness, parents manage children’s play for other reasons, like living vicariously through their children’s experiences in sports, as we segregate players by age and deliberately develop their skills and self-confidence. A hundred years ago, children would manage their own games, not worrying who wins and who loses, or even if the game is finished. So it’s against this rather strange backdrop – where play is found to be something that children from most cultures enjoy, even if they aren’t permitted to do it much, contrasted with Western cultures where parents organize and direct the materials of play and the actual games themselves, that we situate this episode on how to set up a child’s playroom. Before we get into the toys themselves, for those of you who haven’t listened to Episode 57, What is the Value of Play, for a while, let’s just do a really quick review of the evidence on the benefits of play. And they are many. We can count improvements in executive functioning, including cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, and working memory, as well as language development, early math skills, social development, peer relations, physical development and health, creativity, reasoning about hypothetical events, and an enhanced sense of agency. If we think back to the introduction to this episode, we can see how well these skills line up with our goal to raise children who are successful in school. A number of these studies do look at play outside of the parent-child relationship, and some specifically look at play where children are provided with objects and “minimal adult direction,” and find more creative play where adults aren’t standing over the child – or maybe even sitting next to the child - telling the child what to do. This also brings us to an important definition about what play is – while different scholars use different definitions, one of the most commonly agreed upon criteria is that play doesn’t seem to serve any apparent immediate purpose – children engage in it just for the sake of it, because it’s fun. If an adult is trying to ‘teach’ the child something then it isn’t play – in fact, some researchers see the presence of a ‘minimally intrusive adult’ as a contextual cue to play. So *play* is important and useful to children (although play itself may not be inherently critical to children’s development), but what about individual toys? Is there any evidence looking at the impact of the number or types of toys that are available to a child and the child’s outcomes? Most of our children are fortunate enough to own toys; in one ethnography of 32 families’ homes in Los Angeles published in 2012, the authors reported that family homes had an average of 139 toys visible to researchers, with most homes having at least 100 and some as many as 250. The researchers didn’t specifically note the presence or absence of play rooms, but the book does include hundreds of absolutely fascinating photos, many of them photos of the material clutter that...