The band The Alphabet Rockers consists of lead members Kaitlin McGaw and Tommy Shepherd, and a multi-racial group of children who are also involved in writing and performing.  They write about their real lived experiences and their desire to live in a world where everyone belongs.

Kaitlin and Tommy are actually fellows at the Othering and Belonging Institute, run by Dr. jon powell, whose work I really respect and whom we interviewed in the episode on othering.

They also do work in schools - in an hour-long program they work with a class to compose a song, which gives children the experience not just of songwriting, but of truly being heard and having their ideas respected.

Kaitlin and Tommy have now written a children's book called You Are Not Alone, which we discussed in the episode - along with a host of other juicy topics related to parenting...and racism...and White supremacy...

 

01:37 Introducing the guest speakers

04:45 Each song has its journey

14:30 The importance of centering children's experience in creating a culture of belonging

19:30 Practices that are intentionally brought into your family or practices that you have let go of in your family

 

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Jen Lumanlan  00:02

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

 

Jenny  00:10

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

 

Jen Lumanlan  01:33

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today we are going to do something I think that we've never done before. I don't believe we have had Grammy-nominated people on the show before so I'm excited for that. We are welcoming Tommy Shepherd and Caitlin McGraw who are co-creators of the Grammy nominated Alphabet Rockers and they have quickly become an important voice for today's youth curating content centered on children's voices and social justice issues like racism and gender inclusion. Their Grammy-nominated album “Rise Shine #Woke” inspired kids to stand up to hate and they have a second Grammy-nominated album “Love” which lifts up the voices of trans-two-spirit and gender nonconforming communities. They recently received a third Grammy nomination for “Shine” (melanin remix) featured on all one tribe, which is nominated for a best children's album. And now they've now written a picture book called You Are Not Alone, which empowers kids to love themselves and their identities stand up to hate, and have each other's backs no matter what. And the book looks at how children can feel others because of their race, gender, culture, and other factors and how they can navigate discrimination, and find strengths from their friends and allies. Welcome, Tommy and Kaitlin, so great to have you here.

 

Tommy  02:39

Thank you happy to be here.

 

Kaitlin 02:42

Let's go

 

Jen Lumanlan  02:41

All right, so I think the first thing that struck me when I was listening to your work is there are not so many intergenerational bands out there. How did you get started? And why did you choose music as your mechanism to get these ideas out into the world?

 

Kaitlin 02:55

Yeah, well, we had been working in the schools independently and when we came together with alphabet rockers initially, actually, it was, you know, kind of subversive, we knew that hip hop was a cultural space for belonging, actually, and for expression. And so we were bringing hip hop into the schools in a way that we felt really served all children and quickly realized that articulating and being very specific with the adults about what inclusion is required all framework, so we shifted our mission statement, and since 2015 we have been making music intentionally that makes change. So each song holds a question that our children pose to us that we see as community agents for change and we work in community to kind of find a musical response and heart-centered space to share.

 

Jen Lumanlan  03:48

And so we're here with the two of you today, but you are not the entirety of Alphabet Rockers, right? Yes, I should make that clear for folks who don't know you.

 

Tommy  03:55

Sure, yeah. We have a huge team who we are really about our collectivity, a lot of minds come together to conceptualize a lot of minds coming together to actually hold down the business part of things. We have a team that really is about keeping us on our toes with our affirmations and with our [unintelligible]. And we have team members that are also leading like Caitlin and I and other youngsters they lead you know, and leadership changes and leadership actually a thing that we really thrive on because we play follow the follower most of the time.

 

Jen Lumanlan  04:29

Yeah, and so when we're watching an Alphabet Rockets recording, one of the things that we see most of, is children right? It’s children singing and often singing about themselves and how they show up in the world. How does that all work?

 

Kaitlin 04:42

It's a great question for each song has their own journey. So some songs do hold private conversations we've had with kids and families. The song you are not alone, for example, was a private conversation with a transgendered boy who shared what inclusion would look like for him in school and he had written something on a wall. We do a lot of anonymous sharing as well, whether it be now virtually actually it works really well, kids can write their ideas into songs without us even knowing who wrote it. But at the time in person, he put it up and posted it on the wall and said, “I need friends that have my back note, even when I'm not in the room.” And it really, kind of like broke us open a little bit to look at what's the space we want to create for this child and with this child, because at that time, his family had done everything they could since he was a baby to, you know, kind of create the path forward together and they didn't have this piece, they didn't have the musical information that would say, “Okay, like, we know what the truth is in our hearts, we know what's right in our heads, and we don't have the spiritual connection, the culture to walk in where we can share with someone without articulating every piece of it.” And so that's kind of what we did is we wrote that story with him at the center and with his family at the center, and the song that came out of it was really about the world we want to live in. It may not exist yet, but we want to be in a world where your friends have your back, no matter what. It goes right into the book as well. It's like we just published a book by that name too, You're Not Alone, where it's like, “Oh, look, you know, they don't say my name correct at school but my friend always corrects people,” and we're looking for that, we're looking for that bravery from any age, not just.

 

Tommy  06:24

And the really interesting part about it is that the young people you've heard sing the songs are singing from their perspectives, but it's from that perspective that Kaitlin is speaking of, they identified with these stories, and with these interviews that we had, they identify, so it almost seems like they are coming from their own perspectives, you're gonna get some of that this year, some of them like coming from their own perspectives this year, however, they really just identified with not being alone with knowing that they're not alone in these feelings, all of them.

 

Jen Lumanlan  06:55

Yeah, and I was watching last night, one of the videos on your website about the work that you've done in classrooms, and was just struck by how intentional the whole exercise that you go through with children to work together with them for an hour. I mean, it's an hour. It's a short length of time and creating a song with them in that time, and that they come out of this understanding a bit more about the importance of being heard, and having that experience of having been heard. That's the secret sauce, right?

 

Kaitlin  07:26

Yeah, there's a lot of secret sauce happening, like some of that is just like, how are we still compadres business partners, like, 10 years still got stuff to process still in it like a quest, you know? And it's a question and we're still in it together. You know, that video of us writing with kids is actually from Mylan Elementary School, which is where we really started our whole initiative because, at the time, there wasn't brave space talking about anti-racism, and we were at the front of it in terms of the tools that we had. So when kids were writing their songs, and we really listened to what does bias feel like to you what is unfair to you? And sometimes what they talked about, you know, what you think would be like a hot topic, and sometimes it was. Sometimes they would talk about how it's not fair that people when they pollute in the ocean, it affects the world, there was a stretching for us of like, “Yeah, cause sometimes people will talk about changing the world is just about trash and animals, when we were really looking at our humanity. And so we wanted to make sure kids had a space where humanity was the why. It wasn't the convenience of things that adults felt kids could fix, which is like, let's recycle and pick up trash, it was like, “No,” but look at the space we hold together. And that all happened in that video you saw on our website.

 

Tommy  08:42

And the cool part about that process, too, is that we spent probably 90% on the journey of getting to a song and 10% of actually putting the song together and making it happen and practicing with them. That's kind of how we kind of do it, It's really about them getting there. And then we just put it together and it happens, you know,

 

Kaitlin  09:02

isn't that kind of how we write songs? I mean, it's like the process is the product.

 

Jen Lumanlan  09:08

Yeah, and I was thinking, you know, why music? why choose music to get this message out? And something that I read somewhere on your site, just made it click for me like anti-racist work is so often seen as something that happens up here and our heads, right? And you know, the whole White supremacist-based idea of anything that happens up in your head is valuable and important and good, and anything that happens in your body is sort of irrelevant at best. And you wrote about reconnecting those two, can you speak a little bit about how you use music to really connect thinking and knowing about anti-racist work?

 

Kaitlin  09:39

Yes. The biggest thing. And we keep coming back to it right because we feel like kids, they're actually, they're thinking here actually in their hearts first, and adults are jammed up. So when people say, “Oh, these topics are too big for kids,” it's like are they actually though because their hearts are so open, and so the weaving the music actually just creates an earworm of love of connection of validation of celebration, of advocacy, it just keeps going in and out.

 

Tommy  10:07

It's reminiscent of a cycle. Keeps feeding itself.

 

Kaitlin  10:11

When we first started doing the racial justice music in particular, there were a lot of people who were like, “Oh, don't do it, don't do it, you're gonna mess up, you're gonna make somebody feel alienated, you're gonna isolate people.” And you know, even trusted advisors were like, “You be careful because you have the risk of doing what White people have done with civil rights learning,” and just made it just feel yuck, you know, make somebody feel like they don't belong with just one simple word, the word choice you use. When we talk about the 90% process, that's where we do all of the rigor and the song is clarity. We're not experimenting with children. We are sharing clarity.

 

Jen Lumanlan  10:50

And how does that come out as you're writing a song with children? How are you sharing that clarity?

 

Kaitlin  10:50

Well, they have it.

 

Tommy  10:56

Yeah, they have it. A whole collage of words gets written on a board in the classroom and we collectively decide what's the most important jewels of all of these words, and then we expand from there, “Well, words are rhyme with these words, and what can we say about this word that involves another word that we use,” we find out what's important to them and then we just use that, and they become choruses, and they become verses, and then they become part of them after we're gone.

 

Kaitlin  11:23

Yeah, recently, we were in Virginia, and we were going to kick off a residency by writing a song with some children. And there was a protest at the same time of us because they were afraid of critical race theory, I believe was the guys that never use those words, and also, they're transphobic, and there's a bunch of things. We said, “Come in, sit down, listen, we're not going to kick you out, we're not here for that. We're not going to call the police. You can sit in here and protest. This is a program for children and their parents. Now in that brainstorm the kids, we wanted to talk about power, when we know how we're powerful. This has been a part of our journey during the COVID pandemic is let's recenter so we really know what we do got because so much has been taken when we know our power, and we recognize each other's power. That's the spark. So these kids were like, they came up with probably 50 words about power, spark, energy, and the kids who didn't want to speak could create dance moves. So like when we talk about the affirmations, the movement spaces like we don't use one way to write a song, we don't criticize people for spelling, for phrasing, for rhyming. I'm the worst at rhyming. I love loose rhymes we call them, so why not? Right? Why not demystify the artistic process and give everyone access that's breaking up WHITE supremacy too.

 

Tommy  12:47

Yeah, and there are even occasions where there's a student who doesn't even want to do the dance or the rap or the nothing, but they want to push the button to start the music, they want to stop it when it's time to stop it, they want to reset it, you know what I mean? They want to do that stuff. They want to help move the chairs so we can make space, you know, they want to do that there for that too.

Jen Lumanlan  13:08

So, what happened with the protest?

 

Kaitlin  13:11

What happened with it? Nothing. But we're going back there in a couple of months, and I'm sure they will have regrouped and come harder.

 

Tommy  13:17

We spent a little bit of time I believe, I think we both spoke it's after it was over about spending a little bit of time like wondering like, like, “How am I gonna get you like, how am I gonna sting you?” You know what I mean? And then like, that faded after we got so engaged with the kids. Like we kind of forgot about that elephant in the room that was like ready to scrutinize us.

Kaitlin  13:34

Yeah, we gave him a chance to share their ideas. They pass.

 

Tommy  13:39

Yeah, every time this circle came around to their time, we were like, “Here's another opportunity. You can do it. Oh, okay, no. Next time, we're like, here's your opportunity. Oh, okay.

 

Kaitlin  13:47

Because that's what happens in class too. We're not going to hold any expectation that lingers, right? Because everybody can evolve in a moment and the culture of assigning a role to a child in the classroom is White supremacy culture, because every child is capable of shifting and growing, and it's often the eye of the beholder and missing the clue.

 

Tommy  14:09

Just because it didn't happen for you last time doesn't mean it might not this time, right?

 

Jen Lumanlan  14:13

Well, let's hold out hope for those protesters, and what might shift for them next time.

Kaitlin  14:19

That's right.

 

Jen Lumanlan  14:20

There's hope for all of us maybe. So your work really focuses very intentionally on centering children's experience. Why do you think that that is so important as we work towards creating a culture of belonging?

 

Tommy  14:32

I can say, this is for a long time I've really have been interested in the human experience and as a human, I have been a child before, and I've been in places where I'm like, “Oh, you know what? When I get older, I'm gonna do this. And when I get older, I'm gonna do that. And when I do this and that,” what I really starting to understand about being a teenager about adolescent, about being a little over 18, all those things, their experiences, their human experiences, we're not trying to do at that age is here a bunch of all these cautionary tales, like don't do this and don't do that, because I've been there before, you know what I mean? Like, really just like, we need to be there to help guide that human experience versus dictate it or structure it or all of those things. I gotta say, I'm still like, not the strictest, but my son, he got rules, but at the same time, like letting him have his human experience and letting him have mistakes, let him make him because as a teenager, he...

This episode is a continuation of the series on the intersection of children and food.  We've also heard from Dr. Lindo Bacon on busting myths about fat, Dr. Michael Goran on how sugar affects our children, Dr. Karen Throsby with a more high-level view on the sugar topic, and Ellyn Satter on her Division of Responsibility approach.

 

My guest in this episode, Dr. Shiri Sadeh-Sharvit, co-author with Dr. James Lock of Parents with Eating Disorders: An Intervention Guide.  The book is written for professionals but it's short and very approachable and may be beneficial for parents who are navigating disordered eating as well.

 

In the episode we discuss:

The impacts of disordered eating on children's health and wellbeing (which were more extensive than even I had realized)

The ways that disordered eating impact our parenting

How parents can begin to heal so these patterns don't get passed down to the next generation

 

01:29 Introduction of episode

03:32 Where did eating disorder come from

10:37 Imbalance between maternal stressors and maternal resources

14:15 Ranges of eating disorder

15:20 How eating disorders show on pregnant women

15:56 Average age of eating disorder onset

19:06 Characteristics of infants after the pregnant mother experiences eating disorder

23:53 What transitions do we see as a child is getting older

31:16 What outcomes among children whose parents struggle with eating disorder

32:48 Eating disorder can display the desire for weight loss

34:55 Parent-based prevention and its main theoretical contacts

43:11 Advice that Dr. Shiri Sadeh-Sharvit wanted to give to parents

44:48 Advocacy of the program

 

Parents with Eating Disorders: An Intervention Guide (Affiliate link).

 

Sadeh-Sharvit, S., & Lock, J. (2019). Parents with eating disorders: An intervention guide. New York: Routledge.

Sadeh-Sharvit, S., Levy-Schiff, R., Feldman, T., Ram, A., Gur, E., Zubery, E., Steiner, E., Latzer, Y., & Lock, J.D. (2015). Child feeding perceptions among mothers with eating disorders. Appetite 95, 67-73.

Sadeh-Sharvit, S., Levy-Schiff, R., Arnow, K.D., & Lock, J.D. (2015). The impact of maternal eating disorders and spousal support on neurodevelopmental trajectories in their toddlers. Abnormal and Behavioral Psychology 1(1), 1000102.

Sadeh-Sharvit, S., Levy-Shiff, R., & Lock, J.D. (2015). Maternal eating disorder history and toddlers’ neurodevelopmental outcomes: A brief report. Eating Disorders 24(2), 198-205.

Sadeh-Sharvit, S., Levy-Schiff, R., Arnow, K.D., & Lock, J.D. (2016). The interactions of mothers with eating disorders with their toddlers: Identifying broader risk factors. Attachment & Human Development 18(4), 418-428.

Sadeh-Sharvit, S., Zybery, E., Mankovski, E., Steiner, E., & Lock, J.D. (2016). Parent-based prevention program for the children of mothers with eating disorders: Feasibility and preliminary outcomes. Eating Disorders 23(4), 312-325.

Sadeh-Sharvit, S., Sacks, M.R., Runfola, C. Bulik,C.M., & Lock, J.D. (2020). Interventions to empower adults with eating disorders and their partners around the transition to parenthood. Family Processes 59(4), 1407-1422.

One day Iris took her daughter to the park, with enough snacks with for both of them.  When Iris got hungry, she asked her daughter to share some of the food - but her daughter refused.  Iris knows that hunger is a factor that dramatically narrows her Window of Tolerance and makes it more likely that she’ll snap at her child’s behavior, so she asked again for food and again her daughter refused.

 

Then out of nowhere a crow swooped down and tried to steal some of the food, causing the whole lot to fall on the ground - and Iris exploded.  She was so angry that she felt a hot energy coming from her gut, and her daughter is standing in the park with tears flooding down her face, because Iris yelled at her.

 

And then, of course, the guilt and shame spiral begins: “What am I doing?  Why am I so angry?  And why can’t I stop?”

 

Now, Iris is in a very different place.  She’s not perfect, of course - none of us are.  But even Iris, the raised-Catholic-and-prone-to-unworthiness-and-guilt-tripping specialist, has found a different path.  

 

She no longer has to convince herself that she’s worthy of having her needs met - she knows she is, and she holds her own needs with equal care as her daughter’s needs.

 

Because her needs are met on a regular basis, she’s able to respond to her daughter’s age-appropriate difficult behavior with compassion and empathy.

 

And because she’s able to do this most of the time, she doesn’t need to get into the guilt and shame spiral nearly as often.  (And on the few occasions when it does still happen, she knows how to treat herself with compassion as well, instead of beating herself up for screwing up.)

 

Do you want to make this kind of shift in your own life?  Do you often feel triggered by your child’s behavior?  My Taming Your Triggers workshop, which has helped thousands of parents to not just remember a new script for the difficult moments, but to truly take on a new way of being in their relationships with their children - just like Iris has done.

 

Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.

 

 

 

01:43 Introduction about the guest

08:00 Iris’ childhood impression

15:15 What would Iris say to a person experiencing extreme anger

20:40 Iris’ experience in taking the workshop

26:45 What Iris learned in the workshop

33:56 How was it different today than before for Iris

40:59 Transformations that Iris experienced

 

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[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 our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so

 

Jessica  00:11

Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? Me too. Hi, I'm not Jen. I'm Jessica, and I'm in Burlesque Panama. Jen has just created a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes, and I got to test it out. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development. It puts it in context for you as well. So, you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you what to do about each one. Sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe, and come over to our free Facebook group to continue the conversation about this episode. You can also thank Jen for this episode by donating to keep the podcast ad free by going to the page for this or any other episode on YourParentingMojo.com. If you'd like to start a conversation with someone about this episode or know someone who would find it useful, please forward it to them. Over time, you're gonna get sick of hearing me read this intro as well. So come and record on yourself. You can read from a script she's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com and click Read the Intro and I can't wait to hear yours.

 

Jen Lumanlan  01:33

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We're here with a very special guest today parent Iris. Iris, I wonder if you wouldn't mind telling us just a little bit about you and your family. Where are you in the world? Where are you from?

 

Iris  01:43

Yeah, I live in the west coast of Canada in the city of Vancouver with my husband and my almost seven-year-old daughter, Malaya. And Malaya is feisty and funny, and she's just this energetic bunny. Oh, she's human, but not the rabbit. But you know, she is like an energizer bunny just going on and on and on. And I work in a field where not many people want to talk about it, or maybe even think about it. And that is in the field of death and dying. And so, I guess most parents are familiar with childbirth educator or birth doula. And so I like to think of it not my work not as an opposite, but as the other part of life. So, I support people who are grieving and, you know, practical and heart-centered planning. So it's from wills and advanced care directives to like, you know, how would you like to be cared for after you die, and rituals and ceremonies and things like that. I'm an end-of-life educator and end-of-life doula. And one important thing, I immigrated to Canada from the Philippines in 2005. And in the summer of that year, I met a man that became my husband. And in the beginning, I was sort of sitting on the fence, I'm going to have a child, my husband already had a daughter from a previous marriage, but he was asking me, okay, if you want the child like, you know, you decide I'm okay either way. And at first, I was like, oh, you know, like, you know, this philosophical and existential, kind of like, back and forth. And so, I was trying to get pregnant and I knew I wanted a child when it was clear that I probably wouldn't get pregnant, like, you know, I mean, I was having a hard time getting pregnant. And so after six years; six years of fertility treatment and roller coaster of emotions at the ripe age of 41. I gave birth to Malaya. And by this time, I've had a meaningful and successful work life. And so in positions of like, big responsibility, and I was like, “Motherhood. Oh, I’ll be okay. I've done these things.” And like, “Motherhood. It's just I can do this, huh” Famous last words.

 

Jen Lumanlan  04:23

Yeah, and of course, there's the added challenge of when you've worked so hard to have a baby and then to have these moments where you just want to ring that child's neck. It's like, how can these two things go together? So yeah, I'm sure that we'll talk about that in a minute. But the reason that I wanted to talk with you is because you've just finished the most recent round of the taming your triggers workshop, and this was not your first time. And I first realized that you have taken it multiple times when I think you were on your third time around, and I think you'd barely looked in the community the first couple of times and so I didn't really know that you were there. And then when I saw your name coming through again, on the participant list, my first thought was this massive hot flush of shame because I was just thinking, why do people have to come back and do this multiple times? If I was a good teacher? Shouldn't I be able to transfer this knowledge to you and send you out the door and to live your life. And so there was this real moment of fear and shame when I first saw that you were taking the workshop multiple times. And so, I wonder, can you tell us a little bit about how this has played out for you what this process has been like for you as you've navigated your journey with having triggers with your very spirited daughter?

 

Iris  05:45

Yeah. So first off, Jen, I like to say sorry, for your shame or something.

 

Jen Lumanlan  05:51

Apology accepted.

 

Iris  05:54

And you're right, the first two times I was just lurking around the community. And I will talk more about that, when I decided to come out as a repeater of the taming your trigger workshop, it was because I wanted you and the others to know that I truly, truly believe in the workshop that you have designed. And by this time, I've also followed you not in a stalker creepy way, but I followed your podcast for quite a while. And so I knew that I needed this, that I knew that I was one of those in your advertisement if you are this and that, and oh, my goodness, I checked all the lists. And so I knew that there was no doubt in my mind that it was going to be transformative for me, that's why I kept on joining. The third and the fourth time, I'd say to people, I've done this several times, I'm not ashamed to say that I'm not proud either. It's just it is what it is. So your question about how the journey taking the taming your trigger workshop multiple times. Before I answer that question, I want to give a little bit of context, first off a context of my life so that people will have more understanding. I grew up in an urban poor neighborhood in the Philippines, people did not really have enough material things, and we relied on each other for material or personal support. And so for example, you'd go like, oh, I need to prepare dinner, but then oh, we don't have rice, because rice is very important. And then my mother will just say, okay, go next door and ask our neighbor to just borrow a kilo of rice, and then we will replace it later. So yeah, no problem with that, or for example, a neighbor would say, oh, I need to go to the market. But I need somebody to keep an eye on my children and there's no problem because it's okay, we can supervise, we can look after them. They're mostly independent. And so there was really a strong sense of community and like people really in birth or death and all such life situations in between, there's really that community, you know, your neighbors got your back or your extended family got your back. So I did not know I was poor, like, I was just like, like, you know, like, I was just being a kid. It was when I went to school that I realize, oh, other people have other situations. And you see my mother work as a dressmaker in a private Catholic very upscale school and the tuition fee there was like, there's no way we could afford the tuition fee. But because she was working there  and employee, that's one of their privileges or benefits, I guess. I was there. And my classmates were like, because this is all girls school; daughters of congressmen or politicians, and then you know, like their businesses, they own restaurants and all those things. And I was the dressmaker’s daughter, which was fine because many of my classmates knew her and even called her “Nanay, which means mother. I call my mother Nanay, they would also call her. And so I felt that I was liked, you know, except for the rich, poor thing. I was like, I had friends, and I did not feel quite deprived in that area, but I can see that now. They have their nice shoes, whereas my shoes are like, my toe would be showing. I had good grades, and I was active in extracurricular activities. So my life here in Canada, of course, is like, very, very different from my life there, of course, Malaya, likely not experienced that life of sense of scarcity and economic insecurity, and so that is one of my trigger, you know, like, all those things. And so I've always said since I moved here, there were, of course, a lot of things that I really enjoyed and everything, but I felt the absence of my community and I felt the loss of my very wide support system. And I felt this very acutely after I gave birth. So it wasn't a surprise to me when my doctor said, Iris, you have postpartum depression. And I sort of knew it beforehand because I've been having low-grade depression since I came here, and like, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know, to know that. So I joined a lot of support groups for new moms, and I was in individual counseling, and that's one good thing about being here in Canada, there's like, social support system as well. For a long time, I was really resisting taking medication. I know in some areas; this is all hush-hush when it comes to mental health and medication, I just want to lay it all out on the table. And for a long time, I resisted getting medication because I saw it as a sign of weakness and you know, I was like, oh, I was a school guidance counselor so I knew these things and mental health, blah, blah, blah. And I started a nonprofit organization. And I was, I can do this. Of course, motherhood is a totally different ballgame.

 

Jen Lumanlan  11:22

Yeah, it totally is. Yeah. Was there a specific incident that caused you to say, I need more help than I'm getting right now? I need to do something differently than what I'm doing right now.

 

Iris  11:34

Yeah, for sure. So actually, two instances. First, when Malaya was about three years old, we were in the park and I usually pack food, like, you know, snacks and things like that. I was hungry. And that's one of my factors. I was hungry and she was at the stage, Jen, were like, you ask her for something, and she’s like, “No, I won't give you,” and I kept on asking because I was really hungry, and she really wouldn't give me. And I packed for both of us, by the way, and then a crow swooped in and got into the container. I don't know if it's grapes or nuts; all of those things spilled out on the ground. And I was just so so angry! I feel this hot thing coming out from my gut here and Malaya started crying because she felt that energy, and I felt very guilty about that. I was like, “Oh my God, what am I doing?” And yet, I also recognized that there was something so primal in being denied; in “being denied” for food. I wasn't rational at all. And then the other instance, was when out of the blue Malaya asked me, “Mama, why are you always angry?” And the way she asked was really significant to me because she asked out of curiosity. It wasn't there was no judgment. She just like wanted to understand and concern in her voice, like, “Why is this?” And so I'm all for being open and vulnerable and showing all facets of myself to my daughter. But I just had this instinctive feeling that it's not good for a child to be always looking at her parents who are supposed to take care of her. And always like, erupting like a volcano every hour or something. So that's when I need more help than the medication, I need more help than counseling, I need more help than all these things I'm doing for myself to help me.

 

Jen Lumanlan  13:40

Yeah. Okay. And so you've been through this. And we have actually lost track, or I have at least lost track, I am uncertain if we are on round number four and number five at this point. But what I'm wondering is, if a person is listening to this, they can say, “Well, I don't want to have to go through this thing four or five times to actually do something different!” So what would you say to somebody who's thinking that okay, yes, I see myself exploiting sometimes as well or maybe I'm not an exploding kind of person, I'm a freeze up kind of person, or a walk away kind of person, or fawn, and just get the crying and the screaming, just stop kind of person. if I'm seeing myself having these reactions to my child's behavior, I'm thinking, but I don't want to have to do the same thing four or five times to do something different. What would you say to somebody who's in that position right now?

 

Iris  14:23

The first two times when I was lurking, I can tell you exactly what I was doing, even if I sort of petered out. So, I was really spending a lot of time identifying my triggers, and seeing what are the factors that caused me to erupt. The main thing that I was really working on in the first module, I think Jen was the window of tolerance, and how to increase our window of tolerance. And I know that like being hungry, being tired, being sleep deprived—those are the factors that narrow my window of tolerance. So the second time I did the course again, I made sure that I have support something like cooking a big batch of food, so that I don't have to be like, oh my god like to cook and again and again and again every day. And then also, I scheduled more sessions with my therapist. I just made sure I said no to other time commitments or other things that get my attention. And called my friends and say, “Can you please call me when you don't see me?” Like, can you say, “Oh, are we going for a walk or something?” So those things, I like to think of my four or five times in the workshop, as I like to imagine myself as like a horse trainer. And the process of taming my own trigger is the wild doors. And so the first few times were just about me getting into the saddle. And just like, holding on. And just, of course, right now, I'm not the star in the rodeo, or however you call that, I think I am staying in the saddle long enough to enjoy the ride. That was it. And then every time I register again, I learn more and more, and I cover more and more modules. And one thing that really was quite helpful to me was when you reorganize the modules, it's the things that help us with our triggers, and not just like, analyzing hollered triggers. And this last time, there was a call and I had my food ready and all this other support, and it was just this kind of fruit salad, all these things that really kept me sitting on the saddle long enough to spend time with my wild horse of triggers.

 

Jen Lumanlan  16:51

Oh, wow. That's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that I love the metaphor. And yeah, I just want to sort of translate a couple of things that you said, for folks who are newer to this, what I'm hearing from you is that I've added to the content over the times that I've done it but it hasn't changed dramatically, or firstly organized at logically. Having all these logical skills, thinking this is the way people need to hear it. First of all,...

We’ve covered the topic of boundaries before, in our conversation with Xavier Dagba.  In my work with parents, I see that an inability to set boundaries is a MAJOR cause of feeling triggered by our child’s behavior.  

 

When we snap at our child’s behavior, it often (not always, but often) comes somewhat later in the day.  

 

There’s a reason for that: it’s because we haven’t been able to set boundaries early in the day, so each time our child crosses where a boundary should have been, we get more and more irritated.  Then finally we can’t take it any more - and after one last not-boundary crossing, we snap.

 

(If you snap early in the day, I’d ask you to consider what boundaries were crossed for you the day (or many days) before, and whether you’re still feeling the effects of that?)

 

So we’ve discussed this before, and yet…boundaries continue to be a struggle for almost all of the parents I meet.  Why is this?

 

We’ll get into that in this episode, which draws on Nedra Tawwab’s book Set Boundaries, Find Peace, and goes beyond it too.  Nedra outlines nine reasons why we find setting boundaries so difficult, and I argue that’s because all nine are rooted in patriarchal ways of being in relationships.  

 

When we’ve been conditioned for decades that our role as women is not to seem rude or mean, to keep the peace at all costs, to make sure everyone else’s needs are taken care of before our own, and to have our power in a relationship come from taking care of others, is it any wonder that we go out into the world and have no idea how to even know we need a boundary, never mind how to set one?

 

And secondly I argue that while we might need more boundaries between us and the people we love, that we have WAY TOO MANY boundaries between us and the people in our broader communities.  That’s one big reason why we feel so stressed out all the time - because it seems like we are the only person that can meet our child’s every need, and that we have to do it all alone.  I believe that by breaking these boundaries down we can make life a whole lot easier for ourselves by reducing the number of things we need to do (meal swap, anyone?), and by creating connection that helps us to feel nourished and whole.

 

If you’re struggling with knowing how to identify and set boundaries, I’d like to invite you to join my Taming Your Triggers workshop.  

 

We’ll help you to identify your needs so you can work with your child to get these met and meet your child’s needs as well (and even though this might seem impossible right now, it actually is possible to meet both of your needs the vast majority of the time!).  

 

And on the relatively few times when it isn’t possible to meet both of your needs, you can set a boundary instead (which is different from a limit!).  When you do this consistently, you can be more regulated more of the time, which means you won’t snap at your child as often as you do now.

 

Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.

 

Jump to Highlights

01:32 Introducing today’s episode

05:15 Invitation to Taming Your Triggers workshop

09:29 The distinction between ‘boundaries’ and ‘limits’ in the context of parenting

15:35 The challenges adults face in setting boundaries, attributing difficulty to childhood experiences

23:40 Nine common reasons that may hinder individuals from setting effective boundaries

26:28 The challenges of setting boundaries, particularly for female-identifying parents, attributing the difficulty to societal expectations rooted in gender roles

36:04 The impact of societal forces, such as capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, on parenting and the tendency to resort to consumerism as a coping mechanism

42:01 The emphasis on the importance of listening to one's body as a starting point for setting boundaries

 

 

094: Using nonviolent communication to parent more peacefully

SYPM 009: How to Set Boundaries in Parenting

 

 

Birdsong, M. (2020). How we show up: Reclaiming family, friendship and community. New York: Hachette.

hooks, b. (2014). Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking Black. Abingdon: Routledge.

 

"I was spanked and I turned out fine."

 

How many times have you heard this defense of spanking children? But what does the research tell us about spanking effectiveness, child discipline, and long-term consequences?

 

My guest, Professor Andrew Grogan-Kaylor from the University of Michigan, has extensively researched physical punishment and argues that spanking should be classified as an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE)—a marker of severe trauma. When we examine spanking closely, we're discussing hitting another human being, something we'd never accept between adults. As Dr. Grogan-Kaylor points out, parents typically spank when frustrated or angry, making it virtually impossible to administer in a truly "controlled" way.

 

In the episode, we also discuss how, due to the way that a quirk in one researcher’s agenda aligned with changes in ethical rules governing experiments, that there’s actually scientific evidence from randomized controlled trials to support the efficacy of spanking at changing children’s behavior to make it acceptable to their parents!  Now the rules have changed and wouldn’t permit spanking during an experiment, it isn’t possible to generate evidence against spanking.  So advocates of spanking (and yes, there are some!) can honestly say that there is evidence of the highest quality in favor of spanking, and no evidence of that quality against it.

 

And of course we have to ask ourselves: is compliance what we really want?  Our instinctive response to that question might be “Yes!  I do want flipping compliance – and I want it now!” But I know many parents listening to the show have a goal to raise children who speak up when they see injustice, and who are internally motivated to do the right thing…and unfortunately focusing on making children’s behavior comply with our wishes works against that.

 

But that doesn’t mean the alternative is letting our child rule the roost.  There are ways to get your needs met and also meet your child’s needs, without spanking, threatening to spank, punishing, giving Time Outs, withholding privileges, or any other tools like this.

 

Questions this episode will answer

Professor Grogan-Kaylor's meta-analysis examined five decades of research covering over 160,000 children. He found consistent evidence that spanking is associated with increased:

Aggression

Antisocial behavior

Mental health problems

Cognitive difficulties.

The research clearly shows that spanking doesn't improve behavior—it actually makes it worse.

Dr. Grogan-Kaylor's research found that the effects of spanking and physical abuse on children are very similar. This challenges the idea that we can spank children without hurting them in the same way that physical abuse hurts them. Hitting, even when called "discipline," affects a child's developing brain and sense of safety in similar ways to abuse.

Spanking affects a child's stress response system, and impacts their development. The long-term outcomes from spanking are similar to outcomes associated with established Adverse Childhood Experiences. Dr. Grogan-Kaylor makes a compelling case that spanking should join the list of recognized ACEs.

This is one of the most common defenses of spanking. Dr. Grogan-Kaylor explains how our understanding of child development has evolved over the last 50 years. Personal experiences, while valid, don't override the consistent findings from hundreds of scientific studies across diverse populations and cultures.

You might be surprised by what the research shows. Dr. Grogan-Kaylor and Dr. Shawna Lee found that about a third of parents reported spanking their one-year-old children. One-year-olds cannot reliably remember and act on parent's instructions. Spanking one-year-olds is unlikely to lead to them remembering and acting on these instructions. Even at age two and three, remembering and acting on instructions is an emerging capability.

The conversation doesn't just identify problems—it offers solutions! We offer evidence-based approaches to discipline that improve children's behavior while strengthening the parent-child relationship. Professor Grogan-Kaylor shares insights about why non-physical discipline methods work better for:

Teaching children appropriate behavior;

Supporting the development of emotion regulation;

Developing problem-solving skills.

What you'll learn in this episode

Physical punishment like spanking is considered harmful to children's development. Even "normal" spanking shows negative outcomes in research studies spanning five decades.

The scientific evidence showing how spanking increases children's:

Aggression

Antisocial behavior

Mental health problems.

Dr. Grogan-Kaylor's comprehensive meta-analysis shows that spanking does not improve children's behavior.

How spanking affects children across different cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, and family situations

Why spanking should be considered an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE). This would put it in the same category as other forms of harmful trauma.

The connection between spanking and increased risk for long-term behavior problems. This can affect a child's future relationships.

Effective parenting strategies that build positive relationships. This teaches children appropriate behavior - without resorting to physical discipline

Why the common defense "I was spanked and I turned out fine" misses important context about child development and trauma

 

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.

 

By joining the workshop, you’ll discover:

The 10-minute practice that makes your child want to cooperate with you

Ways to cut the number of limits set by at least half – without letting your child walk all over you or becoming a permissive parent

How to stop arguing, tantrumming, yelling, disrespectful tone, ignoring you – as well as bickering, hitting, and fighting between siblings!

It’s available in two different forms:

Mid-May to Mid-March each year: Take the course at your own pace

Mid-March to Mid-May each year: Join the waitlist and take the course with my support in early May!

 

Click the banner to learn more and sign up.

 

 

 

01:33 Introducing today’s episode and featured guest

05:25 The definition of spanking

07:38 The age range advocated by some for spanking, ranging from two to 12 years old

09:20 The effectiveness of spanking

16:16 The critique of positive parenting research, particularly focusing on methodological fallacies outlined by Dr. Lazarle

22:24 The question of whether there might be an optimal level of spanking that leads to maximum compliance in children

24:40 How to handle defiant children who are not complying with milder disciplinary tactics

26:21 How to comprehend the overall impact of spanking on children

32:03 Dr. Diana Baumrind's surprising involvement in studies on spanking suggesting that authoritative parents, considered successful, spank their children

35:56 The legality of spanking and the absence of legal protection for children against physical punishment

38:11 Arguments against banning spanking, citing studies that suggest little evidence of parents adopting more effective disciplinary tactics after a ban

42:10 Potential cultural and racial differences in the use of spanking

44:09 Wrapping up the discussion

 

Afifi, T.O., Mota, N.P., Dasiewicz, P., MacMillan, H.L., & Sareen, J. (2012). Physical punishment and mental disorders: Results from a nationally representative US sample. Pediatrics 130(2), 184-192.

Afifi, T.O., Ford, D., Gershoff, E.T., Merrick, M., Grogan-Kaylor, A., Ports, K.A., MacMillan, H.L., Holden, G.W., Taylor, C.A., Lee, S.J., & Peters Bennet, R. (2017). Spanking and adult mental health impairment: The case for the designation of spanking as an adverse childhood experience. Child Abuse & Neglect 71, 24-31.

Baumrind, D., Larzelere, R.E., & Cowan, P.A. (2002). Ordinary physical punishment: Is it harmful? Comment on Gershoff (2002). Psychological Bulletin 128(4), 580-589.

Borduin Quetsch, L., Wallace, N.M., Herschell, A.D., & McNeil, C.B. (2015). Weighing in on the Time-Out controversy: An empirical perspective. The Clinical Psychologist 68(2), 4-19. Retrieved from https://www.incredibleyears.com/wp-content/uploads/Weighing-in-on-Time-Out-Borduin-et-al.pdf

Cuartas, J., Ward, K.P., Ma, J., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2020). Physical punishment and Colombian children and adolescents’ cognitive and behavioral outcomes. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 68, 101140.

Deater-Deckard, K., & Dodge, K.A. (1997). Externalizing behavior problems and discipline revisited: Nonlinear effects and variation by culture, context, and gender. Psychological Inquiry 8(3), 161-175.

Durrant, J.E., Trocme, N., Fallon, B., Milne, C., & Black, T. (2009). Protection of children from physical maltreatment in Canada: An evaluation of the Supreme Court’s definition of reasonable force. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 18(1), 64-87.

Freeman, M., & Sanders, B.J. (2014). Can we conquer child abuse if we don’t outlaw physical chastisement of children? International Journal of Children’s Rights 22, 681-709.

Gershoff, E.T. (2010). More harm than good: A summary of scientific research on the intended and unintended effects of corporal punishment on children. Law & Contemporary Problems 73, 31-55.

Gershoff, E.T., Lansford, J.E., Sexton, H.R., Davis-Kean, P., & Sameroff, A.J. (2012). Longitudinal links between spanking and children’s externalizing behaviors in a national sample of White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American families. Child Development 83(3), 838-843.

Gershoff, E.T., Goodman, G.S., Miller-Perrin, C.L., Holden, G.W., Jackson, Y., & Kazdin, A.E. (2018). The strength of the causal evidence against physical punishment of children and its implications for parents, psychologists, and policymakers. American Psychologist 73(5), 626-638.

Gershoff, E.T., & Font, S.A. (2016). Corporal punishment in U.S. public schools: Prevalence, disparities in use, and status in state and federal policy. Social Policy Report 30.

Gershoff, E.T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Race as a moderator of associations between spanking and child outcomes. Family Relations 65(3), 490-501.

Gershoff, E.T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Spanking and child outcomes: Old controversies and new meta-analyses. Journal of Family Psychology 30(4), 453.

Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2004). The effect of corporal punishment on antisocial behavior in children. Social Work Research, 28, 153–162.

Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2004). Corporal punishment and the growth trajectory of children’s antisocial behavior. Child Maltreatment 10(3), 283-292.

Heilmann, A., Mehay, A., Watt, R.G., Kelly, Y., Durant, J.E., van Turnhout, J., & Gershoff, E.T. (2021). Physical punishment and child outcomes: A narrative review of prospective studies. The Lancet. Retrieved from https://www.christian.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Physical-punishment-and-child-outcomes-June-2021.pdf

Holden, G.W., Williamson, P.A., & Holland, G.W.O. (2014). Eavesdropping on the family: A pilot investigation of corporal punishment in the home. Journal of Family Psychology 28(3), 401-406.

Holden, G.W., Grogan-Kaylor, A., Durrant, J.E., & Gershoff, E. (2017). Researchers deserve a better critique: Response to Larzelere, Gunnoe, Roberts, and Ferguson (2017). Marriage & Family Review 53(5), 465-490.

Horn, I.B., Joseph, J.G., & Cheng, T.L. (2004). Nonabusive physical punishment and child behavior among African American children: A systematic review. Journal of the National Medical Association 96(9), 1162-1168.

Lansford, J.E., Wager, L.B., Bates, J.E., Pettit, G.S., & Dodge, K.A. (2012). Forms of spanking and children’s externalizing behaviors. Family Relations 61(2), 224-236.

Larzelere, R.E., Cox Jr., R.B., & Smith, G.L. (2010). Do nonphysical punishments reduce antisocial behavior more than spanking? A comparison using the strongest previous causal evidence against spanking. BMC Pediatrics 10(1), 1-17.

Larzelere, R.E., & Baumrind, D. (2010). Are spanking injunctions scientifically supported? Law & Contemporary Problems 73(2), 57-87.

Larzelere, R.E., Gunnoe, M.L., Roberts, M.W., & Ferguson, C.J. (2017). Children and parents deserve better parental discipline research: Critiquing the evidence for exclusively “positive” parenting. Marriage & Family Review 53(1), 24-35.

Larzelere, R.E., Knowles, S.J., Henry, C.S., & Ritchie, K.L. (2018). Immediate and long-term effectiveness of disciplinary tactics by type of toddler noncompliance. Parenting: Science and Practice 18, 141-171.

Larzelere, R.E., Ferguson, C.J., Gunnoe, M.L., & Roberts, M.W. (2019). The insufficiency of the evidence used to categorically oppose spanking and its implications for families and psychological science; Comment on Gershoff et al. (2018). American Psychologist 74(4), 497-499.

Larzelere, R.E., Gunnoe, M.J., Roberts, M.W., Lin, H., & Ferguson, C.J. (2020). Causal evidence for Exclusively Positive Parenting and for timeout: Rejoinder to Holden, Grogan-Kaylor, Durrant, and Gershoff (2017). Marriage & Family Review 56(4), 287-319.

Lee, S.J., Grogan-Kaylor, A., & Berger, L. (2014). Parental spanking of 1-year-old children and subsequent child protective services involvement. Child Abuse & Neglect 38(5), 875-883.

Lee, S.J., Pace, G.T., Ward, K.P., Grogan-Kaylor, A., & Ma, J. (2020). Household economic hardship as a moderator of the associations between maternal spanking and child externalizing behavior problems. Child Abuse & Neglect 107, 104573.

Ma, J., Grogan-Kaylor, A., & Lee, S.J. (2019). Does community violence exposure moderate the associations between maternal spanking and early childhood behavior problems? Aggressive Behavior 46, 210-219.

Ma, J., Han, Y., Grogan-Kaylor, A., Delva, J., & Castillo, M. (2012). Corporal punishment and youth externalizing behavior in Santiago, Chile. Child Abuse & Neglect, 36, 481–490.

Paolucci, E.O., & Violato, C. (2004). A meta-analysis of the published research on the affective, cognitive, and behavioral effects of corporal punishment. The Journal of Psychology 138(3), 197-221.

Ward, K.P., Lee, S.J., Pace, G.T., Grogan-Kaylor, A., & Ma, J. (2020). Attachment style and the association of spanking and child externalizing behavior. Academic Pediatrics 20(4), 501-507.

 

When I interviewed Dr. Chris Winters last year, I described how we’ve been using a No Set Bedtime method with our daughter Carys.  He used it with his children starting in the Elementary years, and his eyes nearly fell out of his head when I told him we’d been using it since Carys was about three.

 

In the email about the Dr. Winters interview I asked any listeners who wanted to learn more about this method to be in touch, so in this episode we’ll meet listeners Katherine and Gila.  Katherine’s daughter is three and Gila’s son is seven, and in this episode I explain the No Set Bedtime approach and then they pepper me with questions about how to make it work in their families.  

 

We recorded our conversation back in November 2021, and in January I followed up with them to see how it’s going.  I share their feedback and my ideas on what’s going well and what they might adjust.

 

[embed]https://vimeo.com/671735528[/embed]

 

 

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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

 

Jessica  00:11

Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? Me too. Hi, I'm not Jen. I'm Jessica, and I'm in Burlesque Panama. Jen has just created a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes, and I got to test it out. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development. It puts it in context for you as well. So, you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you what to do about each one. Sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe, and come over to our free Facebook group to continue the conversation about this episode. You can also thank Jen for this episode by donating to keep the podcast ad free by going to the page for this or any other episode on YourParentingMojo.com. If you'd like to start a conversation with someone about this episode or know someone who would find it useful, please forward it to them. Over time, you're gonna get sick of hearing me read this intro as well. So come and record on yourself. You can read from a script she's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com and click Read the Intro and I can't wait to hear yours.

 

Jen Lumanlan  01:32

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today, we're actually going to do something that we have not done before. We have two parents here with us today, they reached out to me after the still recent to us as we're recording here, that's going to be a little while before this episode is really on the episode with Dr. Chris Winter, where we were learning about sleep and we talked about our no set bedtime process. And at the beginning of that interview, I said, if anyone's curious about this and is interested in applying this idea with their own children, feel free to reach out and maybe we can set something up. And so we have two fabulous parents here today, Gila and Katherine. And each of them reached out and we're curious about various aspects. And we're also kind of hesitant about various aspects. And so today we're going to talk through with them what it might look like to have a no-set bedtime routine in their house. So I'm gonna ask each of them to introduce themselves. And then I'm going to talk for a bit about how this has played out for us and for what I've seen with the families that have implemented it. And then we're gonna go into a q&a, and they're gonna poke holes in this on your behalf, dear listeners so that you can really see how this could play out with your family if you decided to try this. So hello, and welcome to Gila and Katherine, Gila doyou want to go first and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you and your family and where you are in the world? And what made you reach out when you saw this offer?

 

Gila  02:54

Thanks for having me. So I am a single mom of a seven-year-old boy, and we're in upstate New York. And I reached out for a couple of reasons. One is that my son, while sometimes he falls asleep relatively easily, sometimes, relatively frequently, he falls asleep more than an hour after lights out. And I'm a little familiar with the insomnia literature. And my understanding is that it's not good to be in bed for that long and tossing and turning. And I want to establish healthy sleep habits. But I also really think sleep is so important. The other piece is that sleep is a time when behavioral challenges can come up. And I think there's a lot of reasons why that's the case. But one of them is the power dynamic that this is a place where there can be a power struggle. And I've seen in other places how better things go when I can shift away from the sort of power-over dynamic and have a more collaborative approach. But I struggle with that with bedtime because I do think that sleep is so important. And because it's a place where I think structure and consistency are helpful. So but I was very intrigued and I'm very curious to learn more.

 

Jen Lumanlan  04:07

Okay, super. And my understanding is you have more than a passing professional interest in this topic. Is that right?

 

Gila  04:13

Yeah, so I am a psychologist and a neuropsychologist. And so I recommend to my patients all the time to improve sleep habits with is just so critical for cognitive functioning, emotional functioning, psychological and physical.

 

Jen Lumanlan  04:27

Okay, cool. Well, thank you very much for telling us about you. Katherine. Who are you? Where are you in the world? Who's your family?

 

Katherine  04:33

Yes, I'm Katherine, based in Southern Maryland, just outside of DC. I have one daughter who's both three years and three months now. So our bedtime routines have been a little bit inconsistent over time. And lately, at one point we had gotten to a pretty good timing where she was usually in bed and we left the room by 8:30. And now it's kind of crept up to 9:30 by the time we leave, and that leaves very little time for my husband and I to spend time together or just relax, I think that the no set bedtime approach would be exciting to her.

 

Jen Lumanlan  05:16

It is to most children, yup.

 

Katherine  05:18

Potentially be really helpful for us. But I am hesitant about, alright, I can see potential challenges with getting her to actually stay in her room while we go do something else. We usually like to just watch a TV show together or, you know, spend time together and I could see her begging to leave her room and spend time with us.

 

Jen Lumanlan  05:42

Okay, so also like Gila feeling pretty excited about the possibility of this and also like, how on earth is that actually going to work in real life with my real child? Is that right? Okay, so let me tell you how we put this in place for us. And then we can answer all of your questions on behalf of all the parents who are listening to this. So I will say that I'm not sure that everybody who's listening to this necessarily needs to try this approach or to use this approach. I think that one of the main indicators that we can use to say, should we try this approach is maybe something about bedtime is not working for us right now, either, It's not working for the child, and we'll know it's not working for the child because we see them resisting. We see them stalling, we see them not wanting to go to bed, or something isn't working for us. And Katherine, I think you're a great example of that, where you're not necessarily sort of that you're seeing the stalling and eventually the child's getting into bed, and then you get your downtime. It's like your downtime has kind of evaporated at this point. And so something about that is not working for you. And so if the way that we're doing things right now is not working for one or both parties involved, then I think that's a really good reason to consider doing something differently. So we introduced this when my daughter was about two and a half, which even Dr. Winter was pretty shocked by how young she was and basically it came about through resistance to bedtime, and thinking, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this every night, this is harder than it needs to be. What can we shift that can make this potentially easier? Our routine definitely shifted a little bit with how light it is outside and it has also shifted as she's gotten older as well. But in general, what we end up doing is dinner is at around 6:45. And I've cooked every other night. Usually I cook one night and then we have leftovers reheated the second night and dinner itself takes about 20 minutes. So we're coming into the period just after seven o'clock and then we have a good deal of flex time in that hour, that almost hour until about eight. I keep a learning journal for her and I try and keep that out on the end of the dining room table, and so that's my period of the day to write in there. She takes a bath every other day. Sometimes she wants to have playtime if something interesting came in the mail, or we're just back from a trip where we've been exploring national parks, and she didn't finish some of her junior ranger badges and she wants to finish those. So that's sort of a good deal of flex time in that almost hour. And then at eight o'clock, we used to have brushing teeth right at eight o'clock. And we've sort of flex that a little bit as she's gotten older to have stories first, and then she brushed his teeth after. If your child has strong resistance to brushing teeth, I would definitely advise having brushing teeth before stories. So that you can sort of use that as a light touch logical consequence. If you're having trouble getting the teeth to brush that we might not have time for stories if we don't get the teeth brushed in an expedient manner. We're at a point now where that's not so much of a challenge as it has been in previous years. And so we can allow a little more flexibility there. So but at eight o'clock, we are starting our storytime and Carys actually sleeps on a pile of blankets on the floor in her bedroom. By her choice, certainly not our preference. And that does mean that her bedroom is not a very comfortable place to read stories. But if your child is sleeping in a bed like most children do, and that is a comfortable place then you could certainly read stories in your bedroom. And many parents find that the fewer transitions that they have around bedtime, the better. And so that's one more reason to get the teeth done early so you don't have to come out of the bedroom if that is potentially a challenge. For us. Again, that's not so much of an issue so we have stories in the living room, and then after that we're transitioning to this mythical time that you're all wondering about what actually happens in this time. So our basic parameter is you can do whatever you like. It needs to be mostly in your room and we took a harder line on this when she was younger, and I am not going to be involved in this. So if you need help with stickers, or glue or tape, or anything like that, that is not a project that we're going to be doing during this period after storytime that it needs to be something that you can do without asking for my help. In the early days with a younger child, what you will probably find is that if you just set up the options of you can go to bed, even if you're not tired, or you can play in your room quietly by yourself, that you will probably find the child will be quite attracted to this idea of not lying in bed, which they may have been forced to do for some period of time before that. I think the key idea that a lot of parents are struggling with here is that this period of time has to meet both party’s needs and really everything that we're doing in our interactions with our children, ideally is going to be meeting both of their needs. And the important part to distinguish there is the difference between needs and strategies. And a strategy is a way that we can meet a need. Firstly, let's look at it from the other way, I might think to myself, well, I want to read a book every night.  That's part of how I want to spend my time. And I need to read a book, I need that for myself. Actually, that reading that book is a strategy to meet a need, which could be depending on what kind of book it is—it could be intellectual stimulation, it could be relaxation, it could be self-care time, it could be any one of a number of needs that I'm meeting by reading this book. And when we bring this back to the level of needs, rather than strategies, we can see actually, there might be a whole bunch of other ways to get those needs met. So if my need for that time is for intellectual stimulation, I might be able to listen to a podcast just as easily as like, as I can read a book, if my need is for self-care, maybe a bath in the bathroom with the door locked, would be another way to have that need met. And that doesn't involve anything to do with books necessarily. So if we can see this at a level of needs, then all of a sudden, a whole bunch of different ways of meeting that potential need can be met. And so we're always looking to understand what is my real need here, not the strategy I'm using to try and meet that need. And what is the child's real need here, maybe the child is not tired and that's why they're not wanting to go to bed. Maybe they don't feel as though they've had enough connection time with you during the day, and that's why they don't want to go to bed. And we need to understand what is their needs so that we can help them to address that, because if their need is for connection time with you, then when eight o'clock or whatever is your time or you know, 8:30 once you get to the end of the story, storytime rolls around, they're probably still going to be coming out of their rooms saying I want to spend time with you because they're not feeling as though they've had that connection time with you. So if you're seeing behavior that is difficult for you to navigate, like coming out of the room, when you're hoping that they're going to be spending this time in their room, then you always want to be asking yourself, what need is the child trying to fulfill by doing this behavior? And so if it's connection time, well, what can we do about that, maybe you could have connection time with them earlier in the day, and so their cup is full by bedtime, and thus they don't mind the Separation from you as much. If you don't have time to do that earlier in the day, maybe an hour and a half of kind of irritated, you know, I told you to stay in your, room I told you to stay in your room is not meeting your need for relaxation and self-care at the end of the day. And perhaps 30 minutes of one-on-one time with your child could refill their cup for connection. And also then get you an hour of time on the back end, for your self-care time, your connection time with your partner, and so on. So I think that's really at the crux of the well what do I do if my child doesn't stay in their bedroom idea? On the younger end when they're not necessarily as able to communicate their needs, you know, do you want to be in bed? Or do you want to play in your room quietly by yourself can be useful? But as soon as they're old enough to start expressing what's actually going on for them, then we can start to bring in this idea of needs and meeting theirs, and meeting hours as well. And in the meantime, we can always hypothesize we can always sort of taking an educated guess at what we think is going on for them and try to help them meet their needs to the best that we can understand it. So that's a super important piece. Then of course you get to what happens if they go to bed late.

 

Jen Lumanlan  14:27

And when we first started this yes, I will say there was a period of maybe it was probably two weeks at the most where we had gone from sort of an 8:30 lights out to it was heading towards 9:30 and 10. And at that point, we had been making up songs or story. I would lie with her for a little bit and make up a song or a story based on some funny thing that happened in the day or she would suggest a character and I would make up a song or story based on that. And so, of course, it gets to 9:30 or 10 and she's like, “Okay, it's song time now!” And I'm like, “It's not song time.” It's 10 o'clock at night, it is not time for making up songs and stories. And so I put a boundary in place to say, after nine o'clock, I do not have the mental capacity to be able to make up songs and stories. So if you choose to go to bed before nine o'clock, then I will be able to tell you a song, and make up a story, if you choose to go to bed after that, then I'm not going to be able to do that and I don't have the mental capacity to do that. And so there was then a period of time where she chose to go to bed at nine o'clock, so she could get her song or her story, and there were other days where she's like, I don't really care that much—I'd rather keep doing what I'm doing, It doesn't matter to me. And so yeah, there will be a period of time where they're learning what it is like to self-regulate, and they may end up tired. And if you were to start this on a Monday, you know, they're in preschool, and they would just spend those days in school. Would that be the end of the world if you were not the person who had to deal with that? My hypothesis might the way I approached it was no, it would not be the end of the world if I was not the person who had to deal with that. So yes, we very deliberately did this on school days, and yeah, that means you're gonna get woken up at a certain time, and I'm gonna be super upfront about that. I'm gonna say we need to be out the door at 8:15 and it takes you a bit of time to get going. I'm thinking 7:30 is a reasonable time. We're simplifying our morning routine as much as we can so things like getting dressed, brushing teeth, and eating breakfast, those were really the only three things we were doing in the morning at that time. And at 7:30 rolls around and waking her up, she's pretty tired, and she's not super happy to be woken up. But within a couple of weeks, she had learned that if you go to bed at 10, you are probably going to wake up very tired, and the day is probably going to be kind of rough. And there may be a period of time where you have to sort of say, “Hey, it's 9:30 Are you sure you want to stay up?” And you can see they're still in whatever they're doing, and they don't want to stop. It's like, okay, I'm waking you up at 7:30 No matter what. And then pretty soon, you get to a point where the luster of staying up until whatever time I like wears off a little bit. And they don't feel as though this is something you're going to take away. And thus, they have to do it to the max in case my parent changes their mind and won't let me do this anymore. They realize this is a long-term thing. And so all of a sudden, staying up until super late becomes something that it's not a big deal. And I will say for probably a year now, right off to storytime on most nights, Carys has been going to bed at 8:30. And so we're kind of where I might want to be if I was forcing her...

In this episode we hear from parent Amy, who is a White parent married to a Black man raising four biracial children in Colorado.  Amy has been on quite a journey to explore her role as a descendant of Puritans who came to the United States looking for religious freedom on her father’s side, and of Irish Catholics on her mother’s side.  She sees how her parents were able to get advanced education and a loan to buy a house and start a business, and that from the outside they looked like a pretty happy family.

 

But behind closed doors, things were not so pretty - they were actually chaotic and volatile.  Amy was an intense, spirited child and her parents didn’t have the tools they needed to meet her needs.  She learned to use her intellect to protect herself, and projected an image of having her stuff together - a habit that she then continued as a parent, as she projected a Supermom-type image.  Our culture rewards us for looking like we’re keeping it together, even when everything’s falling apart inside.

 

So Amy is a deep believer in dismantling patriarchy (she actually wanted to do this on Wall Street!) and in treating people with respect, but in a sleep-deprived moment after her fourth baby was born she broke up a squabble between two of her older children by pulling them roughly apart and yelled at the older one: “Why did you do that?” (a question for which of course there’s no answer).  

 

She saw the terrified look on her daughter’s face which brought back the visceral fear she felt at her own parents’ explosive feelings and felt so much pain that she, Amy - the believer in breaking down traditional power structures and treating people with respect - had caused this kind of fear in her own child.

 

And of course it seemed like the things that really needed to change were her partner, who should stop doing obnoxious things, and her children, who were pushing each other’s buttons and fighting and leaving disgusting blobs of oatmeal on the floor for her to step in with bare feet when she came downstairs in the morning with a baby in her arms that would make her lose her shit before the day even got started.

 

Over the last few months Amy and her children have been learning new tools to be in right relationship with each other.  It started with learning that Amy did herself, but she shared each idea with her children so they could practice them together.  

 

Amy is now reparenting herself, in a way, so she can be a different sort of parent to her own children - who now empathize with each other’s struggles, and actively try to support each other in difficult moments rather than throwing more fuel on the fire.  Of course all of this is intimately linked to the reconciliation and healing that Amy wants to see in her relationships with Black and Indigenous people in her life and on the land where she lives.

 

Taming Your Triggers

If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, Taming Your Triggers will be open soon.

We’ll help you to:

Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause them

Use new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needs

Effectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered

It’s a 10-week workshop with one module delivered every week, an amazing community of like-minded parents, a match with an AccountaBuddy to help you complete the workshop, and mini-mindfulness practices to re-ground yourself repeatedly during your days, so you’re less reactive and more able to collaborate with your children.

 

Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.

 

 

This episode continues our conversation on the topic of children and food.  A few months ago we heard from Dr. Lindo Bacon about how the things we’ve learned about obesity might not actually be the whole story.  Then we talked with Ellyn Satter about the approach she devised called Division of Responsibility, which holds the parent/caregiver responsible for the what, when, and where of eating and the child responsible for whether and how much.

 

We followed that with a conversation with Dr. Michael Goran, a world-renowned expert on the impact of sugar on our bodies, and specifically on children’s bodies – and co-author of the book SugarProof.  While the research seems to indicate that consuming large amounts of sugar isn’t necessarily the best thing for us, when I dug into the original papers that form the backbone of SugarProof I found that the results didn’t always seem to be quite as large as the book indicated.

 

In this episode we take another look at sugar – this time from the perspective of sociologist Dr. Karen Throsby.  Dr. Thorsby received her BA in English Language and Literature from Lincoln College, Oxford, and a MSc in Gender and later a Ph.D from the London School of Economics.  She is currently  an Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Leeds, and is writing a book entitled Sugar Rush: Science, Obesity, and the Social Life of Sugar.  For the book, she is analyzing over 500 UK newspaper articles about sugar, as well as policy documents, scientific publications, popular science articles, self-help literature, and documentaries.  She wants to understand what happens when we demonize sugar as ‘public enemy number one,’ and along with it the fat body.  She doesn’t aim to determine the ‘truth’ about sugar or offer prescriptions about what people should eat, but instead think about how this debate relates to how scientific knowledge is produced, validated, and appropriated, panics about health and body size, the role of generation, gender, race, and class, and the lived inequalities associated with food.

 

(02:10) Introducing Dr. Throsby

(03:22) One of your big focuses is on the idea of sugar being addictive.  Can you tell us why you start there?  What does it mean to be addicted to something, and can we be addicted to sugar?

(09:46) We have to be really careful with any attempt to define addiction because some people and certain groups of people are seen as more liable to be seduced by sugar than others

(12:18) The neuroscientific model of addiction recognizes that addiction is more than a failure of will and morals but also factors in biological vulnerability which can affect some people more than others

(15:10) The idea that you could stop consuming sugar if you wanted to is part of the problem in the way that sugar is being figured because it ignores the social context within which consumption occurs

(21:18) The reason the book is called Sugar Rush is obviously it's a play on the idea of having a lot of sugar, but also about the rush to blame sugar

(22:04) Sugar is often referred to as empty calories but actually, it's a category of food that is absolutely laden with meaning that I think is really important

 

145: How to Sugarproof your kids with Dr. Michael Goran

 

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Sugarproof: The Hidden Dangers of Sugar That Are Putting Your Child's Health at Risk and What You Can Do

 

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Jen Lumanlan  00:02

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

 

Jenny  00:09

Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? I don't really but Jen thinks you might. I'm Jenny, a listener from Los Angeles, testing out a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it in context for you as well so you can decide whether and how to use this new information.

 

Jenny  00:42

I listened because parenting can be scary and it's reassuring to know what the experts think. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also join the free Facebook group to continue the conversation.

 

Jenny  01:06

Over time you might get sick of hearing me read this intro so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script Jen's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com/RecordTheIntro. I can't wait to hear yours.

 

Jen Lumanlan  01:32

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today we're continuing our series of episodes looking at the intersection of parenting and food. Recently we heard from Dr. Michael Goran who's co author of the new book Sugarproof: The Hidden Dangers of Sugar That Are Putting Your Child's Health at Risk and What You Can Do, where we discuss the research and what that says about the impact that sugar has on our bodies and our children's bodies. But when I was looking around to see who is looking at issues related to sugar that are beyond just what those are there that are happening in the body and really lifting their head up and looking at the broader social and cultural issues, I found the work of today's guest Dr. Karen Throsby.

 

Jen Lumanlan  02:10

Dr. Throsby is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Leeds in England. She obtained a bachelor's degree from Lincoln College, Oxford and completed a master's and PhD from the gender Institute London School of Economics. Her research explores the intersections of gender technology, the body and health and explores how bodily transformations happen and what this says about the wider social context they live in. She's currently working on a book called Sugar Rush: Science, Obesity and the Social Life of Sugar, which begins from the question, what are the social meanings and practices of sugar in the context of a war on obesity.

 

Jen Lumanlan  02:44

She focuses less on the truths about the dietary debates on sugar, but instead uses it to think about how scientific knowledge is produced, validated and used. Our panics around health and body size and the politics of food and its lived inequalities. Welcome Dr. Throsby.

 

Dr. Throsby  03:00

Thank you very much for having me.

 

Jen Lumanlan  03:02

We were just having a little chat before we started and I was saying that whenever we get a sociologist on the show, I always feel completely out of my depth. I acknowledge that I very much approach these questions from a psychologist perspective and I've invited Dr. Throsby to push back when I'm asking these questions in a way that's really different from the way that she sees them.

 

Jen Lumanlan  03:22

One of the the major threads that run through your work is this idea of addiction and sugar being addictive. I guess I'm curious why do you start there? Then we can sort of talk about what does it mean to be addicted to somethin and can we be addicted to sugar? I know there's 100 directions we can go from there but let's start with that as an overarching concept.

 

Dr. Throsby  03:44

Sure. I think just to take a little step back from that is to think about the project that I've done, the research that I've done, which is a study of primarily newspaper coverage of sugar from about 2013 up to the present, which is when you start to get an increased interest in sugar as sort of the dietary enemy of the day. Then I looked at self help books, diet books, public health campaigns, anything I could find within that time period. What I'm interested in is how sugar is talked about and how it's kind of represented, and what kind of role it's playing. What function is sugar playing as an enemy, or as a sort of a slice of pleasure, and so on. This is how I came across these constant references to sugar as addictive. It's used in a very unquestioning way, particularly in newspaper coverage which cites it as a kind of known truth. Sugar is addictive.

 

Dr. Throsby  04:52

In a sense, that therefore is what I'm interested in. Therefore what? If we are claiming that It is addictive, what does that mean? For me, there's a number of questions that come out of that. I think, firstly, what does it mean to say that something is addictive? When you look at the scientific literature, there is very little agreement about what constitutes addiction and at the moment, we're kind of moving towards a sort of neuroscientific interpretation of it but there's no consensus around that really either.

 

Dr. Throsby  05:25

It changes sort of. It sort of evolves how we think about it - about addiction - and what counts as a potential site of addiction. It's not just substances now. There's a kind of expansion of what we consider to food, to online environments, to Twitter to all those things. For me, I'm interested in it because it's given a great amount of certainty, that we all know what it means to say that sugar is addictive, when in fact, if you sort of scratch below the surface, there's very little certainty there.

 

Dr. Throsby  06:00

My question then is, so what is it doing? What is that claim doing when a journalist says, but it is addictive? Or an anti sugar activist says it. what is being done? For me, I think it does two key things. Both of them not well, in my view.

 

Dr. Throsby  06:22

The first one is that it suggests that if we can pin it down as addictive, we then know what to do about it. Oh, we should just treat it like drugs, for example.

 

Jen Lumanlan  06:35

Which we know what to do with, right? We can fix that problem.

 

Dr. Throsby  06:39

As if there is no problem with drugs and addiction. We don't really know what it means. It doesn't give us a solution, necessarily. It also, and I think this is its primary function is to create a sense of urgency. Rhetorically, it functions, the claim that it's addictive functions as this urgent claim that something must be done, and what that does then it authorizes a series of interventions that don't need to be proven in order to be enacted because it's urgent. It's an urgent problem.

 

Dr. Throsby  07:23

It creates, in this case, sugar, which is usually the problem that's being addressed is fatness, which also we don't really understand very well either. It creates this sense of urgency that pulls against the need to stop and think about what are we actually doing socially when we intervene in these practices - with eating practices in this case?

 

Jen Lumanlan  07:50

Thank you for setting the scene on that. I want to go into a number of those areas. Your first contention that we don't really know what addiction is, and also the idea that how we think about addiction is really changed over time. Digging through the references in some of your papers, I wasn't familiar with this suite of literature but, seeing how from the 1930s where addiction is really seen as this moral flaw in people moving towards this nearer psychological model which potentially ignores the social context of it -somebody is not addicted in isolation - can you trace that for us and how does that link to sugar?

 

Dr. Throsby  08:37

I think one of the quite important things is that in those changes that have happened, say, from a very moral judgment about personal failings through to this very kind of biologized vision where it's kind of written into the body in a way that we can't be responsible for. That, actually, we never leave those earlier models behind and actually, we can see with addiction, drug addiction say, or alcoholism, or a presumed addiction to sugar, there is a massive amount of blame attached and kind of moral judgment attached to individuals. I'm certainly not saying that, but things that are kind of recognizable or known as addiction, I'm not saying they don't exist. I'm not saying people are not under the sphere of alcohol or drugs in terrible traumatic ways, but we never leave these other judgments behind and we do judge people who are addicted to all kinds of things, although in different ways to different kinds of substances.

 

Dr. Throsby  09:46

There are kind of acceptable addictions: to exercise, for example, is much more acceptable than cocaine. I think there's that shift, but also I think, for me, it tells us that we have to be really careful with any attempt to define. Not that definitions don't have functions. We have to kind of have provisional definitions for lots of things but we have to be really careful with those and ask who is being excluded. Who is being brought into the center of vision, who then becomes the focus of intervention. I think where sugar is concerned, this becomes really important, because some people and certain groups of people are seen as more liable to be seduced by sugar than others.

 

Dr. Throsby  10:41

It's incredibly classed, and it's incredibly gendered. I think as soon as we start thinking about those models, we need to think about who are they speaking about? Who is considered vulnerable in those kinds of definitions and in those models? Who becomes the target of intervention, and surveillance, when we're deciding what counts as addiction?

 

Jen Lumanlan  11:11

Thinking about the neuropsychological view of addiction, then, it seems like if it's something that's inside ourselves that we can't help, then the most appropriate way to deal with that is to deal with supply. If you can cut off the supply, then the person won't have to deal with their brains inability to cope with whatever is happening. I think we've seen that play out in the story of drug addiction we're now also seeing that related to sugar and thinking about Dr. Goran's book, where we're talking about reducing the quantity of sugar that we're taking in, and things like soda taxes, and those kinds of mechanisms - companies voluntarily reducing the amount of sugar and salt in their foods. We're seeing this play out already. What implications does that have if what we're saying is that a neuro psychological view of addiction is not necessarily the right way of looking at it, because it's ignoring all these cultural and social factors?

 

Dr. Throsby  12:21

There are many appealing aspects to this kind of neuro scientific approach to it in that by saying it's actually not a matter of willpower, for example. If you're saying it's about how the brain is structured and operating, that it's kind of beyond your control in some way. It's not just a failure of will. It's not a moral failure, in that sense. It has a lot of appeal, I think and I think in many ways, it's been mobilized as an attempt to try and shift blame away from individual failings, to think about the broader structures that might expose people to particular drugs or foods or whatever, but I think the analogy between drugs like cocaine, and oriental tobacco, and sugar starts to break down in these terms because you can't abstain from food.

 

Dr. Throsby  13:25

Some people are in a position to control what is in their food to some extent. You could. I know a lot of people do completely remove added sugar, for example, but they're still eating sugar. You can't abstain in the same way. You can certainly reduce but we don't think about wouldn't it be great if people had slightly less cocaine. We think about them as they need to stop having cocaine because you can't have a little bit. A lot of people feel the same about tobacco for example, you have to stop and so on. Alcoholics, obviously, are told  you must not have any. I think this is where the analogy breaks down.

 

Dr. Throsby  14:13

In the UK, when Action On Sugar, which is an anti sugar organization in the UK, they launched in 2014 and they launched with the taglines that sugar is the new tobacco, which was a direct invocation of addiction of addictive properties, plus health harms from then consuming, but even Professor Graham McGregor, who's the Chair of Action On Sugar, sort of later on in the newspaper commentaries said "Yep, we know it's not really like tobacco." It's different but but we said it for emphasis. It circles back to the effect of it. The social effect of saying that it's addictive is flagging up a great big warning.

 

Dr. Throsby  15:10

At the same time, still actually, even through the neuroscientific model, shifting responsibility back onto the individual. It's your responsibility as an individual then to, to know the dangers of sugar, and to find ways to restrict your consumption and to make the right choices. And so even though it seems to lift the responsibility, like almost all environmental arguments about sugar, about soda taxes and everything, in the end, it always comes back to individual choices that you could stop it if you wanted to which, for me is part of the problem of the way that sugar is being figured.

 

Jen Lumanlan  15:55

Why is that part of the problem?

 

Dr. Throsby  15:58

It ignores the social context within which consumption occurs. If we look, for example, at people living in poverty, with very little choice over how to eat, when to eat, what to eat, because of lack of money, lack of time, they're often working multiple jobs, might not be able to afford to have a fridge, might not be able to afford to put the oven on. There's over a million children eating out of food banks in the UK.

 

Dr. Throsby  16:35

By making it a matter of individual choice, and by focusing on sugar - I think this for me is another problem of talking so explicitly about sugar - is that it closes down the other conversations that I think we need to be having, which are about inequality, and poverty. And so you often hear people say, you know, okay, people who are poor, are more likely to be fat, and more likely to have higher sugar consumption. Yes. And that's fairly well documented, but a government policy response to that is usually, "Ah, so we must target the poor people with our anti sugar, anti fat interventions, rather than saying, how can we make people less poor?" I think, by focusing so exclusively on sugar as the problem to be solved, it actually stops the conversation...

“Storytelling? I’m already reading books to my child – isn’t that enough?”

Your child DOES get a lot out of reading books (which is why we’ve done a several episodes on that already, including What children learn from reading books, How to read with your child, and Did you already miss the boat on teaching your toddler how to read?.

But it turns out that storytelling benefits our relationship with our child in ways that reading books really can’t, because you’re looking at the book rather than at your child. If you ask your child what kind of story they’d like you to tell, you also get incredible insight into both their interests and concerns – I can attest to this, as I’ve been singing story-songs about poop and various kinds of baby animals who can’t find their mamas on and off for several weeks now (we had an incident a few months back where she couldn’t find me in a store).

In this episode we also discuss the ways that people from different cultures tell stories, and what implications this has for them as they interact with our education system.

 

02:35 Where to start in supporting your child's learning

07:20 Introduction of episode

08:00 History of storytelling

12:25 Approaches in censoring the stories of our children

14:36 What are the benefits of storytelling

25:25 Why we should tell stories

31:05 2 short stories Kendall Haven used in his book Story Proof

35:45 Ideas to convey

 

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00:01

If we want our children to have the best chance to live fulfilling lives, that can you keep up with all the books and scientific research on parenting, and fit the information into your own philosophy on how to raise kids. Welcome to Your Parenting Mojo, the podcast that does the work for you by investigating and examining respectful research-based parenting tools to help kids thrive. Now welcome your host, Jen Lumanlan.

Jen Lumanlan 00:38

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we get going with today’s topic on the subject of storytelling, I wanted to let you know about a little something I’ve been working on for a while now.  I think I’ve mentioned before that I was working on a Master’s in Education – well, I’ve finished that now and I’m actually not in school at the moment which is both amazingly freeing and rather strange.  I’ve mentioned before that after we made the decision to homeschool our daughter, whenever anyone asked me about homeschooling, they would always ask me the same questions, so I created a course to help families figure out whether homeschooling could be right for them – you can find more info on that at yourhomeschoolingmojo.com if you like.  But a lot of friends said “homeschooling sounds awesome, but I could never do it,” or “homeschooling sounds awesome but I don’t want to do it,” or just “we’re committed to public schools.”  When I asked them to tell me more about this they invariably expressed some kind of anxiety about this decision – kind of a “we’re committed to public schools but….” – they’re worried about class sizes and a lack of funding and the quality of the education their child will receive. And I thought to myself: “hmmm…what if there was a way to take everything I’ve learned during a master’s in psychology and another in Education and make it relevant to people who are committed to public school for whatever reason, but who recognize the limitations in the system and want their children to come out of public school among the 40% of 12th-graders who can read and do math at or above a proficient level, and not among the 60% who are at a basic or below-basic level.  Parents want to imbue their children with a love of learning, but research has shown that the toddlers who couldn’t stop asking questions basically stop being curious by about third grade.  Instead of asking why things happen or how things work, they learn that their job is to answer the teacher’s questions, rather than to ask their own.  And when I interviewed parents, I also found they didn’t know where to start in supporting their child’s learning – they’ve been reading to their child since birth, and they taught their child how to count, but they just have no idea what to do next.

Jen Lumanlan 02:34

So I took what I learned during those degrees, and I did a whole lot of research outside of them, and I talked with Principals and teachers and parents and I asked them what challenge they had had.  What challenges they had in teaching, and in parenting children in school, and in teachers and parents working together, and in catching small problems before they become really big problems, which I found actually doesn’t happen all that often – it was way more common than I’d thought for something to go unnoticed for quite a while and even once it was noticed, to take quite a while to fix.  It really wasn’t uncommon for a student to lose the better part of a year of learning waiting for testing for learning disabilities, or while being bullied, or simply because they had a personality mismatch with their teacher.  I took all of the research on those topics, and a number of others besides, and I made a course for you lovely people that will give you the tools and support you need to prepare yourself and your child for the transition to and first year or two of school.  It helps you to understand the different ways parents can participate in their child’s education in school and which are associated with better learning outcomes.  It digs into the neuroscience of learning, and especially of learning reading and math, so when your child stares at you blankly after you try to show them a new concept you understand what connection is missing in their brain. It looks at homework and whether children should be getting any of it, and gives you the data you need to work with administrators to establish homework policies that are actually grounded in research.  It shows you the critical components of a life-long love of learning, and shows you how to support the development of these through activities connected to school as well as those outside of school.  And best of all, it does all this in a way that doesn’t make you think “Holy cow, here are another 300 things I need to teach my kid; I can’t keep tabs on it all or do it all and it’s stressing me out just thinking about it,” but rather “If your child is having problems with X, here are some things you can try.”  It helps you to see what things you might be able to change in schools if you want to put the energy into it, and which ones are probably here for the long haul.  And we have an awesome group on Facebook that thinks through these issues together in a supportive way.

Jen Lumanlan 04:35

So what’s it like to be in this course?  Well, I’ll quote a couple of the people who have been through it: Kesha from Oklahoma, who is actually a Your Parenting Mojo listener, sent me an email after she finished the section on the neuroscience of learning and said “I LOVED this section on the neuroscience of learning, it made so much sense, provided so many pointers, and gives tools I can definitely use to find better ways to make new things we learn relevant to my son. I had a really hard time doing that before but I think using his interests, then finding ways to tie different subjects to them, and letting him lead me through how he’d like to demonstrate his learning are concrete, easy to apply tactics. This course is amazing!” And Kathryn in the U.K. said: “I had been worried about the transition to school but this course was both tremendously reassuring and inspiring. It both makes very clear the limitations of the school setting but empowered me to see what I can individually do to make the most of the experience. It also, refreshingly, makes clear that perfection is not the goal. Instead it provided me with the knowledge and ideas to find and make the most of opportunities to extend my daughter’s learning according to her own unique needs and interests.”

Jen Lumanlan 05:44

I’m looking for a few more people to test the course for me before I launch it out into the wider world and I wanted to give my listeners a first shot at doing that, and also to give you a special discount on it as well.  The first twenty people who go to JenLumanlan.com, that's L u m a n l a n, and click on supporting your child's learning in school chorus can use discount and use discount code BETA-60-OFF will get $60 off the $199 price, so the price is just $139.  Once again, that’s Jen Lumanlan - L u m a n l a n .com. Click on supporting your child's learning in school, enter the discount code BETA-60-OFF at checkout.  If you subscribe to the show via my website then you actually got the link and the discount code in your newsletter last week, so you can find it there, and if you’re hearing this for the first time on this episode then just click over to the page on my website for this episode at yourparentingmojo.com/storytelling and all the information is right there for you.  I’m looking forward to getting to know a lot more of you in the course!

Jen Lumanlan 06:52

On to our topic of the day: we’re working on a couple of different series of episodes at the moment – I like to mix them up a bit in case you’re not interested in a particular topic so at least you only get bored every other week rather than every week… We’re currently in the middle of two series of episodes – one on the importance of play, and the other on storytelling. This topic hadn’t even been on my radar until I did a paper on discourses in education for my master’s in Education. Today we’re going to cover why we should tell stories, and in an upcoming episode, we’ll talk about how to learn and tell stories which we differentiate from reading stories because we do learn them and tell them rather than reading them.  If you’re anything like me, you might think that you’re not sure you really need this episode.  It wasn’t until I started researching it that I learned about the powerful impact that storytelling can have on our children’s lives, and even on their academic outcomes, and why I wanted to share this with you. I also want to give you a heads-up episode has some content that you might not want children to hear.  No swearing; just some concepts that are more suitable for adult ears only.

Jen Lumanlan 07:55

Let’s start with the story of stories – how did stories orginate?  Researchers think that at one time everyone was a storyteller, but as human society became more complex, people started to specialize in one form or another of the arts – like drama, dance, or music.  People who had a good sense of timing, a good command of language, and a memory to hold it all together became a community’s storytellers.  One theory holds that the stories became so exaggerated that they had to be told in the third person for the teller to retain some sense of modesty, which gave rise to the hero tale.  Storytellers weren’t just entertainers – they were geneologists, historians, and keepers of culture. The first written record of an activity that appears to be storytelling comes from what is known as the Westcar Papyrus, recorded between 2,000 and 1,200 BC, in which three sons entertain their father, who had built the pyramids, with strange stories.  Stories wended their way through history – the first known heroic epic, (Gilgamesh), Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, through the traveling master storytellers of Ireland and Wales who knew would each have known 350 stories during the period of the Roman Empire, to the height of storytelling in Western Europe when professional organizations of storytellers would hold storytelling competitions in the Middle Ages.  After the printing press was invented in 1450, storytelling in Western cultures started on a down-slide from which it really hasn’t recovered.  The written word is now the primary way Western people communicate with each other, and oral traditions (as well as the people whose cultures rely on them) are really looked down upon.

Jen Lumanlan 09:27

The one use we seem to still have for stories is telling them to children – librarians told stories to children to integrate immigrants into the U.S. in the early twentieth century and to inculcate the new residents with their new country’s values, and a history of storytelling in this period is basically a series of life histories of notable children’s librarians.  What was once a way that culture was transmitted to all people had become a way to, in the words of Russian author Kornei Chukovsky: “foster in the child, at whatever cost, compassion and humaneness – this miraculous ability of man to be disturbed by another being’s misfortunes, to feel joy about another being’s happiness, to experience another’s fate as one’s own.”  Sharing a story is a very different experience than reading it by oneself, and in general all people, even adults, enjoy these experiences – which is why we go to the theater and attend concerts, but Westerners have mostly gotten out of the habit of getting together to share stories.  Sharing a story may make the story more enjoyable and also enhance the relationship because the story is an object of shared attention.

Jen Lumanlan 10:28

And what kinds of stories do we share?  Parents sometimes wonder at the unsavory ideas expressed in folk tales – including one-dimensional good and evil characters and stereotypical depictions of women and people of color, as well as violence.  Psychologists believe, though that the confines of the story – the “once upon a time” at the beginning and the “The end” at the end help children to know that what is happening in the story is not real, and that children can safely experience ideas and emotions through stories that they couldn’t do in real life.  Folk tales actually weren’t originally intended for children; even the Brothers Grimm’s original edition of fairy tales published in 1812 was intended for adults.  Almost immediately people started to read them to children, so the Grimms edited the stories for children by censoring out some of the violence and sexuality.  For example, in the 1812 version of the story The Frog Prince, the frog just wants to get into bed with the princess – the story is openly sexual.  Psychoanalysts subsequently imposed their own ideas about why children find these stories appealing: because they give children permission to express “complex, unconscious, infantile fantasies about sexual wishes, anger, guilt, and fear of punishment within the family.  It is unacceptable to consciousness for these to be explicit so they are expressed symbolically.”  The frog in the story represents the princess’s revulsion toward the male member, which she must overcome before she gets married. Some authors note that the Grimms thought that sex was unsuitable in stories for children but violence was perfectly acceptable, although some changes have to be made – it wouldn’t be appropriate for a mother to starve her children to death in the forest so the mother became an evil stepmother in Hansel and Gretel.

Jen Lumanlan 12:06

Now I have to admit that I got to this point in researching this episode and I thought to myself “what the heck are we teaching our children in these fairy tales?”  That’s when I reached out to Dr. Deena Weisberg of the University of Pennsylvania; you heard my interview with her a few weeks ago.  I was surprised to learn that, in general, she’s not a huge fan of censoring the stories we read to our children, although I do think there are a few approaches you could take with this.  One would be to read the stories anyway – some researchers believe that hearing a scary story from a trusted adult leads to intense feelings of anxiety and excitement, with a happy ending enabling relief and a return to safety.  This can allow traumatic experiences to be portrayed and intense emotions to be experienced safely.  I would think, though, that the suitability of this approach very much depends on the child – my own almost four-year-old cries when one friend might not see another friend again in a story, so I don’t think we’ll read original fairy tales anytime soon – but some children *enjoy* being scared and might get a lot out of this experience even at a young age. Another approach would be to share the Disney-type versions of the stories which are fairly effectively sanitized for the worst of the sex and violence, as long as you don’t think too deeply about how the parts of the story that are edited out – things like how Sleeping Beauty gets pregnant (she was raped by a married man) or that Quasimodo’s master has Esmeralda hanged in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, or that the sea witch cuts out the Little Mermaid’s tongue in the original version of the story.  You could read original versions of stories but change the worst-offending ideas on the fly as you go, although to my introverted, slow-thinking brain this would be more stressful than anything.

Jen Lumanlan 13:41

The other thing you can do is just pick different stories.  There are *so many* stories out there that you can choose one with messaging that you support and that your child will enjoy.  There’s plenty of time down the line for your child to get to the gory stuff, when they decide they’re ready for it.  This actually fits with the way that stories were used in previous generations, which is as one more tool in our toolbelt of ways we can support our personal development, and this means we can select a story for a particular purpose in a particular context.  These stories can take a couple of different forms – firstly, we might choose to learn a particular story in which we find a lot of meaning that is important to us.  The other thing we can do is to tell what is called family stories, which are the stories of our own families, and I should acknowledge here that I’m indebted once again to Dr. Laura Froyen for introducing me to this term because I hadn’t previously heard of it.  We’ll talk about family storytelling in our next episode in this series. So what are the benefits of storytelling, given that it currently is not prioritized in our culture?  Storytelling isn’t as common among Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (or WEIRD) families as it is in families from some other cultures, and I believe that this is because people in WEIRD cultures have chosen to prioritize the ability to read above the ability to share stories.  Because schools happen to also prioritize the ability to read, likely because the systems in schools were set up by and primarily for the benefit of the dominant culture in WEIRD societies, which are White children, White families’ preparation of their children thus dovetails nicely with the skills their children will need once they get to school.

Jen Lumanlan 15:16

Families from other cultures value different kinds of information sharing, and I want to tell you about an incredibly powerful lesson I learned during my Master’s of Education.  I had the opportunity to choose one of five theorists who work on the topic of discourses, and in this context a discourse is the vocabulary and symbols that are used when thinking about and understanding a specific topic.  It’s like a “kit” of ideas that surround a concept and the way we think about it, and we can show ourselves as members of a group or as people who are outside a group using the way we describe that group. I actually had the option to pick a theorist who is working in the...

Way, waaay back in Episode 3, we wondered whether we had missed the boat on teaching our babies to read (didn’t you teach your baby how to read?). We eventually decided that we hadn’t, but given that many parents have a goal of instilling a love of reading into their children, what’s the best way to go about doing that? And what if your child is the kind who wriggles out of your lap at the mere sight of a book?

Our second-ever repeat guest, Dr. Laura Froyen, helps us to delve into the research on this topic. We conclude by talking through some of the things parents can do to promote a love of reading, because it turns out it’s not as intuitive as one might think!

Dr. Froyen's  11 Ways to Support Your Child in Learning to Read PDF guide.

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Burchinal, M., & Forestieri, N. (2011). Development of early literacy: Evidence from major U.S. longitudinal studies. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson Handbook of Early Literacy Research (Vol. 3). (85-96). New York: Guilford.

Bus, A.G. (2003). Social-emotional requisites for learning to read. In A. van Kleeck, S.A. Stahl, & E.B. Bauer (Eds.), On reading books to children: Parents and teachers (3-15). New York: Guilford.

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Evans, M.A., & Saint-Aubin, J. (2011). Studying and modifying young children’s visual attention during book reading. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson Handbook of Early Literacy Research (Vol. 3). (242-255). New York: Guilford.

Fletcher, K.L., & Reese, E. (2005). Picture book reading with young children: A conceptual framework. Developmental Review 25, 64-103. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kathryn_Fletcher2/publication/223236320_Picture_book_reading_with_young_children_A_conceptual_framework/links/0912f503ce1f9d05ec000000.pdf

Landry, S.H., Smith, K.E., Swank, P.R., Zucker, T., Crawford, A.D., & Solari, E.F. (2011). The effects of a responsive parenting intervention on parent-child interactions during shared book reading. Developmental Psychology 48(4), 969-986. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul_Swank/publication/51831766_The_Effects_of_a_Responsive_Parenting_Intervention_on_Parent-Child_Interactions_During_Shared_Book_Reading/links/0912f5097cf5ddf41c000000.pdf

McBride-Chang, C. (2012). Shared-book reading: There is no downside for parents. In S. Suggate & E. Reese (Eds.), Contemporary debates in childhood education and development (pp.51-58). Abingdon, U.K.: Routeledge.

Morow, L.M. (1993). Literacy development in the early years: Helping children read and write (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Notari-Syverson, A., (2006). Everyday tools of Literacy. In Learning to Read the World: Language and literacy in the first three years (61-78). Washington, D.C.: Zero to Three.

Otto, B. (2008). Literacy development in early childhood: Reflective teaching for birth to age eight. Long Grove, IL: Waveland.

Phillips, L.M., Norris, S.P., & Anderson, J. (2008). Unlocking the door: Is parents’ reading to children the key to early literacy development? Canadian Psychology 49(2), 82-88.

Reese, E. (2012). The tyranny of shared book-reading. In S. Suggate & E. Reese (Eds.), Contemporary debates in childhood education and development (pp.59-68). Abingdon, U.K.: Routeledge.

Rosenkotter, S.E., & Wanless, S.B. (2006). Everyday tools of Literacy. In Learning to Read the World: Language and literacy in the first three years (81-100). Washington, D.C.: Zero to Three.

Scarborough, H.S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson Handbook of Early Literacy Research. (97-110). New York: Guilford.

Schickedanz, J.A. (1999). Much more than the ABCs: The early stages of reading and writing. Washington, D.C.: National Association for the Education of Young Children.

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Whitehurst, G.J., & Lonigan, C.J. (1998). Child development and emergent literacy. Child Development 69(3), 848-872.