Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive

We've been in a liminal space for the last 15 months or so, since COVID shutdowns.  (The word 'liminal' comes from the Latin root limen, meaning threshold).   It’s a place where a certain part of our lives has come to an end but the next thing hasn’t yet begun, so we’re in a transitional state.

 

We're finally starting to see the end of this liminal state but before we can fully emerge into the new world, we need to ask ourselves: what do we want that world to be like?

 

Do we want to go back to what it was before?

 

Because the world we had before wasn't working for a lot of parents.  We were constantly rushing our children around from one activity to the next, maybe also trying to balance a career at the same time, attending thirty kids' birthday parties a year and just feeling completely spent, most of the time.

 

If we don't take the time to think about what we want life to be like when we reopen, chances are it'll look pretty much like it used to.  And that can seem safe!  It's always safer and easier to go back to what we know, rather than forward to what is unknown and scary.

 

What would something different even look like?

 

Maybe we would have fewer friends, whom we know much better.

 

Maybe we would do fewer activities, and spend a bit more time being, rather than always doing.

 

Maybe we would actually support families financially instead of having a 'families are the bedrock of our society...but you're on your own to provide for it' approach.

 

In this Mother's Day Momifesto, I explore all of these issues, and encourage you to think about how YOU want to be in this new world.

 

And if you need help figuring it out, the Parenting Membership is here to help.  We'll support you through the challenges of today (how to prevent tantrums!  raising healthy eaters!  navigating screen time!) while keeping an eye on where we want to go.  Because you need both.

 

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

 

01:27 The Mother's Day Momifesto

02:04 COVID shutdown

04:28 School reopenings

07:04 18% of women in the US have taken antidepressants

09:29 We try to control our bodies in a variety of ways

12:27 Success is defined for men

19:38 Women working communities

20:25 Plenty of parents and children's needs are not met by the school system

22:47 Intersectionality - the idea that different parts of our identities intersect

25:10 Public transit systems are geared around men

26:17 Contribution of scientific research on COVID 19- women scientists have published 19% fewer papers as lead author

29:26 Standard Body Mass Index calculations are based on the weight of White people

31:41 Nonviolent Communication

34:06 How we can begin to make a difference

44:55 Learning how to meet our own needs is a great place to start

46:44 Reopening of your Parenting Membership will close on the midnight of May 12

 

Andersen, J.P., Nielsen, M.W., Simone, N.L., Lewiss, R.E., & Jagsi, R. (2020). COVID-19 medical papers have fewer women first authors than expected. Elife 9 (2020): e58807.

Belsha, K., Rubinkam, M., LeMee, G.L., & Fenn, L. (2020, September 11). A nationwide divide: Hispanic and Black students more likely than White students to start the year online. Chalkbeat. Retrieved from https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/9/11/21431146/hispanic-and-black-students-more-likely-than-white-students-to-start-the-school-year-online

Brody, D.J., & Gu, Q. (2020, September). Antidepressant use among adults: United States, 2015-2018. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved from: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db377.htm#:~:text=During%202015%E2%80%932018%2C%2013.2%25%20of%20adults%20used%20antidepressants%20in,those%20aged%2060%20and%20over.

Brody, D.J., Pratt, L.A., & Hughes, J.P. (2018 February).  Prevalence of depression among adults aged 20 and over: United States, 2013-2016. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db303.htm

Cevic, M., Haque, S.A., Manne-Goehler, J., Sax, P., Majumder, M.S., & Orkin, C. (2021). Gender disparities in coronavirus disease 2019 clinical trial leadership. Clinical Microbiology and Infection (in press). Retrieved from https://www.clinicalmicrobiologyandinfection.com/article/S1198-743X(20)30785-0/fulltext

Coaston, J. (2019, May 28). The intersectionality wars. Vox. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/20/18542843/intersectionality-conservatism-law-race-gender-discrimination

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist policies. University of Chicago Legal Forum Vol. 1989, Iss. 1, Article 8. Retrieved from https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5780707-Demarginalizing-the-Intersection-of-Race-and-Sex

Gurrieri, L., Previte, J., & Brace-Govan, J. (2012). Women’s bodies as sites of control: Inadvertent stigma and exclusion in social marketing. Journal of Macromarketing 33(2), 128-143.

Jackson, A.S., Ellis, K.J., McFarlin, B.K., Sailors, M.H., & Bray, M.S. (2009). Body mass index in defining obesity of diverse young adults: The Training Intervention and Genetics of Exercise Response (TIGER) study. British Journal of Nutrition 102(7), 1084-1090.

Kassova, L. (2020, September 8). The missing perspectives of women in COVID-19 news: A special report on women’s under-representation in news media. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Retrieved from https://www.iwmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2020.09.16-FULL-COVID-REPORT.pdf

Lewis, H. (2021, March 18). It’s time to lift the female lockdown. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/03/sarah-everard-and-female-lockdown/618321/

Livingston, G. (2018, January 18). They’re waiting longer, but U.S. women today more likely to have children than a decade ago. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/01/18/theyre-waiting-longer-but-u-s-women-today-more-likely-to-have-children-than-a-decade-ago/

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (n.d.). Criminal justice fact sheet. Author. Retrieved from https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/

National Equity Atlas (n.d.). Car access: Everyone needs reliable transportation acces and in most American communities that means a car. Author. Retrieved from https://nationalequityatlas.org/indicators/Car_access#/

Nuttall, F.Q. (2015). Body Mass Index. Obesity, BMI, and health: A critical review. Butrition Today 50(3), 117-128.

Office for National Statistics (n.d.). Homicide in England and Wales: Year ending March 2020. Author. Retrieved from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2020#groups-of-people-most-likely-to-be-victims-of-homicide

Plank, L. (2019). For the love of men: From toxic to a more mindful masculinity. New York: St. Martin’s.

Spohn, C. (2017). Race and sentencing disparity. Reforming Criminal Justice: A Report of the Academy for Justice on Bridging the Gap Between Scholarship and Reform 4, 1690186. Retrieved from https://law.asu.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/academy_for_justice/9_Criminal_Justice_Reform_Vol_4_Race-and-Sentencing-Disparity.pdf

The New York Times (2021, April 5). As we look ahead to life after the pandemic, many people are wondering what will be different in our lives. Author. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/05/us/coronavirus-pandemic.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

The White House (2021, April 28). Fact sheet: The American families plan. Author. Retrieved from https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/04/28/fact-sheet-the-american-families-plan/

 

 

This episode grew out of a post that long-time friend of the podcast, Dr. Laura Froyen, published in a respectful parenting group that we both work in as admins.  In the post she asked people to share how they felt before and after they discovered respectful parenting, and then she created a word cloud of the results.

 

The words in the 'before' cloud were perhaps predictable - things like 'worried,' 'overwhelmed,' 'resentful,' and 'guilty.'

 

And the most common word in the 'after respectful parenting' word cloud?

 

 

What on earth is going on here?

 

In this episode I explore five important reasons why respectful parenting is so hard - and what to do about each of them.

 

If you want to make your own transformation from a relationship where your child JUST DOESN’T LISTEN to one where you have mutual care and respect for each other’s needs, then the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you. Go from constant struggles and nagging to a new sense of calm & collaboration. I will teach you how to set limits, but we'll also go waaaay beyond that to learn how to set fewer limits than you ever thought possible. Sign up for the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop.

 

Click the banner to learn more.

 

01:00 Why we find parenting so hard

01:18 Most prominent words before parents discovered respectful parenting

01:58 Five reasons respectful parenting can be hard

03:03 1st reason: Our needs that our parents just didn’t see despite doing the best they could

05:22 The trauma of unmet needs

06:09 2nd reason: The long game that is respectful parenting

08:54 Our culture trains us to want results

09:56 3rd reason: Our values and what we want to do in an ideal world

10:39 Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting

13:38 Our child's behavior brings up old trauma

14:10 Shifting the way we see our children

15:12 4th reason: When we see these values that we want to live

16:37 The tendency to engage in negative self-talk

17:58 Self-compassion and mindfulness

19:11 The last (and perhaps not the last) reason

24:47 Super short summary information.

In this Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode we meet parent Nicole, who has core values related to being empathic, constantly learning, and upholding justice in the world.  These awesome values came together in a difficult way when Nicole became a parent: she had a deep fear of not getting parenting right, so she was constantly reading and trying to find that one piece of information that would close the gap between her struggles and the kind of parent she wanted to be.

 

The stress of parenting an infant brought out a controlling side of her where she attempted to script every aspect of her (and her husband's) interactions with her child, thinking they had already screwed up parenting because he hadn't asked their child's consent before changing her diaper.

 

Nicole was raised by a single parent who had had a traumatic upbringing, and Nicole grew up sometimes feeling scared by her mother's oversized reactions to normal childhood behavior.  She knew she wanted more for her children - but didn't know what to do.  Over the last year she's been working on 'reparenting' herself so she doesn't have to parent from a place of fear any more, and can relax into understanding her children's feelings - and her own and her partner's feelings as well.

 

If you want to make your own transformation from a relationship where your child JUST DOESN’T LISTEN to one where you have mutual care and respect for each other’s needs, then the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you. Go from constant struggles and nagging to a new sense of calm & collaboration. I will teach you how to set limits, but we'll also go waaaay beyond that to learn how to set fewer limits than you ever thought possible. Sign up for the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop.

 

Click the banner to learn more.

 

 

03:19 Nicole's background

04:36 Nicole's parenting beliefs and values

06:31 Teaching respect by giving respect

08:07 Fear and anxiety of not getting parenting right

09:32 How inter generational trauma show up in your family

11:37 The unexpected reparenting piece

13:35 How talking about death with children led Nicole to my work

15:13 Nicole's experience with the Parenting Membership

18:32 What shifted in Nicole's that made her decide to take the Membership

19:17 Realizing the most unconditional thing you can do for your kids

20:12 Relationships our complex yet we don't think that way when it comes to our relationship with our children

21:08 Nicole's incredible example of how she shows up for her children and handles things differently now compared to before

24:45 Becoming more confident in parenting

26:09 Having the language to talk about our needs

28:39 How Nicole and her husband wants to model conflict to their children

34:44 Wrapping up

 

"Do you know what happens to your body when you get older?"

 

"Um...you get hairy in some places?"

 

"Yeah...other things happen too.  We'll get you some books."

 

That was what I learned about sex education when I was seven - I was always grateful that I learned it from my parents (who were pretty terrified to talk about it,  I think) rather than from the other kids at school.  But then the topic wasn't mentioned again until I was about 18, with a vague reference to "being careful" with my first boyfriend, whom I wasn't even sleeping with yet.

 

Friends: we have to do more than this if we want our children to be able to show up in relationships as fulfilled human beings who understand what pleasure is, how to ask for it, and how to give it.

 

We need our children to know that sex does not have to equal intercourse, and that there are a whole host of ways to enjoy our (and each other's) bodies without doing this if we don't want to do it (when they're ready for it!).

 

And we need to help our children understand boundaries so they can protect themselves when they need to - without getting so caught up in the shame that pervades our thinking about sex.  (Since the sex = shame narrative is deeply pervasive in our culture I don't think we can overcome it completely, but we can make a start...).

 

In this episode we build on our conversation with Charlotte Rose about sex for us parents to go (far) Beyond Sex Ed with sex educator Dr. Nadine Thornhill, whose direct, fun, engaging style will help you to see that you, too, can have conversations about sex and pleasure with your own children.  You can find more information on Dr. Thornhill's work on her YouTube channel where she addresses topics from what happens if the kid walk in on parents having sex to whether first time sex always hurts, as well as on Instagram.

 

If you want to make your own transformation from a relationship where your child JUST DOESN’T LISTEN to one where you have mutual care and respect for each other’s needs, then the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you.

 

Go from constant struggles and nagging to a new sense of calm & collaboration. I will teach you how to set limits, but we'll also go waaaay beyond that to learn how to set fewer limits than you ever thought possible. Sign up for the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop.

 

Click the banner to learn more.

 

 

00:01 Setting Loving and Effective Limits Workshop

02:18 Where we’re at with our mini-series on issues related to sex

03:34 Introducing our guest, Dr. Nadine Thornhill

04:54 The importance of continuing the conversation about sex beyond the basic topics

09:17 Figuring out what kinds of things I need to teach my children and how

12:22 The value of showing our vulnerability to our children

14:45 Talking about the traditional ways we talk about sex and how can we change that narrative

19:03 Having conversations around pleasure of the non-sexual kind

23:27 Modelling intimacy to our children without overdoing it

25:41 Helping our children set boundaries even when we’re having trouble setting boundaries ourselves

31:53 Dr. Thornhill’s son’s case of the “hangry” and how he came to develop recognizing physical signs before he gets hangry

33:41 Talking about shame associated with the White, Christian view of sex

40:34 Talking about bodies and nudity that doesn’t rely on shame

43:07 Going a little deeper into consent and the Authentic Consent Framework

50:48 The House and the Superintendent Metaphor

53:23 How parents can leave more space and be supportive of the potential suite of options about a child’s sexuality

57:46 Should we wait to teach our children about aspects of sex and sexuality until they ask?

01:02:11 Wrapping up

 

 

 

After dinner a few days ago, Carys randomly started telling us that if we want to understand some of the things she's feeling, we should cast our minds back to when we were children and remember how we would have felt about it at the time.  The conversation continued as we explored more of her feelings when she's having difficult moments, and at some point someone (recollections differ on exactly who it was!) suggested we record a podcast episode about it.

 

Carys was immediately on board and wanted to do it right away, but we came back to it the next afternoon.  She thinks that parents often don't understand how their children are feeling and she'd like suggest ways to help your children when they're behaving in a way that may seem 'difficult' to you.

 

Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits

If you want to make your own transformation from a relationship where your child JUST DOESN’T LISTEN to one where you have mutual care and respect for each other’s needs, then the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you.

 

Go from constant struggles and nagging to a new sense of calm & collaboration. I will teach you how to set limits, but we'll also go waaaay beyond that to learn how to set fewer limits than you ever thought possible. Sign up now for the self-guided Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits. Click the banner to learn more.

 

01:00 My special guest in her podcasting debut

02:18 What helps to understand your kid's feelings

03:18 Feeling the physical sensations of frustration

03:42 What Carys feels when she get 'that feeling'

04:19 Parents don't really understand that children sometimes want to be alone

06:07 Different kids deal with things in different ways

07:34 Our new method for when we disagree on things

10:37 We have rewards now

11:46 Carys's thoughts on problem solving

 

Today we build on episodes that we've done in the past on talking with children about the basics of sex (so when you listen to this episode we're assuming you've got the basics covered - things like using anatomically correct names for body parts and taking basic steps to prevent sexual abuse).

 

This is the first in a mini-series of episodes that digs deeper into topics related to sex.  Here we talk with Charlotte Rose, co-host of the Speaking of Sex podcast by the Pleasure Mechanics, about what and how we adults learned about sex.

We talk about the shame that pretty much all of us learned to associate with sex (and how to overcome that), and what we can do to improve the chances of having sex with our partner - even if we're feeling so tired that this currently seems out of the question.

 

We're setting the stage here to approach sex from a less pressured, more fun perspective - which will help us in an upcoming episode to figure out what we want to discuss with our children about sex, sexuality, and pleasure.

 

(01:00) Today's topic and Parenting Membership reopening announcement

(02:20) Setting Loving and Effective Limits workshop announcement

(03:55) Chris and Charlotte Rose the Pleasure Mechanics

(05:16) The primary focus of today's episode

(06:09) Sex isn't what it used to be before we became parents

(08:39) Responsive desire and spontaneous desire

(09:17) Erotic simulation and how there is nothing wrong with your sexual relationship

(11:54) Creating a culture of pleasure within your relationship

(14:42) Continual consent - it doesn't always need to lead to sex

(15:34) Sex is adults at play

(17:37) Sex educations centered around abstinence, secrecy, and shame and how we move forward from that

(20:39) A parenting opportunity to create a different culture for our children, so that they have to unlearn so much less with regards to sex

(22:35) How does shame show up in parents' sexual relationship?

(25:21) So much judgment about sexuality and how it gets in the way of our connection with our partner

(29:04) A culture of community care to have these conversations

(29:49) Initiation and refusal/rejection

(34:36) Mindful sex: How to enjoy sex more

(39:27) Finding that balance when having the sex conversation with our children

(42:23) Giving kids the building blocks so that they can have an experience to healthy sexuality when it is time for them

(45:39) Experiencing self massage in a non sexual way

(50:16) Body neutrality

(51:36) Wrapping up

 

Here are the resources we discussed on the show:

 

Charlotte & Chris' free online course The Erotic Essentials

Conversation starters about sex

Podcast episode on spontaneous vs. responsive desire

Podcast episode on mindful sex (making sex better through focusing on the present)

Podcast episode on body image

 

 

AASECT therapist referral directory

Peer-reviewed article on the 237 reasons people have sex

Guy Winch's TED Talk on How to Practice Emotional First Aid, as well as more explicit resources on why rejection hurts so much - and in peer-reviewed form too

Research on mindful sex

Outspoken Sex Ed

 

 

The Parenting Membership

FREE Setting Loving and Effective Limits Workshop

 

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Jen  00:02

Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want her children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research on principles of Respectful Parenting. if you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen to You, and What to Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.

 

Jen  01:00

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have a bit of a different episode lined up for you today, and if you usually listen to the show with your children around, you might want to reconsider that one today because we're going to be talking about S-E-X. And now we have thousands of little kids around the world asking, "What's S-E-X?" So before we get started with this awesome conversation, I wanted to let you know about a couple things happening in the Your Parenting Mojo world. Firstly, open enrollment for the Parenting Membership is coming up starting on May 2. The membership helps families to take information from the podcast and provides the guidance and the support that you need to help you implement these ideas in your own home with your own family. So whether you're struggling with parenting at the moment and wondering how much longer can things keep going like this, or if you're seeing the vaccine-related light at the end of the tunnel and thinking it's not going to be like this forever, and you're looking for tools to support you through that transition, as well as the normal day to day challenges that will still keep coming up as we all get back to real life, the Parenting membership provides the support that you need to not just survive, but thrive in your parenting journey. I’ll share more in the coming weeks. But in the meantime, you can go to YourParentingMojo.com/ParentingMembership to learn more about the membership. And while you're there, you can join the waitlist if you'd like to be the first to be notified when it reopens.

 

Jen  02:20

For those of you who might be interested in the membership but would like to dip a toe in the water first or if you can't wait and you need help ASAP then I have some news for you there too. i've just reopened registration for my Setting Loving and Effective Limits Workshop. Normally this is available to pay for and work through at your own pace, but starting Monday, April 26, I will walk you through the whole thing in a series of exercise to help you see limits in an entirely different way. You'll have a little bit of reading and a short exercise to do each day for five days and a supportive community that isn't on Facebook to ask questions and get answers in the community as well as through a masterclass call, where you'll get the chance to ask me questions directly. if you find yourself setting a lot of limits on your children's behavior and they aren't listening to you or they're actively defying you. in the workshop, you'll learn how to cut the number of limits you set by at least half while also not becoming the dreaded permissive parent whose child walks all over them. Parents who go through the workshop report that the tone of the interactions they have in their family makes a huge shift after they learn these tools. And suddenly their children who used to resist every single little thing, are now willing to do amazing things like cooperate, and collaborate, and compromise. So if you could use some more of these things in your life, then head on over to YourParentingMojo.com/SettingLimits to register for the FREE Setting Loving and Effective Limits workshop. Registrations open now and the workshop get started on Monday, April 26. I’ll see you there.

 

Jen  03:55

So we were supposed to have two guests today, Chris and Charlotte Rose, who are a couple and who are known as the Pleasure Mechanics, and they are also the host of the podcast Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. And unfortunately Chris is in some gastrointestinal distress and is unable to join us today, but Charlotte has gamely agreed to appear with us, and we're hoping that Chris will be available on a future date to continue the conversation. So I found Chris and Charlotte in a really random way because I was exploring a blog post that therapists Dr. Esther Perel had written called the 7 Verbs That Shaped the Way You Love., and we were looking at that in the Parenting Membership Community because one of the important ways that we've learned about these verbs is through our relationships with our children. And we learned about these through our interactions with our parents. And so the most interesting and useful analysis that I found that super short blog post was in a podcast hosted by our new friends Chris and Charlotte and when I started digging into their work, I realized that I wanted to explore so much more about the ways that our children learn about being in relationships as well as about sex from us. And so I’m not just talking about the anatomically correct terminology and how to spot sexual abuse because we have done episodes on both of those things but how to help children understand boundaries and communication and pleasure in their intimate relationships.

 

Jen  05:16

And so today we're going to focus primarily on the parents angle at this and then we will have more guests, hopefully Chris and some other guests as well in the future, looking at how our children learn about this and what our children are learning and what we want to be teaching them about this. So to formally introduce them, Chris who wishes she were here and Charlotte who is here have very similar bios. Reading through their bios, they both studied Sociology as undergrads, then Sexological Bodywork and then Somatic Sexology and then erotic massage and they've been creating online resources on erotic education since 2006. The internet was a thing in 2006. And they're also parents of a six-year-old so welcome Charlotte today and welcome in spirit to Chris as well.

 

Charlotte Rose  06:04

Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here and yes...

 

Charlotte Rose  06:06

Chris is so sorry not to be here but hopefully you will chat another moment. Yeah.

 

Jen  06:06

Yeah.

 

Jen  06:09

Yeah I hope so too. Awesome! Well we are really glad to have you here and we're wondering if maybe we can kind of ease into this topic with something that I’m guessing affects a lot of parents and maybe you're not immune from this either despite all of your training and that is that sex probably isn't what it used to be before we became parents. And we actually use the term kind of broadly in our lives B.C. to mean Before Carys which is our daughter's name and so we might say something like "Oh, we used to do X like mountain biking Before Carys - B.C. -  and of course sex is one of those things that can fit into that framework as well. And so I’m curious with all the people that you work with I’m sure many of them are parents, how common is this in among the people that you work with?

 

Charlotte Rose  06:52

It is so common and I really want people to know that that it is so normal and it makes so much sense that it is harder to prioritize sex in these early years of having kids especially some experts say that up to kind of when your youngest kid is four or five that your life just is so different in this area and it makes sense like our focus of attention is so on this little being all of a sudden and that changes the relational dynamics entirely in your family, in your relationship. We just don't have enough time to take care of ourselves to rest to sleep. Our hormones have changed our experience of our body has changed. Even for non-carrying parents which is also interesting to think about like the oxytocin levels we're getting from looking at our baby is nourishing in a way and we sometimes don't need it as much from our partner and somebody can feel left out because of that. There are just hundreds of dynamics going on depending on your specific family but the similarities are that it is extremely hard to create time and have the energy to be able to really cultivate this part of our life. And we really like to remember that there are seasons of sexuality in our lifetime and that this one is a harder one and partly if we can go at it knowing that that's normal and that we want to stay connected as much as possible so when we get to the other side of that we still want to be having sex with this person and that we feel connected and supported enough that we are interested and want to keep our sexual relationship going. I also want to tell people that like I cannot tell you how many like late 50s, 60s, 70-year-olds report they're having the best sex of our lives. So also just want to know that there is hope ahead because I found that really like surprising and interesting when I first kept hearing this message.

 

Charlotte Rose  08:39

But one of the important things I want people to know to be able to shift this slowly and to try and increase the amount of connection and intimate connection we can be having is to really know about this idea of responsive desire versus spontaneous desire because this is something that has been studied and it's so important to know. So we have this cultural idea that we experience desire first and then arousal. And often that is how men experience arousal but that's not even always true. But in reality there is this whole... so it's sort of like a lightning bolt hits you...

 

Jen  09:14

Yeah like how it happens in the movies.

 

Charlotte Rose  09:17

That's how we think of right like what happens in Hollywood films so we've been trained like that is what sex is and anyone who deviates from that is broken or not normal and there's something wrong with you. But in reality there's this whole other way of being with our desire and arousal where we're not that

Do we really know what implicit bias is, and whether we have it?

This is the second episode on our two-part series on implicit bias; the first part was an interview with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, former Dean of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and co-creator of the Implicit Association Test.

But the body of research on this topic is large and quite complicated, and I couldn't possibly do it justice in one episode.  There are a number of criticisms of the test which are worth examining, so we can get a better sense for whether implicit bias is really something we should be spending our time thinking about - or if our problems with explicit bias are big enough that we would do better to focus there first.

(03:38) Is implicit bias baked into our bodies?

(06:27) About the Implicit Association Test (IAT)

(08:13) Criticism of the IAT and Dr. Banaji’s response

(12:48) Blindspot and the inception of the IAT

(13:41) We make judgements about individuals based on how they look

(14:12) We often say things that aren't true, even if we think we are truthful

(16:01) The premise of the IAT and how it works

(18:13) Conflicting definition of what implicit bias is

(19:40) Meta-analysis of implicit bias

(33:16) Implicit bias on the decline in recent years

(35:37) The persistent problem with IAT

(42:59) From macro-issues to the micro-issues of IAT

(53:54) My takeways

Implicit Association Test

[accordion]

[accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]

Jen  00:02

Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want her children to lead fulfilling lives but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of Respectful Parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.

 

Jen  00:59

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we start this week's episode, I wanted to take a minute to thank you for being a part of this parenting journey with me and to share a quick update on where things stand with the podcast after four and a half years now. What is that saying? The days are long and the years are short? It certainly seems to be the case here. And well for some of you listening, this may be the very first episode that you're listening to, there are many others who have been with me for the entire 132 plus episodes that I've created to date. We're close to surpassing a million and a half downloads from all around the world, and my goodness, it's a bit strange to even say those words aloud given that I started the show with basically no idea whether anyone would be interested in listening. And it's such an honor to me when you recommend the show to your friends and to other parents at your daycare or preschool. When you share specific episodes that have helped you to find the answers that work with your family and your online communities. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that developing Your Parenting Mojo, which is now the podcast episodes, blog posts, courses, workshops, membership content is more than a full-time job. I have a very small team that helps me to keep my own sanity and my husband is now involved as well. Maybe one day he'll even listen to as many episodes as some of my most dedicated listeners have. Even my daughter now signs off on her videos at home with the brought to you by YourParentingMojo.com. And as the word continues to spread, more and more parents are making transformative lasting change using the methods that we talked about here on the show. We are big cohort in the current Taming Your Triggers workshop who are supporting each other and understanding the sources of their triggered feelings. And just a week or two in they were already reporting the ability to create space for responses to their children that fit with their values, where that just hadn't seemed possible before. And I'm very happy to share that the Parenting Membership open enrollment is just around the corner and will run from May 2 through May 12 in time for celebrating Mother's Day, while the learning membership is going to reopen later in the summer. The community of parents that have already enrolled in the Parenting Membership continues to grow and it's a great resource of knowledge and support and community to help anyone who's looking to apply the ideas and strategies that you hear on the podcast in your own family at home. So I'll share more as we get closer to open enrollment. But for those of you who want to learn more or to join the waitlist, feel free to go to YourParentingMojo.com/ParentingMembership. And thanks again to each and every one of you who have joined me on this parenting journey over the last four and a half years. I learn and I grow every day as a parent and it's amazing to share all this with you.

 

Jen  03:38

So let's get into our real topic of the day, which is part two of our miniseries on implicit bias. Today we're going to continue to open a real can of worms that's already half opened, and that I had no idea that I was about to open when I started researching this episode. So I've been interested in the connection between the brain and the body for some time now, and I'm planning a series of episodes to explore this topic in some depth. And one aspect of this is related to knowledge that we hold in our bodies rather than in our brains. And as I started to explore that idea, I was thinking about intuition, which we often experience as a felt sense in our bodies rather than a decision that we make in our brains. And that led me down a path toward understanding the role our gut plays in what we know. But another branch of this path led me to the topic of implicit bias because I was thinking, Okay, if we start relying on our brains a bit less and trusting our bodies a bit more, how can we know that this will lead us in a direction that's actually aligned with our values? What if implicit bias means that listening to our bodies actually takes us away from living our values because our bodies have implicit bias baked in so deeply?

 

Jen  04:43

Now I've read the book Blind Spot: The Hidden Biases of Good People by doctors Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald some years ago, but I hadn't dug into the research behind it at the time. The book's premise is that we have visual blind spots, which are places where visual information is missing, but our brains fill in the gaps without us realizing it, which can be seen when a person whose visual cortex has been damaged and they can't see an object like a hammer in front of them, but if you ask them to reach out and grasp it, then they'll be able to do it. The author state that a parallel idea exists with non-visual stimuli as well, they say and I'm going to quote "Rather than an effective visual perception, this book focuses on another type of blind spot, one that contains a large set of biases and keeps them hidden just as patients who can't see a hammer can still act as if they do. Hidden biases are capable of guiding our behavior without our being aware of their role. What are the hidden biases of this book's title? They are for lack of a better term bits of knowledge about social groups. These bits of knowledge are stored in our brains because we encounter them so frequently in our cultural environments. Once lodged in our minds, hidden biases can influence our behavior towards members of particular social groups, but we remain oblivious to their influence. In this book, we aim to make clear why many scientists ourselves very much included, now recognize hidden bias blind spots as fully believable because of the sheer weight of scientific evidence that demands this conclusion. But convincing readers of this is no simple challenge. How can we show the existence of something in our own minds of which we remain completely unaware?" The book goes on to describe a test called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, which was designed by Dr. Greenwald and modified by both authors over the years, starting when Dr. Banaji was Dr. Greenwald’s graduate student.

 

Jen  06:27

And so I'd known about what is the Race IAT  for a number of years, there are actually now quite a few of them on topics ranging from age to religion to body weight. The landing page at implicit.harvard.edu, which is where these tests are housed, doesn't say much about the purpose of these tests. You have to click into the About the IAT page to see the description that "The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts, for example, Black people, gay people, and evaluations, for example, good and bad, or stereotypes, for example, athletic or clumsy. The main idea is that making your responses easier when closely related items share the same response key, the IAT scores based on how long it takes a person on average, to sort the words in the third part of the IAT versus the fifth part of the IAT. We would say that one has an implicit preference for thin people relative to fat people if they are faster to categorize words, when thin people and good share a response key, and fat people and bad share a response key relative to the reverse."

 

Jen  07:25

I think I’d even taken the Race IAT once before, a long time ago, which is the version of the test that most people assume you’re talking about when you mention the IAT.  I don’t remember for sure what the result was but I assume it gave the result that it gives about 75% of people who take it, which is to say that they have implicit bias against Black people.

 

Jen  07:44

I came back to the book again and poked around on both Dr. Banaji’s and Dr. Greenwald’s websites to see what they had been up to recently.  I noticed that the most recent publication on Dr. Banaji’s website was co-authored with Dr. Yarrow Dunham, whom we met way back in episode 28 on how social groups form, which is linked to implicit bias.  I emailed him and asked if he would be kind enough to introduce me to Dr. Banaji, which he was, and she quickly responded to say that while she was too swamped for an interview she’d be happy to answer three or four questions.  So: so far, so good.

 

Jen  08:13

Now, Pretty often when I reach out to researchers I’ve been able to get an overview of the concept and of their work but I haven’t yet done a deep dive, because if they say ‘no’ then I will have wasted several days of prep work as I’d have to find someone else to ask and then have to do a deep dive into *their* work.  So after Dr. Banaji agreed to answer some questions I reread Blindspot, and thirty peer-reviewed papers on implicit bias, and some really well-written articles in the popular press (and some not so well-written ones as well), and then things got a bit difficult.  I want to give a special shout-out to journalist Jesse Singal, who wrote a really excellent piece on the topic of the research behind the IAT in an online magazine called The Cut.  I had it open in my browser for a while as I was digging into the peer-reviewed literature and when I finally came back to it I found he had already coalesced a number of the thoughts that were swirling in my brain and had pointed to many of the studies I had by then found “by myself,” and directed me to a few more besides.  He also reached out to a number of the researchers who have been involved in quite a drama of dueling analyses about the IAT which has played out in peer reviewed journals over the last decade or so (dramas in the peer reviewed journal world tend to unfold in slow motion!).  It’s been a drama because there seems to be a great deal of uncertainty about whether the IAT measures what it says it measures, and whether that has any practical significance in the real world.   I ended up actually writing the majority of this episode’s content to try to explain to myself what this web of findings was, and I sent the text to Dr. Banaji along with some succinct questions and she responded that she had never met an interviewer who had done more in-depth preparation and would I like to talk?  So I said yes, I very much would, and you’ve already heard the outcome of that interview in a recent episode, where hopefully you got a good grounding in what the IAT is and how it works.

 

Jen  09:56

And we'll cover a bit more on that in a few minutes. But I have to say that I was highly hesitant to try to do anything that looked remotely like challenging the research on which the IAT sits because of something that appeared toward the end of Jessie Singal’s article in The Cut.  He emailed Dr. Banaji with some questions about the kinds of methodological questions about the IAT that we’re going to look at in this episode, and he says she “repeatedly asserted that criticisms of the IAT come from a small group of reactionary researchers, and that questioning the IAT is not something normal, well-adjusted people do.”

 

Jen  10:30

He goes on to quote her directly: “Of course it annoys people when a simple test that spits out two numbers produces this sort of attention, changes scientific practice, and appeals to ordinary people. Ordinary people who are not scared to know what may be in their minds. It scares people (fortunately a negligible minority) that learning about our minds may lead people to change their behavior so that their behavior may be more in line with their ideals and aspirations. The IAT scares people who say things like “look, the water fountains are desegregated, what’s your problem.”

 

Jen  11:01

[…]

 

Jen  11:01

By and large I operate on the view that I need to pay attention to REAL criticisms of the IAT. Criticisms that come from people who are experts – that is[,] people who understand the science’s assumptions about response latency measures. People who do original work using such methods. I’m sorry to say this but we are all so far along in our work that I at least only read criticisms from people who are experts. I don’t read commentaries from non-experts. There’s too much interesting stuff to do and too many amazing people doing it for me to justify worrying about a small group of aggrieved individuals who think that Black people have it easy in American society and that the IAT work might make their lives easier. The IAT as you know is not about any one group, but this small group of critics ignore everything other than race, and it may be a good idea to find out why that may be the case.”

 

Jen  11:47

Now, if you've been listening for a while, I’m sure you can see the red flags going off in my conflict-avoiding mind already – I’m not an expert; I don’t do original work in this area, and thus she wouldn’t read any commentary or criticism that I proposed, which is why I didn’t get into any of this in the conversation with her.  So I want to be clear what we’re trying to do here.  This is NOT an expose of the IAT, or of Dr. Banaji.  I’m really grateful that she took the time to talk with me, and I’m grateful to Dr. Yarrow Dunham for connecting us.  But I believe strongly enough that the interview we conducted doesn’t tell the whole story of the IAT that I’m going to try to dig more deeply on it here so we can understand whether implicit bias is really something we should pay attention to.

 

Jen  12:28

So, in this episode my plan is to walk through what the research says about what implicit bias is, and how it’s measured, and why that’s important, and what implications this has for how we and our children interact with the world.  I should mention that the research base on this topic is absolutely massive, and even what has now turned into two episodes isn’t really enough to do it justice.

 

Jen  12:48

So our story starts with the creation of the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, and that story is told in Dr. Banaji and Greenwald’s book Blindspot.  A substantial chunk of the book is about convincing you that you have blindspots – that you and I, just like everyone else, don’t perceive things in the way they actually happened.  So, for example, if you’re on a jury in a murder trial where the defendant is accused of drunk driving, and an eyewitness says that the defendant staggered against a table and knocked a bowl to the floor as they left the party they were both at then you might believe the eye witness, but if the eye witness says “On his way out the door the defendant staggered against a serving table, knocking a bowl of guacamole dip to the floor and splattering guacamole on the white shag carpet,” you’ll be more convinced of the defendant’s guilt.  Vivid details make information more memorable (which, incidentally, is why stories in children’s textbooks often contain little snippets of vivid detail – they make the material easier to remember, which helps the child pass the test more easily).

 

Jen  13:41

We also make judgements about individuals based on how they look, and while we might think we’re pretty good at it we’re actually not researchers have asked research participants to judge the trustworthiness of people shown in photographs, they don’t do much better than chance at discriminating between Nobel Peace Prize recipients and criminals who have appeared on the TV show America’s Most Wanted.  A lot of the time we make judgements about people based on what social group they are in, which is why Dr. Dunham’s work is relevant here – you might want to revisit episode 28 on how social groups form for a refresher on that.

 

Jen  14:12

And then a chapter of Blindspot talks about how often we say things that aren’t true, even if we think we’re a pretty truthful person, such as the answers to the question “how are you?” which was a big cultural shock to me when I got to the U.S. because the person asking the question had often already walked by by the time I could even think about an answer, because they didn’t really want to know the answer to the question, which means the answer we give is pretty much irrelevant.  We might lie and say we don’t have any cash on us when a person on the street asks us for money or tell a telemarketer that we aren’t home when we were the one who answered the phone.  We may lie to the doctor when they ask how often we exercise, or how many drinks we have each day, or whether we’ve ever used illicit drugs.  We try to manage the impressions that other people have of us,

-Dr. Mahzarin Banaji

 

What is implicit bias?  Do I have it (and do you?)?  Does my (and your?) child have it?  And if we do have implicit bias, what, if anything, can we do about it?

Join me in a conversation with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, former Dean of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and co-creator of the Implicit Association Test, for an overview of implicit bias and how we can know if we (and our children) have it.

This episode will be followed by a second part in this mini-series where we dig deeply into the research, where results are complex and often contradictory.  Stay tuned!

 

(01:00) An intro of  Dr. Mahzarin Banaji

(02:58) What is implicit bias?

(07:48) Differentiating bias that you are aware of and bias that you aren’t aware of

(08:56) Describing the Implicit Association test

(18:11) What the research says about where implicit bias comes from

(24:50) Development of group preference from implicit association

(32:18) Group bias and its implications towards individual psychological health

(40:44) What can be done to potentially prevent implicit biases from developing?

(46:56) Some good progress with society’s bias in general and areas that need working on

 

Resources:

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People

 

[accordion]

[accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]

Jen  00:02

Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.

 

Jen  00:06

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

 

Jen  00:29

If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE.

 

Jen  00:42

You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.

 

Jen  01:00

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we're going to look at the topic of implicit bias. Now I've been thinking for a while about running a series of episodes on the connection between our brains and our bodies because I've been learning about that and the wisdom that our bodies can hold and wondering, well how can we learn how to pay more attention to our bodies? And then I started thinking about intuition. And I wondered, well, how can we know if we can trust our intuition? What if our intuition is biased? So I started looking at the concept of implicit bias and it became immediately clear who I should ask to interview Dr. Mahzarin Banaji. Dr. Banaji studies thinking and feeling as they unfold in a social context with a focus on mental systems that operate in implicit or unconscious mode. Since 2002, she has been Richard Clarke Cabot professor of social ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where she was also the Chair of the Department of Psychology for four years while holding two other concurrent appointments. She has been elected fellow of a whole host of extremely impressive societies and was named William James Fellow for a lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology by the Association of Psychological Science, an organization of which she also served as president. Along with her colleague, Dr. Anthony Greenwald. She's conducted decades of research on implicit bias and co-authored the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.

 

Jen  02:21

I should also say that there are a lot of issues that we only got a chance to skim over at a fairly high level in this conversation, which I'm recording this introduction afterwards, because Dr. Banaji was quite pressed for time. And I'm planning to release an episode that follows up into these issues and dives into them at a much deeper level soon. So please consider this part one of a two-part conversation with you.

 

Jen  02:42

Alright, let's go ahead and get started with the interview.

 

Jen  02:45

Welcome Dr. Banaji. Thanks so much for being here.

 

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  02:48

Hi there.

 

Jen  02:49

So I wonder if we can start out by understanding a bit more about what implicit bias is. I hear it all over the place, and can you help us to just define what that is, please?

 

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  02:58

Sure. So implicit bias, quite simply, is a tendency in every human being to favor one individual over another, one social group over another, and to do so without conscious awareness, or without the ability to be able to exert conscious control over the judgement that one is making. So let's just break the phrase down into the two words that constitute it. The word implicit and the word bias, okay? Bias, what is it? It's simply for us a deviation from neutrality, it is privileging one option over another, right? If I say I prefer blue to red, I'm biased in favor of blue, and not in favor of red relatively speaking. So that for us is what a bias is. And implicit just means that that favoring of red over blue or blue over red is something that I'm not even aware of. It's just that when I go into a store, I pick up clothing that is all blue rather than red. That put together tells us that implicit bias is a deviation from neutrality in ways we ourselves would not be happy to see ourselves doing. If it's in the domain of color, who cares whether I prefer blue to red or red to blue but imagine now that it's not blue and red. Imagine that it is a native born child in the classroom, and an immigrant child in the classroom. And even though I as a teacher believe very much that both should be treated equally that is to say, if they do something good, I should reward both equally. If they did something that's bad behavior, I should reprimand them equally, I should encourage both equally to pursue new things in their lives. I should support both of them equally to meet their goals and so on. A deviation from neutrality would mean that I'm doing these things both the good and bad things in order to teach a child something, that I'm doing them selectively, that I'm doing more for one category over another. So that's all biases. And teachers are so well intentioned, just like parents, what they want is the best for all of the kids in their class. And so when we discovered that a teacher may not be aware but is systematically calling on certain people in the classroom, or saying, "Aha!" or "Good idea!" to some rather than others, then we would say it's implicit. And as you can imagine, teachers, by and large, are very good people and so when they're biased it is almost always without their awareness.

 

Jen  05:41

Okay, so is this lack of awareness perspective, that's really the key, then?

 

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  05:45

That's exactly right. And the reason this is interesting is because if you look in almost any society, but let's just take American society or the Western world or whatever, some large group of people, you will notice that explicit forms of bias have been coming down, at least in what people say on a survey. If you say to a teacher, "Do you think that native born children are just inherently smarter than immigrant children?" The teacher will likely say, "No, I don't believe that that is the case at all. I think all children are talented in all these different ways." So if you measure it explicitly, if you say, "Tell me is this immigrant kid better or worse than this native one kid?" You will not see any evidence of bias. But when you sit in the back of the classroom, and you just measure what the teacher is doing, who the teacher looks at who the teacher says nice things to who the teacher calls on, and you see that there is a systematic difference, then we say we must become interested in this, because the child is experiencing these good and bad things the teacher is doing, but the teacher has no awareness. And think about the child. What does the child think is going on? The child might think I'm bad, or I'm good, right? And that's why we should be interested in both kinds of measures, what people say to us directly, and also what they may not be able to say because they don't think they're that way.

 

Jen  07:10

Okay, I'm wondering if we can just pull that apart a little bit. And we're sort of using teachers as an example. But this could just as well apply to managers or anyone in any situation. I can understand if a researcher were to come and say, "Do you think that native born children have different capabilities than immigrant children?" Then, I understand the correct thing for me to say in that moment is "No, of course not." But I may still be thinking that and I may have awareness that I'm thinking that. So I'm trying to understand the difference between an explicit bias that I know it's not a socially correct thing to say, and implicit bias that I might not be aware of, how can I parse that difference?

 

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  07:48

Yeah, it's a great question. For now, I would say, an explicit bias is something that you know, even if you don't say it to other people, but you know. So let's say that I believe that boys are better at math than girls are. But I'm not going to say that because I don't want my girl students to hear that or feel bad about that. And so I'm not going to say it, but I think it and I'm able to consciously put those words together in my mind, boys are better at math than girls, I know that. As long as that is the case, we would say it's consciously accessible to you. Your mind is capable of saying A is better than B or whatever and to do that to yourself, at least. What makes it implicit is when you say boys and girls are equally good at math, I believe it. You never say to yourself; boys are better at math than girls. But if we look at some other aspects of your behavior, who you spend more time teaching a difficult math problem to, etc., then we would say it is.

 

Jen  08:56

Okay, perfect. Thank you for helping us to understand that distinction. And so then I wonder if we can go from there into the Implicit Association test, which is something you've spent a bit of time working on over the years. Can you tell us what that is? And how does that measure implicit bias?

 

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  09:11

Yeah. So as you can imagine, your listeners and you will easily see what the problem is. A person, if asked genuinely and truly says, "I have no bias." And when you measure their judgments and actions in some way, you're seeing a systematic effect. How do you measure that? When the person themselves is saying no? In psychology, we've relied for over 100 years on what we call explicit measures. If you want to know something about what a person is thinking, ask them. How stressed are you feeling? Okay. Well, sometimes maybe I can tell you that I'm feeling stressed. But there are lots of studies where people like me say that they're not stressed at all and you'll see me breaking out into hives or something, which is a response to the stress. Now you have to have a measure of those hives, you have to be able to measure skin complexion, you know, when one is stressed and not stressed and say whether the person knows it or not, there is some physical response that we can measure. What can we do when the response we are looking for is locked up between our ears in a box that is not easy to penetrate? So the first thing to do is to just imagine the difficulty of trying to even track anything implicit and the measure that you mentioned, the one that we are most familiar with, and the one that I believe today is the dominant measure of implicit cognition in the science as a whole is the Implicit Association test, and I'm one of three co developers of that test. The test has a very simple assumption that underlies it. The assumption is that when two things in our experience have come to go together repeatedly, they're joined in time and in space, let's say, that they become one for us. If when I see bread, there is usually a bowl of butter, bread and butter come to be associated when I think bread, butter comes to mind more quickly than some random word like water, or couch or something like that. So that's very easy to understand and neuroscientists, actually, in order to teach people how neurons in our brain fire after having learned something, they teach it to us by the phrase, if it fires together, it wires together. And we use that when we teach how learning occurs. By firing together, it means in the same moment, if neurons for bread and butter becoming activated, your brain learns that there's something about these that go together, and that's how we learn everything. We learn, you know, that mother and father are a unit, like bread and butter, but we also know certain experiences we have in the presence of something. When I see flowers, I feel happy, and flowers becomes associated flowers almost become synonymous with good, even though the words that we might use to capture goodness have nothing to do with flowers. So you know, not just words like beautiful or peace or joy, but if we use words like you know, angel, or satisfied, or whatever that have no semantic relationship to flowers, those words should become more easily accessible in the presence of flowers because our experience has made them repeatedly be associated. Unlike insects, when we think of an insect, we think yucky, I mean, unless you're a five-year-old boy, yes, I will put them aside for a moment. And say that, yes, that may happen. But even young boys, when they take our test, if it's flower or insect, they have learned that in our culture, flowers are good, and insects are bad. So all we've done is made a test that measures the strength of association between insects, and bad and good flowers and bad and good. Okay, that's what the test is. And now we can begin to go beyond the test by keeping the test logic identical. If I have you look at flowers on a computer screen and press a key - left key when you see flowers on the right key when you see insects - very easy for you to do that. Now I'm going to say okay, not just flowers and insects, but words are going to pop up on the screen words like love and peace and joy, good words, or bad words like devil and bomb and war and things like that. And your job is to use the same key to say flower or good words, and the same key, now a different but the same key when you identify an insect, as having appeared on the screen, or a bad word is having appeared on the screen. Now, if flower and good have truly become one in our minds, this should be a very easy task. Left key for flowers left key for good. Right key for insect right key for bad, right? That's easy. But now let's switch. This is the moment in the test when people groan because I'm saying to them left key for flower and left key for bad things, right key for insect and right key for good things. And they can't do it. By can't do it I mean, they can, but it takes them a whole lot longer to do this and they make many more mistakes when they do this. I show this bias, you show this bias. You know, even entomologists who study insects and love them, show it but to a lesser extent than we do. So they acquired the cultural thumbprint that says insects are not as good as flowers, but because they love insects and they work with them. They show a lower anti insect bias.

 

Jen  14:51

Fascinating.

 

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji  14:52

Okay, so now, the logic of the test should be very clear to people, and they will mostly agree in fact, everybody will agree that this is a decent measure of whether we like flowers or insects. And when the data come back and tell you, you have a strong preference for flowers over insects, people nod their head and say, "Yes, I do." There's no quarrel with the test. The quarrel with the test emerges when we replace insect and flower with Black and White faces, Asian and White faces, fat and thin people, people who are Native Americans and European Americans. And sometimes when we even change the good and bad words, to be things like bad and good things like weapons and musical instruments or something like that. Is it easier for me to associate, you know, certain groups with bad things and certain groups with good things? And the startling result is that for people who have, and I would say, genuinely have no explicit bias, now, I can't say what your explicit bias is, because you may think that you think that you know, male is better than female, but you may not be willing to tell me, but I'll take myself, I know that explicitly, I do not believe that Black is bad, and White is good. I know that for sure because it's me, and I can tell myself the truth about what I consciously think. And yet for people like me, who seem to have no explicit bias, this test throws us a curveball, because it demonstrates that people like me are not able to associate good with Black as easily as we can associated with White. And when that happens, it's troubling to us. It's troubling because it doesn't feel like the test is telling us anything true about ourselves. I don't blame people who say what a stupid test is just telling me, you know, it's just all complete lies. I felt the same way when I first took the test. I thought, "What's wrong with this test?" Obviously, I'm the great Mahzarin I'm not biased, so if the test is telling me I am, something's wrong with the test. And you know, a few minutes later, I came to my senses and I realized it's not the test that's the problem. It's my head that's the problem. I have accumulated all this learning two things have gone together, it fired together, it wired together.

 

Jen  17:22

Okay. All right. Well, thank you for that. And I think there's a lot of different pieces to come up from that, that we're going to get to in due time as we go through the conversation, but I'm wondering if maybe we can start with “Where does this come from?” Because in preparation for this interview, you sent me an epic paper that you had written with one of your grad students, and the reference list alone was enough to make me weep when I saw it,

-Diana Winston

 

Meditation is touted as being a cure-all for everything from anxiety to depression to addictions.  But is it possible that all this is too good to be true?

 

In this episode, meditation teacher - and former Buddhist nun! - Diana Winston guides us through what we know of the research on meditation that's relevant to parents.  It turns out that the quality of much of this research isn't amazing, but this may not matter to you if you're thinking of starting a meditation practice because the opportunity cost (a few minutes a day) is so low and the potential benefits are so high.

 

We walk through a basic meditation that you can do anywhere, and no - it doesn't involve sitting cross-legged with your thumb and first finger held in a circle and saying 'ommmmmm....'.

 

I was skeptical about meditation too - until I tried it.  Perhaps it might help you as well?

 

If you want to:

😟 Be triggered less often by your child’s behavior,

😐 React from a place of compassion and empathy instead of anger and frustration,

😊 Respond to your child from a place that’s aligned with your values rather than reacting in the heat of the moment,

 

the Taming Your Triggers workshop will help you make this shift.

 

Join us to transform conflict into connection and reclaim peace in your parenting journey.

 

Click the banner to learn more!

 

 

02:36 Introducing Diana Winston

03:39 Defining Mindfulness

05:25 Distinguishing between mindfulness and meditation

06:26 How can mindfulness benefit me?

08:05 Self-hatred as a Western concept

12:27 The practice of mindfulness rooted in religion and cultural appropriation

13:57 The research on mindfulness

17:27 Why is it so hard to study mindfulness?

19:33 Mindfulness vs science as tools of observation

21:26 The benefits of mindfulness to parents and children

28:04 Improving parent-child relationships through mindfulness

30:27 Working in mindfulness practices in the context of communities

35:52 Practice mindfulness now with this quick walkthrough

42:46 Sit Still and It Will Hurt Eventually

 

Taming Your Triggers Masterclass

 

 

Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group

 

D’Andrea, W., Ford, J., Stolbach, B., Spinazzola, J., & van der Kolk, B. (2012). Understanding inter-personal trauma in children: Why we need a developmentally appropriate trauma diagnosis. American Journal of Orthopsyhchiatry 82(2), 187-200.

Goessl, V.C., Curtiss, J.E., & Hofman, S.G. (2017). The effect of heart rate variability biofeedback training on stress and anxiety: A meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine 47, 2578-2586.

Miller, A. (2006). The body never lies: The lingering effects of hurtful parenting. New York: Norton.

Tippet, K. (2019, December 26). Bessel van der Kolk: How trauma lodges in the body. On Being. Retrieved from:https://onbeing.org/programs/bessel-van-der-kolk-how-trauma-lodges-in-the-body/van der Kolk, B. (2017). Developmental trauma disorder: Toward a rational diagnosis for children with complex trauma histories.

Psychiatric Annals 35(5), 401-408.van der Kolk, B. (2016). The devastating effects of ignoring child maltreatment in psychiatry: Commentary on “The enduring neurobiological effects of abuse and neglect.”

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 57(3), 267-270.van der Kolk, B.A., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., & Spinazzola, J. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A randomized controlled trial.

Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 75(6), e559-e565.van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Penguin.van der Kolk, B., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., & Spinazzola, J. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A randomized controlled trial.

Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 75(6), e559-e565.van der Kolk, B. (2006). Clinical implications of neuroscience research in PTSD.Annals – New York Academy of Sciences 1071(1), 277.van der Kolk, B., & van der Hart, O. (1989). Pierre Janet & the breakdown of adaptation in psychological trauma. American Journal of Psychiatry 146(12), 1530-1540.

 

 

 

 

 

 

01:00 This episode’s rationale

03:12 The two ways trauma shows up in broader family relationships

05:27 The separateness of the brain and the body has a long history in Western culture

06:05 Rene Descartes on the schism of mind and body

07:12 The held belief of the mind as superior to the rest of the body

08:09 The inherent bias of data

09:42 The lies our brain tells us

12:54 The so-called 4 ‘truths’ of the physical experience of trauma

16:22 When we are not attuned to the signals that our body is giving us

19:01 Difficulty in identifying feelings for people who experienced trauma

22:16 Saying OK when you aren’t really OK

26:19 The difference between reacting and responding

27:10 Using physical experience to bring order to the chaos in our minds

31:15 The first step to creating a safe environment for your child

33:26 The root of our inability to create meaningful relationships

34:18 Equipping ourselves with the tools to regulate our arousal

 

 

 

 

Boscarino, J.A., (2004). Posttraumatic stress disorder and physical illness: Results from clinical and epidemiologic studies. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1032, 141-153.

Fuchs, T. (2018). Ecology of the brain: The phenomenology and biology of the embodied mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hull, A.M. (2002). Neuroimaging findings in post-traumatic stress disorder: Systematic review. British Journal of Psychiatry 181,102-110.

Sledjeski, E.M., Speisman, B., & Dierker, L.C. (2008). Does number of lifetime traumas explain the relationship between PTSD and chronic medical conditions?  Answers from the National Comorbidity Survey-Replication (NCS-R). Journal of Behavioral Medicine 31(4), 341-349.

Wolfe, J., Schnurr, P.P., Brown, P.J., & Furey, J. (1994). Posttraumatic stress disorder and war-zone exposure as correlates of perceived health in female Vietnam war veterans. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 62(6), 1235-1240.

Zoellner, L.A., Goodwin, M.L., & Foa, E.B. (2005). PTSD severity and health perceptions in female victims of sexual assault. Journal of Traumatic Stress 13(4), 635-649.