Transcript of “Praise That Encourages Intrinsic Motivation”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be talking about praise. It’s an interesting topic. It can be confusing because there’s a lot of different advice out there. A lot of it is these really strict do’s and don’ts: don’t say these certain words, don’t do it this certain way. And a lot of those don’ts are actually against our instincts, so that makes it doubly hard to navigate. One thing my mentor Magda Gerber always said is, children don’t need big hooplas. And she recommended that we acknowledge, rather than praise. One thing I loved about Magda was she was all about clarity and simplicity, she didn’t use complicated terms. But she was very exacting in the words she used to communicate; maybe that’s because her original degree was in linguistics.

If we think about it, acknowledge, that’s something that we do that’s really about noticing what our child is doing, noticing what they’re accomplishing. So they have ownership, and we’re just the ones noticing. With praise, we’re more subjective. It’s more about us imbuing what we see—our child’s accomplishment, their activity—with certain qualities. We are giving it a certain value. So it’s more about us than just acknowledging is. Which isn’t to say that we should only ever acknowledge and never, ever praise. Children need a little of both, I think. They want to know what we think sometimes. And one way to be able to discern that for ourselves is to wait for them to ask us what we think, look up at us for that acknowledgement.

But I can understand why Magda emphasized acknowledging over praising. Because she put such a high value—and so do I, I’ve learned the value of it and that it’s really possible for us to nurture it—on intrinsic motivation. And it’s kind of a delicate thing, intrinsic motivation. We can, without meaning to, sort of take that away from our child and make it more about them pleasing others, like us. So we just want to be a little more careful with praise, that’s all. That we’re encouraging our child to still have ownership and not subtly taking that away from them.

Hari Grebler, my friend and associate and my first RIE teacher, she was a recent guest on this podcast in an episode called Every Child, Even a Tiny Baby, Needs Time On Their Own. She has an Instagram page that I love, Hari’s RIE Studio. And she did a post recently, it was just a little video clip, and this was the message on it: It’s okay to be quiet while children are creating. Wow, that’s something kind of surprising to a lot of us. That frees us, right? We don’t have to say something to encourage them. We can just be quiet and honor what they’re doing.

And then she said: When they show you one of their creations, you could ask how they thought to do that. So when they’re asking for feedback, when they’re showing something to us and sharing it with us, then we’re interested in where that came from in them. What made you want to make that? We’re still encouraging the intrinsic desire to make that, instead of labeling it with some kind of praise or qualification of our own. And what that also does is encourages our child to stay in touch with that creative part of them. We’re showing that we value that by asking about it, we’re interested.

Hari also notes: They can get hooked on our oohs and ahs. And why do we ooh and ah sometimes? Because we feel like we’re supposed to, we’re supposed to say something! They’re going to feel discouraged if we don’t talk about what they’re doing, right? That’s a fear that a lot of us have, but it’s not the truth.

The next thing she says: Don’t interrupt them. When children are creating something, just the way that we create or focus on an activity, focus on a skill, we’re in it. And we want to encourage children to be in that flow of what they’re doing. So when we go, Ooh, ah, we’re interrupting that, which makes it a little harder for them to have that longer attention span. They can become accustomed to being interrupted. One of my most popular early posts I wrote is called Baby, Interrupted, and it’s all about that.

Then she says: Never (and I don’t hear a lot of “nevers” coming from her!) never ask them what it is. So, why wouldn’t we want to ask a child what it is? We do want to ask them what it is sometimes, right? Because we’re seeing from this product mentality that we tend to have as adults: You must have been trying to make a thing here. But children, they’re in the process and they’re interested in what it feels like to be painting on this piece of paper, what the brush is doing, what the colors are doing, or whatever they’re working on. They’re interested in what’s going on moment to moment and—especially very young children—they’re not trying to make a finished product. They’re not trying to make something, they’re just making. And they’re into the making of it, openly exploring. All qualities that we want to encourage, right? So it can be counterintuitive for us, but it’s so much more encouraging to not try to get them to zero in on, You have to make a thing here. You have to make something that looks like something, that you can call something, that represents something. You can’t just explore what’s inside you. Big difference, right?

Of course, this is specifically about creative projects, but it really holds true with all kinds of skill development that our children are doing. They’re figuring out a process, and they’re learning. As Magda Gerber said, they’re learning how to learn every time they get the opportunity to do this.

And then Hari says: You could ask them to tell you about their drawing, but that’s even over the top sometimes. Because that’s putting pressure on them. Maybe they don’t have words to describe their drawing, right? Adults that create things can’t always talk about what they’re doing, or they don’t want to.

Finally she says: When I did art with kids at preschool, I would just play with color, abstract, so as not to distract them from their own work. Mostly, let kids work. No need to put up all their work, wait until they think of it. Some children don’t care at all about the piece itself after they’re done. It’s truly the process for them. Hari shares all kinds of jewels like this on her Instagram page.

Most of us have heard that it’s not a great thing to say “good job” or to use terms that represent fixed traits, like, “You’re so smart,” “You’re so pretty,” or “You’re so great at this!” Carol Dweck did the famous study on this where children who were told that they were smart, they would perform far worse on the test afterwards than those who were praised for their effort, who were told, “You’re working so hard to get this.” But being told that they’re smart, it imposes pressure. It’s almost like, I can only go down from here. And they would fall apart and not be able to do their best. Fascinating study.

But before we start doubting ourselves too much, I recommend considering what really matters. And, as with everything to do with our relationships with children, what matters is authenticity between us. When we’re talking about what they’re doing, it’s coming from us truly paying attention, noticing and appreciating what our child does. In other words, it’s all about our intention. Because we could say the perfect words or the words that aren’t recommended. We could say, “Wow, you’re a stupendous artist!” or, “Look at all the colors you’re using!” And either way, if we’re doing this purely to try to encourage our kids, because we feel we need to say something, not because we really mean it, children will sense the difference. And this is how they can get hooked into needing that kind of empty validation. It’s empty because we’re doing it because we’re just trying to come up with something to say that’s going to make them feel good. 

That doesn’t work with other people, right? When we’re just trying to say something to make them feel good rather than really meaning it. When the people that are always authentic with us, when they acknowledge something, that feels amazing, right? Because we know that they really mean it. We want to be that person for our children if possible, and try to prevent them from falling into that trap of people-pleasing and being outer-directed.

Here’s some guidelines that I put together that have helped me in terms of praise:

First, don’t praise to deliberately encourage, acknowledge what you genuinely think, like I was just saying. And, as Hari Grebler said, it’s okay to be silent. Children can feel when we’re genuinely interested and attentive, they have a sixth sense for this. Try to trust your child.

Next, be careful about overdoing it. Big hooplas, as Magda called them, tend to make it more about us than about our child. Big hooplas for going on the potty or for eating that certain food. Those will reveal our agendas to our kids and very possibly get in the way of our child going on the potty and eating that certain food. Because now, instead of doing this for themselves because they wanted to and it felt good to make that autonomous choice, they now realize they’re doing it for us. And young children don’t like being told what to do, neither do teenagers, neither do most children. Yes, if this is truly something rare and extraordinary that you’ve seen them struggle with, they’ve worked so hard on it, you both know that—yes, make a big hoopla then, if that’s how you really feel. But save those for those momentous occasions.

Finally, don’t use praise with the intention of gaining cooperation. I see it as misusing praise. So instead of saying, “Oh, good job, good job, good job,” I would say, “Thank you.” “Thank you for helping me do that, that really helps.” Or, “You’re able to do that now with me, and that’s much more fun for me to do it with you. Thanks for your help.”

But even with good job, there are ways we can say that authentically. It’s when we’re looking into our child’s eyes with that twinkle, we’re sharing something we’re both excited about, and we’re saying, I see you and you did it. Good job. When it really means something. That feels so much better than this sort of automatic stamp of approval that “good job” can often be. Good job, good job, I want you to keep going, keep doing this for me. Children don’t need that, and it can get in the way and have the opposite result from what we’re hoping for.

And then getting back into that intention part of this again. This can be our north star: intention. It just sort of clears everything away. What is my intention and how can I achieve it? I think in most of these examples, it seems like mostly our intention is to encourage. We don’t have bad intentions here, it’s very positive. We want to encourage our kids, we want them to feel good about themselves, to have self-confidence, to know they can do things. That’s what we want, right? So here are some ways that are quite related to what I’ve been talking about, about praise, but these are surprising ways to encourage our kids.

First, don’t try; instead, trust. Encouraging kids is not this active process, as I once thought it was. It’s about facilitating rather than doing. Since, as I was saying before, children feel our presence and they sense our emotions and our intentions, trusting in them as capable, unique, evolving individuals is the most valuable support we can give them. And, as Hari Grebler said, it can be silent.

Second, don’t cheerlead. You can do it! Good job, good job, good girl, good boy! Or coax. Come on, just give it a try! Give it a try. Instead, calm yourself and reflect what you see. There’s that acknowledging. “You’re working hard on that. It’s really difficult. Ah, it’s frustrating at times, right? To try to figure that out.” Or, “You did it.” And now I just have to say, my impulse when I first became a parent was to cheerlead, for sure. It’s what I grew up with. The way my family did things is to go over the top, and I still kind of love that in a way. But I see how it interferes and how with me, it interfered with me being outer-directed, looking outside of myself for validation, not feeling self-confident. I don’t think that was the only reason, but that was part of it.

Kids don’t need as much reassurance as we think, especially if they’re not asking for it. I try not to assume that my kids need to be reassured and reassured that I’m in their corner, that I’m rooting them on. They feel if we are or we aren’t, because they’re so magnificently aware. So they feel more genuinely supported when we’re not trying to push it or sell it on them. I mean, then they can feel like they’re letting us down too, right? When they don’t achieve whatever it is.

I’ve also realized that my impulse to actively demonstrate support for my kids mostly stems from my own discomfort with the possibility that they might become frustrated or fail. In other words, it’s not my child needing this feedback as much as it’s my need to want to give it to her. And so that was a big aha! for me. Calming myself is the best way for me to keep the air clear of the pressure and the urgency that can make it seem way more important than it is to my child. And that’s going to create pressure.

Point three, don’t direct or fix. Instead, be patient, fully attentive (if we’re available to be), providing the most minimal direction needed for children to be able to accomplish self-chosen tasks themselves.

Four, don’t over-sympathize or attempt to actively comfort frustration. Instead, allow it, accept it, empathize, acknowledge feelings. Doing all those things normalizes the experience of frustration. Because it is a life experience, and if we can feel it, allow it to be, it passes, we get through it, and we become used to those walls that go up. It doesn’t feel good, but we know it’s going to pass. Or maybe we need to take a break and come back, or maybe we need to give up on it altogether that time and come to it another day or later when we’re more ready. If we offer too much sympathy and comfort, we can teach our children, without meaning to, that this is a really negative situation, a problematic situation that you need my help with, that you can’t handle, that I need you to feel better.

Five, don’t project your own agenda or your urge to get it done and done “right.” Instead, let go and enjoy the journey. Enjoy the surprises. If it doesn’t work, the child learns from that too. If we can be okay with it, they can be okay with it.

Just to continue on this idea that it’s really not about the words, it’s about our intention, and that that can be our north star in helping us to give children praise or acknowledgements in ways that are genuinely connected. I received a note. It’s not the first one I’ve received with this issue, so I thought it would be interesting to respond to regarding this topic of praise.

Hi, Janet-

I can’t thank you enough for your work. It’s been life-changing to our family, and I wish we would’ve found it sooner. We have two daughters, a four-year-old and a one-year-old. We regrettably didn’t start following your methods until our oldest was about three, but she has a great attention span and plays well by herself.

Lately, however, she’s been a constant look at me, look what I’m doing, watch this, Mom, you’re not looking!, Mom, say good job! (Which we haven’t said to her in years and do not say to her sister.) I know this has everything to do with her younger sister, who is now able to do so many things. But I find myself getting exhausted and not wanting to watch every little thing she does. I also don’t want her to feel ignored. I tell her “not right now,” but that doesn’t seem to stop the constant requests. I’ve tried, “Ah, I hear you want me to watch you, but I’m a bit busy,” but the constantly responding to her requests is just exhausting. I find myself more and more withdrawn and lost in my own mind and needing space the more she requests my attention. Other people in her life say things like, “Good job!” or, “Wow, look at you!” And I just don’t feel like it’s authentic. I cannot control how other people speak to her, but she seems more and more bothered that I don’t speak to her that way.

Any encouragement or recommendations would be so greatly appreciated.

This parent gets that certain kinds of common ways we praise children aren’t authentic. The thing is, though, they are still going to get that input. Either from us, before we started considering the way we use those words, or from someone else—relatives, teachers. And what children do when they hear or observe or otherwise experience things, the healthy thing they do is that they process these experiences out. And often they do that with us, their trusted leaders. They’re exploring it. Wow, people are getting all excited with this praise thing. They’re not articulating it this way in their mind, but, Whoa, there’s this energy around this and I’m going to explore that. What does my mother think about it?

Then, if children come up against some resistance with us around something that they’re processing, we’re either shocked or we’re angry or, in this case, we’re just kind of annoyed because we don’t want her to be hooked into that stuff. And then also, Ugh, she wants me to give her this validation that doesn’t seem authentic. And I don’t want to do it and I don’t have time. But it could have just been that very first time we could have just been like, Oh, uh-oh, she wants me to say good job. Or, She’s all into needing validation. What have I done wrong? Or, This isn’t a good sign. So there’s that little bit of hesitation on our part, that little bit of maybe disappointment or worry. They feel that resistance from us. They’re coming up against some resistance, and that can be curious. So they want to explore it further. What if I ask this every second? Why is she getting more and more annoyed? And that can become a stuck place for them.

I believe that could be what’s happening here. She’s getting this subtle pushback when she requests this kind of empty praise, so she’s getting stuck. That means she’s struggling to get that need to just process this out filled. So what I would do in this case, especially because she’s asking for it, I would give her what she’s asking for without hesitation or reservation. Which we can still do authentically, I’m going to try to demonstrate. And I’m also sure that this parent is spot on in that her child is craving that extra attention and validation because of the rivalry with her sibling. So she’s a little more vulnerable, and then now she’s getting this feeling from her mother that what she’s asking for is this kind of annoying big deal. So then she’s getting stuck there doing it again and again and again, not wanting to be this more annoying child, but that’s where it’s going.

I want to try to assure this parent that she can give that validation while still holding onto her personal boundaries. And the way to do that is we’re giving it with an attitude that’s open, welcoming, encouraging. Generous, if you will, instead of stingy. Like, Sigh, alright, I’ll say good job. “You want a good job? Sure! That’s a great job! You’re doing a great job, I’m sure of it! I didn’t see what that was, but great job!”

So just to go over this, the parent says, “Lately, however, she’s been a constant look at me, look what I’m doing, watch this.” “Look at you? You know what? I want to look at you! I have to do this for now, but I can’t wait to come look at what you’re doing. Can you hold onto that? Just let me do this first.” I didn’t stop everything I was doing to go look at her, but I had an open, welcoming attitude about it, while still having my boundary. Which helps free her from that stuck place. I’m not annoyed, I just can’t do it right now, but I’m excited to do it when I can. She says, “Watch this!” “I wish I could! I can’t wait to see you do it after I do this thing.” “Mom, you’re not looking!” “Oh, I know, I know, but I will be!”

And then, you know what? We don’t have to keep talking every time she talks. We can let it go too, but just not with that tension that I’m guessing this parent is feeling. I mean, I understand why she’s feeling that because what her child is asking for is a bothersome thing, and then she won’t let up. But she will let up, I believe, as soon as this parent lets down her guard about it and lets it be. And when she says, “Mom, say good job!” And the mom says, “Which we haven’t said to her in years and do not say to her sister.” “You want me to say good job? Good job! I’m sure you’re doing a great job.” Or if we do see it, let’s say: “Good job, that is a good job actually!” We’re still not using it the way that we don’t want to use it. We’re using it in response to her wanting us to say it. And there’s no harm in that for her.

This parent says, “I tell her, ‘not right now.’ Or I’ve tried, ‘Ah, I hear you want me to watch you, but I’m a bit busy.'” Even saying those things could be fine, but the way she’s saying them, if she’s saying them with, Oh, not right now, but I will! Can’t wait to! Or, You want me to watch you and I wish I could, and I’m sure you’re doing something amazing. I’m a bit busy now, but I’ll be with you. It’s just a different attitude. It’s an unruffled attitude, it’s a there’s nothing to fear here attitude. Me saying those words to her is not going to harm her. It’s only going to help her move through this and see that there’s no pushback coming her way, there’s no odd resistance here. Nothing is a big deal. And it’s that daily diet of the way that we respond that matters. It’s not the once-in-a-while and the aunts and uncles doing it or whoever else is doing it.

I wanted to share this because I feel like it’s a good example of us getting tripped up in words, with all our wonderful intentions, to say the right words. There’s so much focus on words in our environment around parenting. But we’ll find much more clarity and freedom when we let go of those words, so we’re able to see beyond them to what really matters. And I would love to encourage this parent and every parent listening to believe in themselves and know that, in this case, this parent, she could free herself to do both. She can respond lovingly and exuberantly and affectionately with that empty validation her daughter wants right now, while still holding her boundaries and believing in what she believes in: being authentic. I mean, that’s a great value right there, in my opinion. I’m all about authentic. That’s one of the most important things to me, and I feel like it’s underrated these days, but that’s another story.

Let’s not get ourselves hamstrung worrying about words. We can trust ourselves more if we can also trust our child. Trust their intrinsic motivation, that they don’t need us to babble on about what they’re doing. It’s not up to us to mold certain outcomes for them. We provide the environment and the relationship of authenticity and trust, and these qualities we want to mold for our child will bloom on their own. That’s what I’ve seen with my children, the families I’ve worked with. I believe in that 100%: that trying to mold the outcome will only get in our way. It’s not our role at all. Instead, when it comes to our child’s abilities, be an interested spectator. The most interested spectator. Not judgmental, just interested.

Overall, we can stay on track as parents by considering: What do we want? Not just for now, but for the years to come. What do we want? Most of us want honest, authentically and mutually appreciative relationships with our kids. And we hope that they’ll know from the inside out that they are capable, that they are valuable, that they are worthy. Not because we say so, but because we both know so.

I know that we can do this.

The post Praise That Encourages Intrinsic Motivation appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “A Secret to Helping Our Kids Achieve (Advice for the New Year)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be talking about this running thread that’s through many of the issues that parents share with me. It’s actually maybe not so much in the issues themselves, but in my thoughts about how to address these issues. These are the concerns that we have with our children’s development of skills of all kinds. Could be social skills, cognitive or motor skills, manners, character traits. We worry about those, right? Especially when kids are seemingly unmotivated, they’re not making progress, or they seem disinterested in doing things that we know that they’re capable of.

Could be a lot of things like getting dressed, building with blocks, drawing, not being welcoming to our friends and family, seeming too shy or too bossy with peers, not using good manners as we wish them to. Not interested in learning letters or numbers or learning to read. Seeming unfocused when they play, moving from one thing to another, or seeming to focus too much on this one mundane task with a toy. And even motor skill development, like when our child is still not walking at a year-and-a-half or even before that, we worry and we wonder what we can do to help.

Often the problem, or at least one element of the problem, stems from this spot-on comment that my mom used to make as a grandma. She was an excellent grandma, so into it. And I remember her saying, with her great sense of humor, when she would maybe make overtures to a child or she would be in the room when someone else was doing it, Oh, come on, give me a hug! She’d say, “Ah, I know. Oops. I want it too much, right?” Or to the other person, “I think you want it too much.” When we want it too much, our children feel that. Even when we want it a lot, our children feel that. And that can be pressurizing. Just as with all of us, or maybe just most of us, pressure can be uncomfortable. It’s nerve-wracking, unsettling, and it doesn’t set us up to learn or perform at our best.

So yes, there are exceptions for sure, but for most children, at least in this impressionable time of their life, this more open-to-us, this sensitive time from infancy right through their early teens, they need us, they need to please us. It’s a basic survival instinct that they have. So that pressure, that expectation that we have makes everything harder for them and can even delay learning, affect self-confidence and sense of self. When children know they’re not quite pleasing us, it doesn’t feel good.

The other element that goes hand-in-hand with this is our children’s healthy development of autonomy. Wanting to be their own person, especially as they start to become toddlers, and then all the way through the teenage years. They’re driven to feel autonomous, to feel a little independent of us. Of course, they still want us desperately and they want to be the ones to decide when to be independent of us. But that can get in the way of what we want, right? Because when we want our child to be able to do this thing and our child will likely feel that coming from us, it can make this side of them that wants to be autonomous say, No, they’re not going to do it. And that’s why the toddler years can be so challenging for us as parents because all of a sudden something that our child can do or usually wants, and now they’re saying no to it. What’s that about? It’s about growing up, it’s about being their own person. And it’s very, very healthy. And ideally we can try to remember to see it that way, that sort of rejecting us or things that we want for them is really integral to their healthy development.

But this is why it can be a very hard time when we’re directing our child’s toilet learning or wanting them to do things socially or all these other skills. The need for autonomy can show up there and cause children to naturally want to resist. Sort of holding themselves back from things that they could do to unconsciously make this stand as themselves, as their own separate person from us. If you want it, then I have to say no to it. That’s why children, beginning as toddlers, seem to say no a lot. They’re asserting self in this—hopefully we can see it as positive—way.

So, wanting things too much, wanting our child to do this specific thing, focusing our attention on it, worrying about it, maybe. That doesn’t help our children or help us to get what we want. And so what do our kids want? What do they need from us to be able to flourish?

It’s actually pretty simple because if we think about it, it’s what we all want from our loved ones. We want others to not only accept us as we are wherever we are in our journey, we want to be accepted wholly and loved for that. Rather than our loved ones or especially our parents wishing for more or different or the next thing in our development. So this is very simple, but it can be hard. It can be hard as parents to trust where our child is right now.

And there’s not a lot of help around us, usually. We live in a society that’s achievement-oriented rather than process-oriented, which is the arguably much healthier way that our kids are naturally, as innately gifted learners and explorers. So most of us, we’re not prone to being comfortable with the status quo. When we’re dating somebody, everybody asks, “Oh, how’s it going? When are you going to get married?” Then we get married. “When are you going to have a baby?” We have a baby. “When are you going to have another one? Are you going to have another one?”

And even a lot of parenting advice that’s out there these days is achievement-oriented. If you say these five words, your child’s going to feel better. Or, play a silly game with your child, not because you’re in a fun, loving mood that you want to share with them, but to get them to brush their teeth. Recently there was a popular post going around that said something to the effect of, The best thing you can say to your kids is that whatever grades you get in school, I’m going to love and accept you just as much. Now, there’s nothing really wrong with this, but I couldn’t help but see this from a child’s perspective. And I believe to a child, this would come off as this very kind of surface and late-in-the-game kind of message. Why is my parent saying this? Why does this need to be said? They’ve been giving me this message, or the opposite of it, through all their actions for years and years ever since I was small. Are they saying it to try to convince themselves? Are they saying it because this is kind of a band-aid that they hope will fix the years of subliminal messages that they’ve been giving me? Like when they interrupted my play to quiz me, Where’s your nose? Tell me the numbers, the alphabet song. Or when they got way more excited with my interest in reading than they ever did when I made mud pies or just played in the mud without making anything.

Children need us to show rather than tell these messages, because everything we’ve done with them has been showing them how we feel. If we really do take an interest in where they’re at, if we feel that that’s not only enough, but cool. So it’s not that we were wrong to do or say those kinds of things, but if we want our kids to be motivated in a healthy manner, from a place of confidence and comfort in their skin, knowing that they are enough because we’re making a point to show them that. And we won’t be perfect at this, we’ll need to keep reminding ourselves that actions speak louder than words. They always have, they always will.

So what do we do? Let’s say we realize that we’ve unintentionally given our child a lot of achievement messaging or that we’ve been subtly pressuring them to develop a certain skill. How do we change? Where do we begin? First of all, always, with self-compassion. With forgiving ourselves for doing something normal that almost everyone does at least a little bit, because we don’t have support to do otherwise, really. And knowing that really we’ve only been hurting ourselves, in a way, by buying into what’s encouraged around us by the greater society, by our family and friends. Isn’t your child doing this enrichment yet? Oh, they like that? You’d better give them a lesson so they’ll get better at it. We have a lot against us when it comes to trying to trust and wholly accept our children as they are. A lot against us. We don’t have encouragement, and we need it. So that’s where the self-compassion comes.

And then I recommend taking a look at some of the particulars, these things that we want so much for our child. It can be different for all of us. It’s worth exploring, right? Because, really, these things that we want a lot, that maybe we want too much, they’re a window into ourselves. They’re things that we want that we didn’t get, that weren’t encouraged in us, or that maybe we were scolded or rejected around. With that kind of self-reflection, there’s a lot we can learn about what matters to us. That’s where the healing begins. And that’s where we can start to differentiate between our child’s path—which we really don’t control at all. We can only encourage and support and hold boundaries around as needed, but we can’t decide who they’re going to be, what kind of things they’re going to like, what they’re going to want to do with their lives. So that’s where we get a clearer view of our child’s path and our own feelings, our wishes, our self-criticisms, etc.

So just as an example, and actually this note that I received from a parent is part of what stimulated me to want to talk about this today. This question kind of exemplifies what I’m talking about:

Hello, Janet-

Your guidance has fallen in line with the way my ex-wife has shared parenting with me. This framework/philosophy has not only improved the entirety of my daughter’s remaining life, but has also made my life better.

In regards to your recent episode about assertiveness, I found it, ironically, lacking in assertiveness. I’ve been in martial arts since high school, so I’m familiar with assertiveness, and I’ve “trusted the process” while trying to encourage my daughter—who’s eight—to speak up and stand up for herself. The issue is her lack of proper assertion is now starting to result in negative outcomes from interactions in her life. There has been non-zero progress, but nearly as much backsliding. I’m concerned that trusting the process is, in this case, too lackadaisical and will be harder to correct as she gets older.

Thank you for your work, and I hope you can offer some type of more specific action.

I wrote back: “Hi, thanks for your support. Can you explain your situation? Your question is too general for me to understand what you are getting at.”

And he wrote back:

Yes, sorry for being vague. I view it as a broad issue. I noticed this morning you have an episode about a strong-willed child. My daughter is strong-willed. She’s often bossy and wants to lead play on the playground. I joke she’s going to be the activities director for cruises. Paradoxically, her speaking up for herself is a skill I’ve tried to work on for most of her life. If she’s feeling cold, if there’s something she’d like to get or do, etc., it’s been some effort to get her to express herself.

It came to a head recently on the playground. A boy hugged her from behind. It was an unwelcome hug. She did nothing. Later that day, he hit her. She did nothing. This has also resulted in her grabbing things out of the hands of others, and she’s lost her cool with me once. It seems so strange, such a smart, strong-willed little girl not being able to express herself and set boundaries when appropriate.

I’ve talked with her and she agrees that sometimes her not speaking up leads to her being frustrated with people or situations, so she lashes out. Her daily behavior is phenomenal. I don’t want to misrepresent her. It’s that this is unusual behavior and increasing in frequency. I’m doing my best to get her to recognize the times she speaks up and it makes things better. I’m also flat-out having talks about why it’s an important skill. But I’m wondering if there’s a particular thing that can help me get her more secure in asserting herself.

Hopefully this better explains things.

I love this note. I love the love that this parent has for their child and their deep interest in them, and it seems like he sees his daughter very, very clearly. And this is so interesting, right? Because here’s a strong-willed girl, he describes her as, who’s very strong, can be bossy, bright, and she’s not standing up for herself. And as he says, this is unusual behavior. So I guess like other mysteries that we’re trying to solve, when something’s unusual, that means something, right?

This dad says, “Her speaking up for herself is a skill I’ve tried to work on for most of her life.” So there’s a clue, right? There’s the first clue. This is a really important skill to this parent. I don’t know how it’s looked that he’s tried to work on this for most of her life, but she knows it’s important to him and he’s focusing on it. We could say maybe he wants it too much. So she knows that, and she’s probably feeling both of these elements that I brought up earlier. She’s feeling the pressure of that. Oh, I know he wants me to assert myself when this child does this with me. And I’m feeling that vibration from him. He’s talked about this with me a lot. It’s a big message. It’s a big learning he wants me to do. Uh oh, the spotlight’s on. I can’t do it. So there’s that.

And also the other. I think especially because this is a strong child. He wants me to do this so much, I have to say no. And I don’t think this is conscious at all. I just can’t do it. I can’t give him what he wants here because I am my own person and I’m not going to let him decide just because he wants something that I’m going to do it. So again, not a conscious process inside our child’s mind, but that’s the impulse. That’s what we set up when we want it too much.

And he notices this. He says, “It seems so strange, such a smart, strong-willed little girl not being able to express herself and set boundaries when appropriate.” The thing is, she’s sort of expressing herself and setting boundaries with him, in a way, in these situations. You’re not going to decide how I handle this. I’m not going to do something that I know pleases you even though it would please me as well. And then the frustration that comes from that resistant mode that she goes into and feeling the pressure, both, that makes her later want to lash out. It’s frustrating, I wanted to do this, but I couldn’t do it.

He says, “I’ve talked with her and she agrees that sometimes her not speaking up leads to her being frustrated with people or situations, so she lashes out.” He says, “I’m wondering if there’s a particular thing that can help me get her more secure in asserting herself.” Yes, I believe there is, and it’s what we all want. You didn’t feel like asserting yourself there. Interesting. And, So what. That attitude. And I would dial all the way back his talks with her about how important this is, the teaching that he’s doing. All of that has sunk in, but now it’s holding her back, I believe. And when he backs off and becomes totally accepting of where she is right now and what she’s doing and taking an interest in that. Interesting. This very strong-willed girl doesn’t want to confront in the moment with some of these behaviors. That’s interesting. It’s not a bad sign. It’s not an endgame. It’s not a direction we need to worry about. It makes sense when we understand the way children think and feel and how perceptive they are when it comes to what we want. And how they’re, in this very subtle way, maybe training us to want the child we have, where they are.

And from that place we can learn to walk this very fine line of balance between where children need our support and help and where it’s getting in their way. And it’s kind of a lifelong journey that we’re on, trying to figure this out. We’ll never be perfect at it, but it’s sort of what takes raising children to another level for us mentally. That we can engage in this really interesting challenge of supporting without wanting it too much and without taking over in a way that doesn’t help our child.

And what I would say to her if I was this parent or any parent who realizes they’ve been maybe pressuring their child in some way or creating that resistance without meaning to, besides dialing it back and just not doing that and really accepting our interesting child where they are right now, I would put it forward. Because she knows and we know that she knows and she knows that we know that she knows. So I would put it out there: “You know what, I’ve talked to you a lot about standing up for yourself and how important that is and how much I want you to do that. And I realized you’re going to do it when you want to, when you feel ready. And that’s really nothing to do with me. I trust you. You know what you’re doing. You’re totally capable. And when you want to do that, when you’re ready, you’ll do it. If you ever want my support or my ideas around it, just ask.” She’s eight years old, so we can definitely have a conversation like that. But I would have one even with a one- or two-year-old. Maybe a little bit simpler, but I would offer up, You know I’ve been doing this. I know I’ve been doing this. Whether it’s around potty training or whatever. “I’m going to trust you when you’re ready.”

But we have to believe it first. We have to get there first before saying those words. We have to mean it. This is where what I used to do a long time ago, acting, and parenting are similar. It’s not good unless you believe it. In that moment, you believe it. So this is real life and we can believe it, right? It should be easier to believe in this child that he says “her daily behavior is phenomenal,” whatever that means. Wouldn’t we all love a parent who feels like that about us? So there’s no reason not to trust this child.

I remember an example from my class with this adorable girl. She was in my class from the time she was a very young infant until around three years old. And her parents were amazing and they really got the trust thing, and they saw how capable she was from quite young. I mean, we all saw it, we see it with all the children in different ways. And there was no reason not to trust her. But one day she—and I can’t remember how old she was, but I think it was after she had turned one, some months after—she took a few steps, she started walking it seemed. But then, she went back to walking on her knees. I guess crawling, but not on her hands and knees, just on her knees, like straight up. I haven’t seen that many children do this. And of course the parents were a little worried. What’s going on? Why is she doing this instead of walking now? We know that she can do it. They didn’t want it too much, but they were naturally curious.

One thing I was able to point out to them, and that’s what these classes are about, and the gift of them really, is that we can point out to parents what she is doing and give them all the encouragement they need to keep trusting. I said, “Well, this is still working for her, on her knees. And look at the muscles she’s building here. And look how speedy she is, getting around on her knees. When she sees the reason that she really would rather be walking, she’ll be doing that again.” And sure enough, I don’t know, it was maybe like three or four weeks went by, and she was up and walking. Very solidly, because she had all the confidence, all the motivation, all the muscle development and balance that she needed. She’d worked on it, on her knees.

So for the next year and the next and the next and the next, let’s give our children an empowering, life-giving message: You know your journey better than I do. You’re enough as you are, not because I say these words to you, but because you know that I really believe it. And to help us believe it, maybe we can work on a message from—and now I’m really dating myself—John and Ken. They had a talk radio show for years. My mother listened to it, so it’s got to be ancient. They used to say at the end of every show, EGBOK. And EGBOK is an acronym for “Everything’s Gonna Be OK.” One of my children and I always end our messages and calls with EGBOK. So, EGBOK to you, it’s gonna be okay.

And I have an idea for you for starting the new year right. My No Bad Kids Master Course will help you to fully absorb and internalize my relationship-centered approach. You can check it all out at nobadkidscourse.com. And my books have both been bestsellers on Amazon for years: No Bad Kids and Elevating Child Care.

Happy New Year. We can do this.

UPDATE: The parent who sent me the email kindly responded to this podcast:

Hello again Janet,

I just heard the episode in which you addressed my email. Thank you so much for giving such an insightful and thoughtful response. 

I can absolutely see either scenario fitting with what’s going on inside her. But beyond that, you’re of course right about her doing things on her own time. 

She took slightly longer than normal to walk. She took so long to talk, we began to wonder when we should become concerned. She regularly is chill, and then surpasses any expectations. 

I do trust her, and I think your advice was great. 

Thank you again. I look forward to future episodes, and I wish the best for you and yours.

Thank you!

The post A Secret to Helping Our Kids Achieve (Advice for the New Year) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Raising Motivated, Self-Confident, Less Stressed Kids in an Age of Anxiety (with Dr. William Stixrud)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m pleased to host Dr. William Stixrud. He has a wealth of experience and wisdom to share from his decades of working with families as a therapist for children with learning and mental health challenges. He often sees the same client from childhood through adolescence and adulthood, so he’s able to see the results of his practice.

He’s the co-author, with his associate Ned Johnson, of two popular books: The Self-Driven Child, which to me feels in many ways like the perfect counterpart to the ideas I share for caring for kids in early childhood and how they might translate to understanding our role as parents with grade school, middle, and high school age children. I love this book and I’m looking forward to reading their recently published follow-up offering, What Do You Say? How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home. I’m hoping Bill will share his secrets for encouraging our children’s healthy motivation and their and our sense of control, which, as he believes, is the key to mental health. I’m excited.

Hi, Bill. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. William Stixrud: Thanks for having me, Janet.

Janet Lansbury: Well, I just adored your book. It’s so compatible with the kinds of messages that I try to give to parents as well, so it was wonderful to experience how this looks and feels in your work with children who are mostly grade school and older. Right?

Dr. William Stixrud: I would say that, yeah. I test kids, I’m a neuropsychologist and I test kids for a living, and I test kids from four to about 40 or so. But mainly I see school-age, middle school, and high school kids.

Janet Lansbury: And you work with them and their parents as well?

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah, I do evaluations and then I tell parents what I learned, I tell kids what I learned. And probably most of the kids I follow over time. So I’m seeing a lot of kids now that I tested initially 20 years ago.

Janet Lansbury: And did they come to you because they have issues or concerns?

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah, I see kids primarily because they’re having learning problems or attention problems or emotional problems or social problems, and I try to figure out what they’re good at, what’s going right, and what’s going wrong and how to help them.

Janet Lansbury: And you’ve written this book, The Self-Driven Child, a bestseller, with Ned Johnson, who is, what is your connection with him?

Dr. William Stixrud: Well, we became friends probably 10 years ago, maybe 12 years ago. Somebody introduced us and said, “You guys think so much alike.” And we’re very different. I’m 20 years older, I’m a neuropsychologist. Ned is the Washington, D.C. area’s test prep guru. He has a big business helping kids do better on standardized tests. And he realized that the way he does it is very similar to the kind of things that I’ve been lecturing about for many, many years. And we started lecturing together about motivation and about how too much stress affects kids’ brain and their development.

And we realized as we worked together that we saw we had two major concerns, and one was this, what people are calling an epidemic of mental health problems in adolescents and young adults, but also in the last several years in kids from five to 11. And then also so many of the kids we see have what we considered to be unhealthy motivation in the sense that either they’re obsessively driven, they’ll sacrifice anything to get into the most elite college. Sacrifice their health, their friends, and their family. And other kids who do as little as possible, don’t seem to have any kind of internal drive.

And we realized that there’s something that connects these two things, that points to a cause and a solution. And what we concluded was that what connects these two things is a low sense of control, because a low sense of control is at the root of all the mental health problems. I mean, think about it. If you’re anxious, your thinking’s out of control. If you feel depressed, you’ve got no sense of control. If you have substance use problems, your life is chaotic. So we realized that that’s the key to mental health.

And also every place we looked, Janet, to try to understand how do kids, little kids, grow up to be self-motivated, all the arrows point in the direction of autonomy. They have to have a sense that this is their life, and they aren’t continually being forced to do things.

Janet Lansbury: And they don’t have these areas that are free and clear for them to be autonomous.

Dr. William Stixrud: Right.

Janet Lansbury: That downtime and self-directed play, it’s everything, right? It’s therapy for them. It’s how they learn, it’s how they practice taking on different roles.

Dr. William Stixrud: It’s so interesting. Two of my granddaughters, their mother was very strict about very limited technology, virtually none for the first few years. And all they did when they were five years old is play. They’re 10 and seven now, and whenever they have a minute, they play, they make up games. They go to the dentist, they come home and they play dentist. That’s the way that mammals have always learned to be adults. As you said, that’s the way they manage their feelings. That’s the way they try things out. That’s the way they learn how what they do affects other people.

Janet Lansbury: And I think on the parents’ end, it can be hard. I mean, there’s all this peer pressure to have your children in classes from the time they’re infants and have these schedules during the week where you have these scheduled events and you can’t really have that kind of play that you’re talking about and that I promote also, which is about good periods of time each day where there’s really nothing that children have to do. And I think if children aren’t used to that, then it can be tough for them to kind of wind down into that space. So that can be tough for parents sometimes, but it’s really everything.

Dr. William Stixrud: It’s huge. I agree.

Janet Lansbury: It’s interesting what you said before, how you saw the two different ways that this manifested, this feeling of lack of control. That it manifested in obsessively wanting to try to keep control, in terms of, I’ve got to keep achieving, I’ve got to keep doing, I’ve got to keep holding this all together and keep on this track, or I can’t handle what happens if I feel like it’s falling apart, and then the other end of it where they kind of give up and say, What’s the point? I can’t control anything, and so I don’t want to do anything.

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah, yeah. The more I’ve been thinking about and lecturing about and writing about this sense of control for, I guess about six or seven years now, it’s a really, really powerful construct. The research on anxiety problems, it looks like they’re all rooted in low sense of control. Same thing with depression. And the research is looking at cognitive behavioral therapy, which is probably the most effective approach for treating children’s anxiety and mood problems. The reason it works is it increases their sense of control. And again, every place that we looked to try to understand how do kids develop that healthy self-motivation, that drive to develop themselves, and as they get older to realize, I need to develop myself to provide useful service to this world. That’s the kind of way that I think about developing kids’ motivation, is that healthy self-drive to develop themselves to have something useful to offer this world.

Janet Lansbury: And that starts with them getting a chance to connect with themselves and see who they are, which goes back to the play thing. From the time that they’re babies, they can feel a sense of agency about, Do I want to reach for this ball or do I want to suck my fingers, or do I want to look over here at this corner of the room where I see a shadow that’s interesting? Allowing them to have those kinds of options gives them this sense of, This is what I like to do.

Dr. William Stixrud: Yes, yes. It’s so interesting that some years ago I was reading the work of this guy named Reed Larson who studies adolescent development, and at one point in his career, he was looking at how do young children turn into self-motivated adolescents and adults? And he said, it’s not through dutifully doing their homework every night. It’s through what he called the passionate pursuit of pastimes. He described that flow experience, that experience of flow where you’re actively engaged in something that you’re interested in or that’s fun for you, or trying to solve a hard problem where it’s not so easy to be boring and it’s not so hard that it’s wildly stressful, but it’s kind of in your sweet spot and you’re working hard to figure it out, to solve something, or to beat somebody for competing.

And so the idea is if a three-year-old is building a little fort out of Lincoln Logs or playing with Legos and building something, they’re really concentrating on it, they’re really focused on trying to make it right. That experience shapes the brain in a way that develops that intrinsic motivation, that self-drive. And so it wasn’t through somehow doing what’s expected of me, what other people are telling me to do. It was through that passionate pursuit of pastimes. And we can start, as you said, by respecting that they may have different tastes and they may like some things and they may see something differently than I do. And respecting that individuality I think is really healthy, at the same time that we’re helping them be part of a family and part of a community.

Janet Lansbury: You made a really good point in your book, and it’s a question that I’m asked often about, “Well, if you’re allowing children to play as they wish and you’re not trying to engage them in focusing on certain kinds of learning that you think they should be working on, in the early years especially, then what happens when they get to school and they can’t focus?” And you made this great point that my mentor, Magda Gerber, used to also make, you say: “The best way to motivate him for the things you think he should focus on is to let him spend time on the things he wants to focus on.”

Dr. William Stixrud: Right. And for my co-author and me, our north star in thinking about motivation is self-determination theory, which is one of the best supported theories in psychology, developed about 30 years ago. And the main idea is that to develop that intrinsic motivation, the drive is coming from you, you have to have three needs met: one’s for a sense of competence, and one’s for a sense of relatedness, and a sense of autonomy. And I think that when we respect autonomy, that kids feel respected and it really helps our relationship with them, and those two things. And as we foster competence and we point out, “Gosh, look what you just did. Six months ago or three months ago, you couldn’t do this.” You foster that sense of competence, that they can develop skill. These are the most important ways that I know of for us to build that kind of healthy self-motivation in kids.

Janet Lansbury: Well, that reminds me of another quote that I wrote down from your book. You talked about competence: “It’s an internal rather than external barometer of accomplishment (growth mindset—you’re getting better). Remember that you can’t develop competence for them, and any attempt to do so will just undermine their own motivation.”

Dr. William Stixrud: Makes sense to me.

Janet Lansbury: Me too. But it’s very powerful actually, because I think that a lot of times as parents, we’ve put that on our job description that we’ve got to help them achieve this and help them achieve that, and it really can create a lot more anxiety in us and isn’t helping.

Dr. William Stixrud: Right. It’s so interesting because anytime a kid tries to do something, whether they’re two years old, they try to do something or they’re three or four, and they can’t do it, and they try again and they figure it out, it changes the brain, it develops the circuits in their brain to when something hard happens, to cope and to feel confident they can cope. Because when you’re dealing with something hard, even something that’s stressful, what happens —unless you’re just overwhelmed— what happens initially is that your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that can think logically and put things into perspective and calm yourself down when you’re stressed, your prefrontal cortex activates and leaps into action. And when the prefrontal cortex activates, it dampens down the stress response.

So we want kids, ideally even when they’re little, as much as possible, with our support, to solve their own problems, to deal with the stressful things they handle, but also just when they’re playing— the kid is trying to get a Lego construction together and it’s frustrating for him and he eventually figures it out, that’s what builds competence. And if we pointed out to him, “Man, you just stuck with that incredibly. A lot of kids would’ve given up.” You made those just kind of off-hand comments, in my experience, those are the things that really structure in a kid’s brain: I’m a competent person. I can learn, I can get better.

Janet Lansbury: And when they do need help doing the smallest thing, if they say, “I can’t do this, I can’t do this.” “Hmm, well, what are you trying to do? Where are you trying to put that one?” Asking questions, but keep bouncing the ball back to them, just being an emotionally supportive person. And it’s hard to do. It’s kind of like an art, to be able to give that minimal intervention.

Dr. William Stixrud: It’s true. One of the things I used to do, Janet, when my kids were little, if they get frustrated, “Daddy help me with this,” I’d say, “Well, I’m going to look at my watch here, and if you try for a minute and a half to figure out on your own and you still can’t do it, then I’m going to help you, but I want to give you a chance to figure it out.”

Janet Lansbury: Oh, that’s a good idea.

Dr. William Stixrud: And then if they still couldn’t get it, I said, “Well, I wonder what would happen if you tried it this way.” That kind of suggested way as opposed to telling them what to do.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, you can always break something down into steps and just give them the first step. I remember my son had to draw a picture for a book report, and he had to draw a picture of this wolf and he said, “I can’t possibly draw this picture.” I think he was maybe in third grade. And I said, “Yeah, I mean it is hard to draw pictures. What do you want to draw first? Which part of it do you want to draw first?” And he said, “The nose.” And I said, “Okay, what shape would the nose be? How would you like to draw that?” And it was amazing. He made this pretty cool picture. I was so proud of myself, because it was an experiment on my end. But to see how that worked with an older child.

I work a lot with the younger children, I’m used to doing it with them, and it’s amazing. And they don’t naturally have this feeling like being stuck is a bad thing. That’s something that we can unfortunately influence them to feel more when we’re worried they’re not going to finish it or get it, or that we’re starting to feel for them, Oh gosh, maybe they can’t do it and I’ve got to help. I’ve got to rescue. And then they start to pick up from us that anxiousness and receive that same sense of urgency from us and see that, Oh gosh, this isn’t a safe place to be, just in the middle where I’m not getting it.

Dr. William Stixrud: Right. And as you said, it’s hard because we’re mammals. We evolved to soothe and protect our young. And in our second book, we talk about this research of a person by the name of Jessie Borelli. She studies what she calls parental overcontrol. And she has a study where these kids are in a room with some kind of computerized puzzle and they’re trying to put it together and the moms are in the room and the moms are only given one instruction: Don’t help. And they’re measuring the kid’s heart rate and the mother’s heart rate. And so the kid starts to solve this puzzle and it looks easy, but it’s much harder than it really is. As he starts to get frustrated, the kid’s heart rate goes up. Mother intervenes and says, “Honey, try it this way or this way.” Mother’s heart rate goes down when she is doing something that gives her a sense of control, but the kid gets more stressed as the mom gets involved.

Janet Lansbury: Wow.

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah. So I think it’s not that we don’t want to be supportive. It’s not that we don’t want to help our kids. It’s just that we don’t want to jump in. I did this exercise, I did it with a parent educator some years ago, where we thought about, Well, let’s say your second-grade girl comes home and she’s crying because everybody in her friend group got invited to a birthday party and she isn’t invited. And what we asked the parents to do was to ask themselves, Whose problem is it? Because the way that we’re wired, it’s so hard to do that. It’s hard to resist wanting to start soothing or, That’s okay, I’ll call the mom. And just remind them that we can listen, we can try and understand, but if we jump in and solve it for them, we deprive them of that opportunity to solve it themselves and to shape that brain, this experience of going into coping mode.

Janet Lansbury: And it makes it harder for them the next time because they feel dependent on us for making them feel better.

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Janet Lansbury: You talk also in your book about the concept of the non-anxious presence. What are some of the keys to being able to be that for our children?

Dr. William Stixrud: Well, can I just mention how I got to this idea?

Janet Lansbury: Please.

Dr. William Stixrud: When my daughter was just turning two, her language was coming along really well, but she stuttered and she started to stutter really badly, and she went for a couple days where she didn’t talk. And I’ve never been more panicked in my life, Janet. I’m thinking, Oh God, if she doesn’t talk, she’ll never get better. She’ll be teased the rest of her life. And a couple days later, basically her mouth caught up with her brain and she just stopped stuttering. And I realized that all of our fear as parents, it’s about the future. It’s about, They’re going to get stuck in some ways and never get better. So that was a really formative thing for me was realizing that all our worry, all our fear, it’s about the future. That kids are going to get stuck.

And my experience is, if we as parents don’t get highly anxious and too involved, kids, they go through stuff and they grow out of it. The other thing was when I used to do therapy, I’d sit with parents and one of the parents would start to cry and they’d say, “I just want him to feel good about himself.” It struck me many years ago, I said, “Well, I think it would be easier for us to help him feel good about himself if we weren’t worried sick.” And then somebody introduced me some years ago to this idea of a non-anxious presence. I love the idea. I love the term, and I didn’t make it up unfortunately, but I was introduced to it. And somebody at an independent school in Washington, D.C. asked me to do a program with parents on how to become a non-anxious presence.

And I never quite thought about it in terms of parenting that exact way. But then I realized if you’ve got an infant who’s crying and wailing, it’s a lot easier to soothe them if you stay calm. If you’ve got a two-year-old who’s having a tantrum in a store, it’s a lot easier to handle if you stay calm. If you’ve got a 16-year-old who’s coming home and his girlfriend just dumped him, if you can stay calm, you can be much more helpful. And we know that kids are certainly much more stressed now, much more fearful. It is like the message that young kids get is, Be very afraid. As they get older, it seems to be be very afraid, given how many kids are so anxious and fearful.

Janet Lansbury: And you’ve really seen that rise in time?

Dr. William Stixrud: Oh, yeah. I see it in my own practice, but the statistics on it are just mind-boggling. The surgeon general now calls the status of mental health in adolescents the defining public health crisis of our lifetime. And I think for parents of young children, there’s so much we can do to strengthen them. And I think in part by, if we move in the direction of being a non-anxious presence, we help kids in just dozens of ways. For example, if a little kid falls in the playground and we go, “Oh, oh, are you okay?” Kids learn to react to things that happen to them in part by watching how their parents react. And so, many kids, they fall on the playground and they look to see, Should I cry? Am I okay? If we stay calm, it’s different than if we’re, “Oh, honey, are you okay?”

And I’m not saying if something’s really bad, we shouldn’t be nurturing. We want to be nurturing to our kids. I think in our first book, we quote this book, it’s something with a magical character, and he says to this group of kids, “I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you safe.” And the kids say, “You did something much more important. You helped us feel brave.”

And part of the way I think about this non-anxious presence is not being overly emotionally reactive and not being burdened by excessive anxiety or worry and being able to communicate that courageous attitude as opposed to a fearful one. There’s a lot of things that you could worry about in this world, and I’m not saying we should never worry. Worry helps us stay safe in many ways, but ideally if what we communicate is, Yeah, that makes me anxious too, but I know I can handle it and you can too, it’s a very powerful way to help kids develop confidence that they can handle stuff and also to communicate that courage.

I’d love any thoughts about what I just said, and then I’ll tell you some of the ways that we think about encouraging parents to move in that direction of being a non-anxious presence.

Janet Lansbury: For me, when you said courageous, that really hits home for me because I started to imagine —and this was when I had to take my upset first toddler out of a grocery store or someplace or when I had to do anything— I would see myself, and I’ve talked about this, the parents that listen here probably have heard me say it, but I would put on a superhero suit in my mind to be confident for you. Because I’m very sensitive, I tend to take on everybody else’s mood. So if my child’s afraid, that affects me too, and then I’m sure I affect them back.

And I would imagine, if you were a fireperson coming in here to help somebody that had to jump out of a building, you would be very confident for them. You would know that this is the most important thing, that you weren’t panicking and that you weren’t afraid, and that you believed that they could fall into that net and they’d be okay. So I take it to that level. I really needed a lot of work. And what I found is it’s easier for me to be courageous for my child than for myself.

Dr. William Stixrud: And my co-author, in our second book, his twin brother is an EMT, and what he does, he goes into situations, an emergency situation in a family, and he says, “I think we’re under control here. You don’t have to panic. Should I let you know if it’s time to worry?” Just model it. Because when we wrote our first book, The Self-Driven Child, one of the things we emphasize is the research on what’s called stress contagion. The idea that stress is contagious. I mean, if you’re around a really stressful person, your brain picks it up and it increases your stress level. As we were researching our second book, I learned that one of the mantras of the Navy Seals is “Calm is Contagious,” and it’s contagious because all emotions are contagious. And that’s part of the reason why I encourage parents to move in that direction of being a non-anxious presence in your family, because then what you do is you communicate, you infuse calmness into your family and your kids feel it.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. And so how else can parents do that when there are so many concerns, especially as parents? There’s a lot of concerns in the world, and then there’s concerns as parents, which magnify everything.

Dr. William Stixrud: One of the things we talk about, I think in the introduction to The Self-Driven Child, is that most human beings are living in the safest time, in the safest place in human history. And many of our fears as parents are related to this 24/7 news cycle and the fear that parents have of young children, like, being abducted. It’s all based on that, we get these alerts. And it turns out that the rates of child abduction are extremely low, except for if parents are divorced, one parent will take a kid without the other parent knowing it. But the perception of danger is much greater than it really is. So that’s one thing.

What I ask parents to do is to take a long view, in the sense that most kids turn out fine. And because I test kids who are having problems and I’ve followed kids for 40 years, I know that in the vast majority of kids, even the ones I see that are having problems, they turn out fine. In fact, I got a Christmas card two years ago, Janet, on the outside it said, “You were right.” And I opened it up and it’s a picture of these three young adults with their spouses, and their parents had written, “They all turned out great.” These are kids who I evaluated at various points starting in probably the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, and I hadn’t seen any of them in 10 years. And I just got an email from a mom who I saw, whose kid I saw when she was eight, who’s now like 38, and she had autism. And mom’s just saying, “She’s so great and doing so great.”

So just take a long view and remember that all our worry about our kids, it’s about, Something’s happening now, oh my God, this is not going to get better. And it’s because a low sense of control is the most stressful thing you can experience in the whole world, that if a kid has a problem and we don’t know how to solve it, it’s very stressful. So we kind of work on ourselves as you did, Janet, to experience more of that kind of inner calm so that we can radiate that calm to our family. We train ourselves to remember that if I don’t get stuck, my kid’s not going to get stuck, that we can take steps to solve these problems. And that usually they turn out really good.

Janet Lansbury: So if our children aren’t going to feel that sense of control unless we feel that sense of control, we can maybe derive our sense of control from that visualization or belief, that trust, that my child probably will be just fine and get through these things. And you know what? Our job as parents is not as complicated as I think we can make it. Just like with the news cycles, there’s so much parenting advice out for people now, and it’s overwhelming and it can sound like this is such an intricate thing. Something that we’re putting out there to try to help —the various parenting advisors, like me— it can make it appear as if, Oh, there’s so many details we have to get right. And really those are just supposed to help you if you’re stuck, maybe. But it’s not that complicated.

Dr. William Stixrud: It’s really not.

Janet Lansbury: And you and I, that have adult children, can acknowledge that. I have three adult children also.

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah. I remember my son had tics and learning disabilities, and I worried about the tics and about being teased and that. I realized that the most important thing that I can do to help myself is to work on my own fear, my own anxiety, and realizing that my fear was all about as he got older, if his tics were terrible, that that might affect him negatively somehow. And he’s a PhD psychologist, he’s a very successful, wonderful human being, beautiful wife, beautiful children. And yeah, I had a lot of worry, but I realized that I was more upset than he was, and I just worked at it.

What I realized is that if I see kids are going through a hard patch, that if I see it as, This is part of their path and I’m going to help them through it, as opposed to thinking, This is a disaster! That perspective of accepting where kids are. If we think about the idea of unconditional love and unconditional acceptance, arguably the most important thing we can do for our kid is to let them know we love them immeasurably, no matter what they do or how hard they try or how they behave. This is one of the ways that we do it.

Janet Lansbury: And if we look back on our own lives, how many rough spots have we all had? And how positive were those for us?

Dr. William Stixrud: Right. Before we started recording this, you mentioned this experience I talk about in The Self-Driven Child where, when I was in first grade, I cried the whole first week. I’d never been in a situation where I didn’t know anybody, none of my friends from kindergarten were in my first grade class, and I was kind of a little bit on the anxious side anyway. And one day the girl sitting next to me said, “Ms. Ward, Billy’s crying.” And she said, “He’s going to be fine.” And I realized, she’s just modeling this non-anxious presence and communicating confidence that I could handle it.

Janet Lansbury: I love that teacher, she should get an award of some kind. And how simple that is: She believed in you. She believed in you, and that feels good.

Dr. William Stixrud: I know. And there’s this new program, this brilliant program out of Yale, for helping kids with anxiety. The acronym is SPACE. It’s Supported Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions. And one of the main things that parents are taught to do is to express empathy. “I know this is really scary for you.” And then, “But I’m a hundred percent confident that you can handle it.”

Because what we do, because we’re mammals, what we do when kids find something stressful, we try to protect them from it. If a little kid is afraid to go into the bathroom by himself, we go in there with him, that kind of thing. And it turns out that when we make that kind of accommodation to a kid’s anxiety, it just makes them more anxious. And so what we’re taught to do is to eventually not make those accommodations. But the first step is you express empathy. “I know that going into the bathroom by yourself makes you anxious, but I’m also a hundred percent confident that you can handle it.” Which requires us to manage our own anxiety and then to communicate confidence that you can handle it so that we communicate that brave, courageous attitude.

Janet Lansbury: That’s so important, I think. But again, it all stems from the trust that we have in, I guess in ourselves as parents, and therefore towards our children. You said it well in your book: “It takes courage to trust a child to make decisions, to trust in a child’s brain development, to ignore the pressures that cause us to protect our kids from themselves, or to be overly involved in their lives. It takes courage to face our fears about the future. It also takes humility to accept that we don’t often know what’s in our kids’ best interest. It takes a change in mindset to focus on ourselves—our own emotions and attitudes—as an extremely important element of our child-rearing.”

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah, I like that. Five years later, I still like it.

Janet Lansbury: I like it too. But then you also say: “As hard as all of this is, the harder route by far is trying to control what we really can’t.”

Dr. William Stixrud: Yeah. In the book we talk about some postulates of motivation, and one of them is that you can’t make a kid do something against their will. And I think that knowing that, knowing you really can’t make another human, even a little kid, you can’t make a little kid do something. Your kid, you need to get in the car to go see grandma, and they’re refusing. You can pick them up and put them in the car, but then they aren’t getting in the car, you’re putting them in the car. You really can’t make somebody do something. And when you make peace with that, that if theoretically I really couldn’t make him do something, you make peace with that, you realize, Well, that’s not my rule. It couldn’t be my responsibility to always make him do the right thing. And for me, the older I get and the more I see that something that looks like a disaster leads to something really good, I get more humble about knowing what’s in a kid’s best interest. And inclined to take that attitude that this is your life and you get to figure it out and I’m going to help you.

We talk about the idea as parents being a consultant of their kid rather than their boss or their manager, their homework police, who’s always running their lives. Because our goal is for kids to be able to run their own lives before they leave home. And that’s what I’ve suggested to parents of young children, is think about, you aren’t going to start turning over the keys to your five-year-old, but the idea is, let’s move in that direction. For myself, I’m going to move in the direction of a non-anxious presence who can support my kid in making wise decisions, practice making decisions for themselves, learning from their feedback, who can trust my kids. I can say, “I have confidence you can solve these problems.” That’s my role. And the kid’s role eventually is to figure out who they want to be and be able to run their own life.

And I say that because I was giving a lecture about The Self-Driven Child in Houston before the pandemic, and I happened to mention the most elite high school in Washington, D.C. and a woman came up to me afterwards. She said, “I’m a therapist at The Menninger Clinic here in Houston,” this really good mental health clinic in Houston. And she said, “We know this school in D.C. really well, because so many of the graduates get into the top colleges in the country, but as soon as they get a B, or as soon as they realize that everybody there is as smart as they are, or as soon as they ask a girl out and she dumps them, they can’t handle it. So they take a medical leave of absence and they come here for treatment.” And she said, “To the one, they just don’t have enough experience making their own decisions, solving their own problems, running their own life.”

And I gave a lecture recently and this guy came up to me and said, “I just finished my doctoral dissertation on promoting autonomy in two-year-olds by, ‘Do you want to do it this way or this way?’ Start out by giving them a limited number of choices.” So you’re coming back to that treating them respectfully that you mentioned earlier.

Janet Lansbury: So for the parents that listen here regularly and know my work, they know that a lot of what this podcast ends up being about is how to actually set limits with children and have those boundaries for them and all of those things, which are to me in a different category than what you’re talking about, but not completely. We still give children choices with things that we have to help them do, like getting into the car seat, for example. “Do you want to be the one to go in by yourself?” But we do have to take charge of them, because if we don’t that creates the kind of stress that doesn’t help them to function either.

Dr. William Stixrud: As we say in The Self-Driven Child, this idea of being a consultant, it doesn’t mean that the kid’s the boss of the family. We see this as squarely in the tradition of what’s called authoritative parenting, as opposed to authoritarian or laissez-faire. And in authoritative parenting, we’re the guides of the family. We’re the leaders of the family, and we work out limits with kids. And ideally, when our kid’s, say, three or four, we sit down and talk about limits so that they’re kind of agreed-upon and everybody knows and they feel fair. We want to minimize the extent to which we’re forcing limits when we’re mad, go to your room kind of thing. But if little kids have too much freedom, as you said, it just makes them anxious. They can’t have that. Kids with laissez-faire parenting, where there’s very few limits, very few family rules that are enforced, it makes them really anxious because young people, they need to feel that my parents are in charge.

And ultimately, from that position, we treat them respectfully and know that the way kids become good decision-makers is by practicing making decisions. And the way kids learn to treat other people respectfully is by being treated respectfully. And so we can give kids choices, we can give them freedom, but we don’t let them walk all over us. They aren’t the boss of the family. They can’t do anything they want. It’s a delicate balance, but it’s doable if we realize that kids need limits and it’s really good to treat your kid respectfully. Like he or she is a human being who has a mind of her own. And it’s also true that when we treat kids respectfully that they’re more likely to go along with us. When they feel loved and appreciated and enjoyed, they’re just more likely to just go along with us and not fight us.

Janet Lansbury: Because we’re on the same team. And they know that, they feel that. The way I see it and teach it, again from infancy, so there’s sort of two areas. Even though we want to give children choice when they can handle it, sometimes they can’t in the boundary-type situations or situations in their care where they really need us to take the lead. But then there’s this whole other area of play, learning, that’s theirs, that belongs to them. And the more we support that while staying in our lane and not trying to micromanage it and decide what it should be, the better.

Dr. William Stixrud: I love that. It makes complete sense to me.

Janet Lansbury: That’s how I learned this, and it just felt really clear. I’m a person that needs things to be very, very clear in my mind to be able to even try to do them.

Dr. William Stixrud: And I really feel like my major mission, and certainly one of the reasons that I wanted to write The Self-Driven Child, is to help parents feel that it’s safe. It’s safe not to worry about your kid all the time, it’s safe to feel that you can trust your kids a lot of the time. It’s safe to feel that you aren’t supposed to know who they’re supposed to be and what they’re supposed to be like or what’s always right for them. You couldn’t know because when something happens to a kid, do you judge whether it was good or bad the next day or five years later or 10 years later? Certainly one of the most important experiences of my entire life was the first time I went to graduate school, in English literature. I went for 20 straight weeks and I didn’t turn in a single assignment because I was just so anxious and insecure. I work with a lot of underachievers and I say, “Twenty weeks, I turned in nothing. Top that.”

Janet Lansbury: I have nightmares about that.

Dr. William Stixrud: But my point is, so after the second quarter, I hadn’t turned anything in, so I flunked out. And I felt like my whole life had gone up in smoke. And it took me about a month to realize it was the best possible thing that could have happened to me. No way should I have been an English professor. I always felt like an imposter, I felt out of my league, and I wanted to do something with children. Most of my professors gave me incompletes. This one flunked me, so I couldn’t go back. And I prayed that I’d meet him and be able to thank him. But honest to God, Janet, two years later, I’m walking on the campus of the University of Washington where I’m taking some classes in education, and I see this guy and I go up to him and I say, “You probably don’t remember me.” He didn’t remember me, but I said, “You flunked me two years ago and it was the best possible thing that could have happened to me. Thank you.” It was a very satisfying experience.

But the point is that if we see what kids are going through as part of their path to figure their lives out, and our job is to support them and help them and, as you said, to provide structure and direction as necessary, it’s just a lot easier.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah. It works better for us, it’s easier, it’s less stressful when we stay in our lane and let them do their work and we do ours and trust everybody to do their job.

Dr. William Stixrud: It’s safe to do it. And I have great confidence in this as you do, because I walk this walk with my own kids, and I have two wonderful adult children who grew up with no academic pressure at all, and both have PhDs. And this approach of really fostering a sense of control, as they get older playing more that consultant role to help them figure out who they want to be. The three questions that I ask to think about my relationship with the kids is, Whose life is it?, Whose responsibility is it?, and Whose problem is it? And I want to remember that I don’t know who they want to be, it’s their life. I want to remember that I don’t want to take responsibility for something that’s really a kid’s responsibility, like doing their homework, for example. And also that I don’t want to solve problems that they’re capable of solving themselves.

Janet Lansbury: And you share so many incredible case studies. And you have a whole chapter on navigating learning disabilities, ADHD, and autism spectrum disorders and how your approach can work with children that have those challenges.

The other thing that you said is the enjoyment factor. So not only is it easy for us when we’re not trying to do jobs that aren’t going to work for us because they’re not our job, we’re not as able to enjoy the unfolding of the person because we’re so busy worrying about if they’re measuring up in this way or that way. And you offer these points around being a non-anxious presence: “Make enjoying your kids your top parenting priority. Don’t fear the future.” Maybe easier said than done, but we’ve got to put trust out there, right?

Dr. William Stixrud: Yes, yes. The enjoyment piece. When I used to do therapy, starting about 35 years ago, I did a lot of therapy with parents. And what came to me is that, let’s set our highest parenting priority as simply enjoying your child. Because when you enjoy your child, she experiences herself as a joy-producing organism as opposed to an anxiety-producing or an anger-producing or a frustration-producing organism. And it’s not that we have to enjoy every second, but the idea of just being spontaneously enjoyed, that’s how people have a sense of, “I’m likable.” And so what I’d do with parents is we’d work backwards: Let’s make that our goal. What’s keeping you from enjoying your kid most of the time? And it may be some behavioral thing, it may be something in the marriage, maybe some pressures at work, maybe insomnia and said, let’s work on these things, with the goal being to enjoy your kid, so your kid starts to see himself as a joy-producing organism.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. And it also can be because we’re trying to do right by our child, putting them on the team or whatever, and now we’re dragging them to practice because they don’t want to go. And it’s impossible to enjoy your child that way. But what I remember is when I could observe my children playing —which they allowed me to do about to the age of five, and then they didn’t want me to anymore— but their ideas. And I just remember one time my daughter, she was waiting for me, I was teaching actually, and she had to come that day. And I see her over there, she was using paper clips, something that was there, and she was making people out of paperclips and they were talking to each other, without even bending them or destroying them or anything. She made up this whole story with paperclips. And it’s just that kind of stuff that children do that’s so cool. And we can really see who they are and their imagination and interests and all of these things. It’s so much more interesting.

But anyway, I’m going to finish your list here: “Don’t fear the future. Commit to your own stress management. Make peace with your worst fears. Adopt an attitude of nonjudgmental acceptance.” What is that, nonjudgmental acceptance?

Dr. William Stixrud: Well, I think most parents buy the idea that it helps kids to feel that they’re loved unconditionally. And I think what that means is kind of warts and all. That it means that we accept them and we love them and we approve of them, even if they’re having a hard time, even if they’re trying to figure stuff out. And so this nonjudgmental acceptance just means that, if they’re acting badly, we’ll intervene in some ways. But we take the attitude that we aren’t judgmental, we don’t give them the idea, You’re a bad kid, or This is unacceptable to me, kind of thing. That we deal with them respectfully and say, “This isn’t working.” Or, “I don’t let people talk to me that way, I’ll see you in five minutes.” And find ways of dealing that’s respectful to the kid and gives the kid the message, I can handle your strong feelings. I can handle your bad behavior.

Janet Lansbury: Because we know there’s a reason they’re acting like that.

Dr. William Stixrud: Exactly.

Janet Lansbury: It’s usually about what’s going on inside them. It’s hardly ever really about us. So we don’t need to take offense.

Dr. William Stixrud: Right. Part of the goal of becoming a non-anxious presence is that when we’re calm, we’re much better listeners, we’re much better able to convey empathy, to express empathy for kids. We’re less controlling.

Janet Lansbury: And we’re much more able to solve the problem or figure out the issue because we’re not under stress, yeah.

Dr. William Stixrud: That’s exactly right. Just recognizing that once you’re stressed or your kid is stressed, you can’t think clearly. Don’t bother trying to teach a lesson, or don’t try to tell your kid something that you really need to get their attention. If you’re stressed and they’re stressed, they really can’t hear it, because we evolved to respond instinctively. So the prefrontal cortex that can think logically and rationally, basically it gets shut down, because the last thing you want to do if you’re being attacked by a wooly mammoth is to stop and think about it. So, recognizing that when we start to feel stressed is not the right time to lecture our kid or to try to teach him something, we say, “I want to talk about this. I want to help you with this. But I’m a little stressed right now. I’m going to take a walk or I’m going to go into my room for a few minutes. But I’m going to come back and let’s work this out.” This non-anxious presence is a powerful idea. And it’s a goal.

Janet Lansbury: And it’s a goal moment-to-moment, I feel like. It’s not like, Oh, I got it. I’m the non-anxious presence forever. It’s something that we are constantly just trying to keep in our mind the importance of. And we see when we do it that it really, really helps. It helps calm that person down. It helps them pass through it. It helps them figure things out and not get stuck in our stuff.

I could talk to you all day long, gosh. I’m fascinated by all these topics that you’re an expert on and I would love to have you come back another time and we’ll go over one of these other topics. For now, I want to thank you so much for speaking with me today, sharing all your knowledge. As you say, “We think of chronic stress in children and teenagers as the societal equivalent of climate change—a problem that has been building over generations and will take considerable effort and a change of habits to overcome.” And that’s what you say in your book and wow, that’s scary. But we can all be taking steps in that direction.

Dr. William Stixrud: The idea is if we want a calmer world, a more peaceful world, then we work on that in ourselves. There’s so many things that we can do to make lives better for ourselves and our kids, and we can model for our kids really taking good care of ourselves when we work on our own stress management. Whether that’s with exercise or meditation or yoga. We model for our kids that I take care of myself so I can be at the top of my game. And I think, what more can we do?

Janet Lansbury: Not much, but try to enjoy our kids. Even as they get older too. I am having just as much fun, if not more, with my adult children as I did with my little ones. And I love working with little ones. That’s why I do it.

Dr. William Stixrud: It’s true. And I love being a parent at every age. I loved raising teenagers and having young adults is just fabulous. It’s a great role.

Janet Lansbury: Same. Alright. Thank you so much.

Dr. William Stixrud: My pleasure, Janet.

Janet Lansbury: Alright, you take care.

Dr. William Stixrud: Okay, you too. Bye.

Janet Lansbury: Okay, bye-bye.

Dr. Stixrud is the founder of The Stixrud Group, a member of the teaching faculty at Children’s National Medical Center, and an assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine and co-author with Ned Johnson of The Self-Driven Child and What Do You Say? How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. And my books, No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame, and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting, you can get them in paperback at Amazon and In ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and apple.com.

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

The post Raising Motivated, Self-Confident, Less Stressed Kids in an Age of Anxiety (with Dr. William Stixrud) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Mental Health Starts in Infancy (with Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m hosting infant mental health and infant-parent relationship expert Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon. Angela’s also a fellow RIE Associate and now serves on their board, after serving a long tenure at the nonprofit Zero to Three. Dr. Fisher-Solomon has worked on national projects on home visiting, family childcare, Early Head Start, and more.

Today we’ll be discussing what infant mental health really means. It might not be what you think. So, what is it? What is it not? Why is it important? And what can we do to nurture it? Which includes understanding secure attachment, stimulation, infant emotions, and a lot more. I’m really looking forward to this.

Hi, Angela. Welcome to Unruffled.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Good afternoon, Janet. Thank you so much for having me. It is such an honor to be able to sit and chat with you on one of my favorite topics.

Janet Lansbury: Well, the honor’s completely mine, let me tell you. I’m so thrilled to be able to share your wisdom and many years of experience with my listeners. So thank you for taking the time to be here. Like you said, I love this topic. It’s one that isn’t a part of the conversation in parenting as much as a lot of other topics. Why do you think that is? Do you have any thoughts about that?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: I think families, and particularly parents, often they shy away from the terms infant mental health because people often think about mental health as, Oh my goodness, if you say infant mental health, does that mean that something is quote unquote “wrong” with my baby? And it does not mean that at all. Infant mental health has what we call synonymous definition, which simply means social-emotional development in babies and toddlers, and that’s all it means. It is really just the capacity of a baby or toddler to experience, regulate, and express their emotions. It’s also their ability to form close and secure relationships and really to explore the environment and learn. All within the context of biology, relationships, and culture.

And so, on one hand, that’s a big definition in terms of the field. But to parents, when parents ask me, well, what exactly is infant mental health? I often just simply say, think of it as, how is your child developing their social-emotional skills? And then that leads into attachment and what does that look like? And basically, just how is your child’s overall emotional wellbeing, what does that look like? And then as an infant mental health specialist, we break that down.

Janet Lansbury: So what are some of the important practices that parents should consider engaging in with their babies and what signs from them are showing us that we’re on the right track? Can you talk about that?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Infant mental health, I have found, and in my research, really I link it back to what is happening to the baby in utero. Because infant mental health doesn’t just start when the baby is here, right? After the baby is born. It starts with the connections prenatally. So I often like to tell parents it starts there. What kind of pregnancy did you have? How did you feel about the baby? How were your emotions? Because we know that emotions during the journey of pregnancy are sometimes up and down, right?

Then once your beautiful baby has arrived, what is the connection? Because as soon as the baby is born, infants come into the world, as you know, seeking the connection of another human face, particularly the mother, father, or whoever is going to be that primary caregiver in the child’s life. And it often starts out with something as simple as the earliest connection, making eye-to-eye contact with the baby. Touching a newborn is like heaven. And making that up close, eight to 12 inches from the baby’s face so that they know by smells and using their other senses, they know who mom is. And a lot of research says they also know who dad is, particularly if the dad has been able to talk to the baby in the womb on a regular basis. So parents ask, how can I help my infant have a strong social-emotional capacity? I tell them, by building a healthy, secure attachment relationship, which in turn builds trust and security.

And in my research, which looks at confidence-building in babies, it’s really this —and we know this, you and I often talk about it in many different scenarios— the importance of going slow with an infant. Your language, your eye rapid movement, the tempo of your body language, babies pick up everything. And what we consider to be small nuances of how you interact with a baby, how you observe the baby. And that consistency really in fact is building the necessary skills for strong social-emotional capacity, which ultimately means you are building strong social-emotional skills, which lead to strong cognitive skills and so on and so forth. Because it is strengthening that particular developmental domain and the baby’s brain.

Janet Lansbury: Because it’s giving them that sense of calm and security that allows them to—

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Regulate.

Janet Lansbury: Yes, and then therefore have the capacity to develop cognitive skills and these other skills.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Absolutely. I mean, everyone wants their child to do well academically. Even if a baby is, let’s say two, three days old, it’s natural for a parent to think, I want my child to be able to read before they get to kindergarten. Or, what should I do? How can I make them and help them to have strong cognitive skills? You know, we as adults, we have societal pressures. So as parents we can’t help but start thinking further ahead. And you know, Magda Gerber used to often say about being in the moment, but it is understanding, and in the world of infant mental health we zero in on: to what degree is slow. Observation, being able to understand the developmental cues, being able to identify them, being able to read them consistently, and being able to meet the emotional needs of the baby. 

An example is, when we talk about regulation, if your baby is crying and you may come close, you have the best of intentions, but in fact the baby already could be overly stimulated and it turns its head away from you because it actually needs to shut down and have a little quiet time. So infant mental health is about helping parents to identify those cues and come alongside the baby, in a sense, so that the baby is dictating what it needs and the parent is better able to give them that.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. And that example of overstimulation, that’s one that’s I think so commonly misunderstood. And there are so many products that we’re offered as parents to maybe make our child smarter or learn faster or be less bored or whatever, that actually are very overstimulating. And I know that this idea of how sensitive babies are to stimulation, that got away from me a lot, even with my third baby. Because we can’t gauge that on our own stimulation needs, they’re so much more sensitive.

And it’s like what you were saying about slowing down, too. We can’t be with a baby in a way that’s really going to be helpful to them if it’s on our adult pace. Magda Gerber and Pikler talked about this a lot, and Heidelise Als, who did so much research with preemies, talked about how jarring it is for them when we’re on an adult, more rapid pace in the way that we talk to them or handle them. So I feel like those things, maybe there’s not enough information and support and reminders out there that babies are… their newness to the world and all this incredible learning potential that they have, they’re so open to the world and yes, everything is more to them. They need so much less than we think.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: You know, infants, their right brain develops much earlier than the left side of their brain. And the right brain is what controls their emotional development. Yes, they come into the world with over 70 billion brain cells. So they come into the world very, very smart. Their senses are heightened. But to your point, the one thing that is not always considered is, although they are simply brilliant and competent little people, their ability to take in information, it must be slow.

You know, parents often wonder, Why do I have to repeat myself, even to my toddler? I explained to them, because it takes them probably around the third time, sometimes the fourth time for it to register. You know, let’s say if it’s a toddler who is only speaking a few words, but if you are using hand gestures and you speak slow enough and use eye contact, even an infant, they’re going to understand you.

And I’ve had parents challenge me, that there’s no way my four month old can understand me and I give them little experiments. Yes. Why? You know, you speak to the baby in a certain way and then I begin to show the parent, Look at her eyes, look at her hands starting to open and close. Her breathing is increasing. She knows I’m explaining something. Parents sometimes think that they’re just little nuances, but they in fact have great meaning.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. That’s what I say to parents too because I often get that, Oh, what’s the point? And, They can’t understand. And I suggest, Try it. And people have come back to me and said, Oh my gosh, okay, I saw it. I saw my baby registering what I said, or I saw them responding in a way that proved to me or seemed to prove to me… It’s still freaky, right? They understood what we were talking about.

About stimulation… I was just imagining, for us it would be we’re in a stadium, really noisy, there’s all this stimulation, all this stuff going on. Which is I think how babies must feel just being there in the world. Because they’re taking everything in—every sound, every sight, everything all at once. And then yes, if we were in that stadium with all of that stimulation and all that sound and all that sight, then it’s going to take a little while for you to communicate with us because we have to tune some of that out just to be able to focus on what you’re saying. I don’t know if that’s a proper analogy, but that’s what came to my mind.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: It absolutely is a wonderful analogy. And I teach on infant brain development to college and graduate students and I often say to them that, there’s understanding brain development, you’re neuroscientists or something like that. But for a parent, they don’t necessarily need to know it to that degree. They need to know how a baby’s brain works, in that a baby’s brain literally depends on the social interaction in order for the right side of that brain to flourish and for the neurons and the connections to get strong enough. And to understand, to your point, that quieter environment, it gives the baby the opportunity to regulate itself. It’s hard, even for adults, for us to regulate our own emotions and our bodies and our senses if we’re, what did you say, in the middle of a stadium. You know, our ability as adults to be intentional, physically, emotionally. Why do we think infants are any different?

And if anything, because they haven’t been in the world that long. They’ve been inside the womb, this really safe, dark but comforting place where only they’re really dealing with their mother’s heartbeat. Even if it’s a water birth, however the child enters the world, it is still a shock. Because now they’ve got lights and they’ve got people moving around, they can’t really see clearly. So it’s a lot for their brain. And again, the right side is much more developed than the left side. The left side holds cognitive and language skills, it doesn’t really develop until closer to age one. So the right side is working a lot and babies need consistent but quieter sounds to begin to allow them to kind of regulate and get their own body rhythms. And we talk about, from Magda, telling a baby what you’re going to do before you do it and pausing and waiting.

All of those practices really help babies, it gives them time. And parents often find that if you give your baby that time and that consistency and you’re going slowly, you literally are helping them to build their social-emotional capacity. Because as they grow, everything is going to start to increase, right? And become a little bit faster. There’s such a big difference between an infant, a toddler, and then a preschooler who’s running around and jumping and going from one thing to the next because they have the capacity to do that. Between age four and five, Oh, he can sit and listen to a preschool teacher. Or the things where when you need them to wait, well, when you go slow in the beginning you’ve been building their social-emotional development, a.k.a. their mental health, they are better able to regulate their bodies. And typically it affects their sleep schedule, their sleep cycles, their feeding cycles, and their play cycles with their loving parents.

Janet Lansbury: Yes.

I wanted to ask you about something because when you brought it up, I got a little feeling of uh-oh, and I’m sure other parents worry about this. You talked about how our feelings around our pregnancy, and of course we all know —and some of us have experienced— postpartum depression, or that anxiety as a new parent or just after the birth of a baby. Well, we can’t help how we feel if we’re depressed during pregnancy, right? I had a very difficult third pregnancy. I think I was maybe too old to be having a baby, I don’t know. But I had a lot of negative feelings.

You know, there’s very extreme things that parents go through. And there are also situations where of course babies are premature, their brain hasn’t finished fully developing as a full-term baby’s would. And then there are situations where there’s adoption and the baby has, I believe, a sense of loss of leaving the person that smelled and spoke like that, that they heard in the womb, and going to someone else. What do we do if that was our situation? How can we help our babies to process that? Is it just being even more sensitive the way you’re talking about? Or can we expect certain things from them that we might not expect from a full-term baby where everybody was emotionally healthy all through it?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Sometimes parents are not able, they don’t necessarily arrive in the best situation. Or to your point, if in this case that there is a mother going through postpartum and she may not have the capacity to give her child the nurturing that it needs. That’s why this field is so critically important because a mom or a family needs support, no one can parent in a vacuum. And if someone has gone through various levels of postpartum depression or other adverse experiences that impede their ability to parent in a healthy manner for their baby.

Babies, unfortunately, they don’t really wait. You know, they grow every day. But they are incredibly resilient. And in the families that I work with, I often explain that you meet your child where they are. There’s no such thing as a perfect parent, we all make mistakes. And whatever the situation is, if you are able to get some kind of support, like if it’s postpartum, they have the amazing Postpartum Support International, that’s doing some amazing work around the country for not just mothers, but they have family groups, they have groups for fathers, they have LGBQT groups, different cultural groups.

Because, you know, you could have one vision for how your family’s going to look when you’re getting ready to welcome a new baby or a child into your family, and it may not turn out that way. So there are many different groups that I try to guide parents to. If I’m not mistaken, there’s probably infant mental health specialists and organizations in almost every state in the country. And many times those resources are free of charge.

And then if you ask, How does that affect the baby? You can only hope that there could be someone there, even if it can’t be the mother or the father, that it could be someone who could still give that infant a nurturing experience until the parent is ready. And when the parent is ready to create the bond, it’s still going to continue to have a major effect on the child’s life. If it can be in utero, if it can be from day one, that’s fantastic, but it might not be until age three.

I tell parents, you do the best that you can and if you’re trying to strive to get better, then a child’s brain is incredibly resilient and flexible. So it is not to think that just because there’s extenuating circumstances, that Is my baby just lost if I can’t provide this slow, nurturing, comforting? No. I would encourage parents to try to get support and resources. And in the world of infant mental health, we have something called prevention and promotion because of course if we can help offset some of those challenges, it’s going to be better for the baby and it’s going to be better for the parenting journey. So earlier is always helpful. Not always possible, but wherever you get the help at whatever time, it’s about the health and wellbeing of both the adult, of the caregiver, and the baby.

Janet Lansbury: That’s very helpful. So let’s say, in my situation where I had a lot of dark moods during the pregnancy, but then once I had my baby, I actually felt really guilty about the dark moods because he was just so vulnerable and adorable and, you know, there was no way I was not going to love him. He had a lot of crying, whatever that was. Colic, I don’t know if it was his digestive system. Not during the day, but in the night he would have lots and lots of crying and I tried a lot of things, a chiropractor, my diet, all of these things.

But I sometimes wonder if, do babies express those feelings that they absorb from us in the womb or maybe in the early days after birth if we’re depressed? Are there different ways that babies express that and process it out of their system with us? Or is that just as variable as all the different types of children there are, with their different capacities? Or are there some themes? An adoption situation, maybe, where they had that loss and now they’re in this really positive situation though? Is there anything that that looks like that we could look out for? Or is it just very individual for each child?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: You know, I get asked that question a lot. And one of the reasons I chose developmental psychology is because my outlook on babies, it’s from a scientific perspective, yes, but it’s also from a holistic and a spiritual perspective. Babies do because of genetic makeup, right? And stress that’s internalized in different hormones that we absorb in our bodies and so does that then get passed to our babies in the womb? Or if it’s an adoptive baby, is that baby coming with a genetic pattern for its emotional framework? In a sense, yes, the science has shown that babies do come, in a sense, with a genetic blueprint. And that’s under the realm of biology, right? But then there’s nurture. And the research shows nurture —which is, again, giving your baby the support it needs once you’re able to identify some of the issues— is stronger.

And so let’s say with you, your son may have had these issues. Or if it’s an adoptive child, they’re going to have some residuals because they had a birth mother at some point. But what I tell parents again is that the power of love is at the core and the center of babies. I know it sounds simple on one hand, but it does have the ability for recovery. If you’re the birth parent, if you have sad feelings that heighten your level of cortisol in your brain and the hormones or stress hormones, and your baby is born extra-irritable, it just seems incredibly tense and it can’t seem to regulate. There are steps in infant mental health in identifying what’s happening. Why is the baby tense? Is it muscle tone, is it irritable? So there are different screenings. And once those are identified, then we can come up with a plan to help a parent bring the stress level of the baby down.

If babies who’ve suffered, let’s say with alcohol syndrome, they recover. It takes work, but they recover and they begin to thrive. So yes, it’s an individual’s situation for both the adult and the baby, but just because it’s not an ideal situation doesn’t mean that the baby has to be quote unquote “stuck”. Does that make sense?

Janet Lansbury: It totally does, yeah. I love that.

You brought up cortisol. What should parents know about cortisol? I know there’s a lot of mixed advice put out there around if your baby cries or if your baby cries for too long or too often, that’s a dangerous thing because of the cortisol. What is the science on that?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Cortisol is a stress hormone. We have it, it’s in our bodies, and it’s there for a reason. It’s kind of a measuring stick and it helps to regulate other functions in our bodies. I agree with you that parents don’t quite understand about cortisol and crying in particular. But for babies, crying is healthy. It’s a way to express emotions. The challenge is understanding, where is it coming from? If all the basic needs have been met, sometimes there’s not going to be anything that you can do because the infant is also sometimes trying to regulate itself. However, as a parent, if you feel that, okay, I’ve done everything and my baby is inconsolable, then I would say call your pediatrician to make sure that there’s not anything going on internally. But crying in and of itself, again, once all of the babies’ needs have been met…

And sometimes parents aren’t quite sure as to, When should I hold my baby? Should I rock them? Should I do this, should I do that? To keep them from crying, you have to try to help the baby to regulate. And sometimes it’s taking your baby’s clothes off, warming up your hands. I’m a certified infant massage educator and what we do is called holding sacred space, speaking very quietly in your baby’s ear, looking at them in eye contact. I know you’re upset. I know it’s hard, but I am here for you. And same repeated soft motions that are rhythmic. Typically I found they work, bouncing and all of those things. If the baby is already overly stimulated, then bouncing them is sometimes only going to make it worse and then the crying becomes elevated. So the cortisol level in terms of stress has more to do with prolonged crying and not giving an infant acknowledgement or recognition that someone is there.

Janet Lansbury: And hopefully someone that can be as calm as possible, right? So we’re not adding to it with our own emotion for the baby to absorb.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: And you brought up an excellent point because when you know you’re stressed. In some of my parent-infant classes, I will say, It’s okay. Step over to the side, count to 10 or 20, take deep breaths. And I’ll give them a mindfulness exercise. And then come in. Because if you’re not regulated, it’s only going to add to the baby’s stress. If you’re stressed, then the baby’s going to be stressed. And if their baby’s not stressed, the baby will then become stressed. They basically mirror you and they mirror your emotional capacity.

Janet Lansbury: I love that you teach that in your classes. Can you talk a little about this tool that you’re developing? The FIOT, the Fisher Infant Observation Tool?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Called the FIOT, it’s been a baby of mine for the past 20 years. I was inspired by Magda’s work in talking about confidence and then there’s some other theorists that I researched that also talked about confidence, and Dr. Pikler. I was inspired and I wanted to look at confident behavior as an action verb.

So I looked at adult insecurity. They didn’t just start that way. We always go back into the world of infancy and early childhood. And so what I did was I studied insecurity and fear. Where is it rooted? What are the elements and the factors that contribute to confident and insecure behavioral patterns? And that is the FIOT. So it is a paper parent observation tool. But I created it to empower parents because for me I said, well it’s great in psychology and nurses and pediatricians, we get all these different screening tools and most of them are not culturally sensitive. So I created the FIOT.

Janet Lansbury: You created one that is.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: I had some amazing mentors who I think are far more brilliant than I am and more experienced. And we did the research and looked at, what are the differences in parenting styles, the differences in how we see babies and what does that look like across various cultural groups? And how can we ultimately bring this into the hands of parents to empower them? So the goal is to empower parents. It’s not a measuring tool, it’s more of an identifier. If your baby scores a particular number, here are some strategies to help you at home.

So if your baby is starting to show some insecure behavioral patterns, this helps you to offset that behavior. So you don’t have to wait until your child is three to start to wonder, Why is my child so fearful? Other than separation anxiety and stranger anxiety, which are all typically developing behaviors. So the FIOT begins to identify what that looks like. And it has gone through two levels of scientific testing and it has very, very strong scores. We are now in the final phase. We’re constantly looking for funding and perhaps partners at some point, because now it’s ready to be taken around the country. It needs a larger sample population before it’s ready for publication. But ultimately that is the goal.

Janet Lansbury: Wow, you’re amazing.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: It’s been a long process.

Janet Lansbury: I mean, congratulations. Especially because it’s been a long process. So does this also help parents notice if there’s neurodivergence or other issues like that? Can they notice anything like that at the infant stage?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Absolutely. Even though it is created for typically developing babies, people have asked me, would this be a tool if my child was on the autism spectrum? Just as an example. And what it has shown, because of the identifiers, so far is that it picks up on things that are not consistent, which in turn propels a parent to be able to wonder a lot sooner than later. And it has the chart, you know, typically developing should be doing this. And it also gives room for varying cultural groups. So how a particular culture, what their outlook is on parenting practices. It can be tweaked here and there to make room for that.

Janet Lansbury: It sounds like it might also do something that— this was one of my favorite gifts from Magda, she taught us to see this ourselves and help other parents see this. That it’s not just, My child isn’t doing this yet, it’s, But look what they are doing. They’re doing this. You didn’t realize that was a thing. Well guess what? It’s a thing. They’re sustaining attention on something. Or the way that they’re shifting their body. They’re maybe not rolling, but they’re preparing themselves to be able to do that, moving their head, extending themselves, turning on their side. You know, I love how we’re able to show parents in the classes and ease their mind that your baby’s really making some good progress here. Look at all the things they’re able to do that you never even thought meant anything.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Absolutely. And the FIOT doesn’t make a comparison and it allows parents to, you know, you don’t take it just once, right? You could take it more than once. So to your point, it’s not as though you’re looking for anything. It’s really training parents on how to observe without judgment. It’s almost like writing in a diary. You know, if you’re anyone that’s trying to lose weight, you weigh yourself and then you might weigh yourself again two, three weeks later. Then if there’s a big enough difference, it gives you time to pause and possibly correct if you need to correct something. And so it’s really the awareness and the awareness early on would in turn help babies and toddlers before they get to preschool. So prior to the age of three, to be able to offset. So it’s the awareness, empowering parents and then allowing them to make their own informed decision. The FIOT will give parents the opportunity and the ability to identify their own baby’s cues.

Janet Lansbury: Wow. Well, I’m excited for this to come out. So keep going.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: I will be sharing it at the World Association for Infant Mental Health in Dublin. I don’t share the tool, but I will be sharing different posters about the research and all of that.

Janet Lansbury: Wonderful. Well thank you so much for sharing so many wonderful tips and your perspective and insights. I really, really appreciate it. And I of course personally enjoy talking about one of my favorite topics with an Associate.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Yes. And if anyone wants to learn more about the FIOT, they could visit fiotbabiesconsulting.com.

Janet Lansbury: That’s F I O T babiesconsulting.com. Great. And is that where we can learn more about your work personally too?

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: There are small-group classes, you know, similar to RIE classes, Resources for Infant Educators, but these classes deal with a lot of psychology, things that might come up for parents, as well as deepening cultural differences in how they see their children. So yes, there’s a whole series of components. The screening tool is just one of them.

Janet Lansbury: I want to take one of those classes. Maybe with my grandchild someday.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Listen Janet, when we get to the next level, you would be an honored guest.

Janet Lansbury: Wow, thank you. Good luck with all of this. I feel like you’re on your way to helping even more parents than you’ve already helped and more babies. A whole generation.

Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon: Thank you so much.

Janet Lansbury: Thank you.

You can learn more about Angela’s work and resources at: FIOTbabiesconsulting.com

And please check out some of my other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in.

Both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon, No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame, and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting. You can get them in e-book at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or barnesandnoble.com and in audio at audible.com. And you can even get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the LINK in the liner notes of this podcast.

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

The post Mental Health Starts in Infancy (with Dr. Angela Fisher-Solomon) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “‘Earlier Is Better’ and Other Child Development Myths (with Rae Pica)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today, I’m joined by Rae Pica, a true standard bearer for early childhood education. I’d never met Rae, but I certainly knew of her and her work. She’s been focused on this for over 40 years. So I’m thrilled she agreed to come on the podcast. Rae is dedicated to developing and educating the whole child and she’s written 20 books on the subject. She’s a brilliant keynote speaker and, as a consultant, she’s offered her expertise and experience to an incredibly diverse list of organizations, both public and private, including the CDC, Sesame Street, Mattel, Gymboree, Nike, Nickelodeon’s “Blues Clues,” and many health departments in schools. Rae and I will be discussing how children actually learn, how to encourage their intrinsic developmental processes, and some of the parenting myths that are so common these days and can stifle a child’s natural instinct to explore, discover, learn, and flourish.

Hi Rae, welcome to Unruffled and thank you so much for being willing to share with my listeners today.

Rae Pica:  Oh, I’m happy to. Thank you so much. I love the title, Unruffled, that’s just great.

Janet Lansbury:  Oh, well, it’s something to strive for. I think when we do understand child development and our place in it, all of that perspective can really help us. We don’t have to pretend we’re unruffled, but the way that we see children and trust them as capable, it can help us to actually be unruffled.

Rae Pica:  Yeah, understanding child development is so important.

Janet Lansbury:  And I know that’s been life’s work and that you have been such a wonderful communicator of your knowledge to the public. So, anyway, I’m thrilled to have you here.

There are so many things we could talk about, but I was thinking the other day that what I would like you to share is, I think, something that will be very practical for parents and helpful. I always try to focus on what can I offer that might help, and one goal that we all have as parents is that our children thrive. That they flourish physically, cognitively, creatively, socially, emotionally; that they reach their potential in all those areas. Sometimes there are things that we don’t realize are getting in the way of that.

What are some of the common hinderers of this desire that we have for our children? What gets in the way?

Rae Pica:  Well, Janet, I think the biggest one is, I hate to say this, all the misinformation floating around out there. There’s just so much information. I mean, there’s so much information. Never, in the history of parenting, has there been so much information and so much of it is wrong, in my humble opinion. It just is wrong. Ugh, gosh, that just sounds so negative.

Janet Lansbury:  Well, I think what you’re saying is this is a blessing and a curse. I think most of us understand the blessing, hopefully: that it’s helping make our lives easier and making our role clearer, helping us with our children’s behavior in the moment, all of that. So hopefully it’s doing that, unless we’re just getting very confused, which is also very possible. So what do we need to look out for? Like when we’re getting information, how do we know…?

Rae Pica:  Yeah, how are you supposed to sort through it all and know what’s right and what’s wrong? I mean, we mentioned child development earlier. Most parents, unless they’re in a field that requires it, haven’t studied child development, and they sure as heck don’t have the time to keep up with the research and anything pertaining to young children or early childhood education. So, yeah, there are several pieces of misinformation. Let me just start with the biggest that has become very prevalent in our society and that is keeping children from thriving. We think that it’s doing the opposite. That piece of information is that earlier is better.

“Earlier is better” is a myth. I don’t know how all of this started. I do know that traditional and social media haven’t helped. They’re very good at perpetuating myths and in fostering competition. And I’m not just talking about parents, but policymakers, adults in general have received the idea that we have to give children a jumpstart. Whether we’re talking about academics or athletics, we have to get them started as soon as possible because if we don’t, they’ll fall behind forever and stay that way.

And it’s just not true.

The harm is that, well, for one thing, it puts a lot of pressure on parents. Pressure that doesn’t have to be there.

For another, it puts a lot of pressure on the children because child development is a process and it can’t be accelerated. You know how much they want to please the important adults in their lives. The little ones do, and when they can’t do what we’re asking them to do because they’re not developmentally ready to do it, they’re not supposed to be doing it yet, it puts a lot of pressure on them. They feel anxious and depressed and just plain unhappy. So let’s start there, Janet, because I can just ramble on.

Janet Lansbury:  Yes. I’m absolutely in agreement with you here, nodding my head, and that’s exactly what Magda Gerber used to say, “earlier is not better.” I have a couple theories as to how this could be being perpetuated. One is from when I had my first daughter, which was 28 years ago. There was this whole “super baby” trend at that time and it was so much pressure and it just always seemed so arbitrary to me. “Stimulate them this way at this age and then by this many months, you’ve got to do these games to your baby and do this to make sure they’re getting that,” and the whole responsibility was on us. That we were going to miss windows or we were going to-

Rae Pica:  Yes, the windows.

Janet Lansbury:  Those horrible windows. It was up to us to make sure those windows were getting filled with something.

Rae Pica:  Well, if you could name another group of people easier to scare than parents, I mean, of course, they were frightened by that. I mean, they want the best for their children and if they didn’t get on board with all of this … and, part of it, I remember, and I don’t know what year it was, when Rob Reiner came out with “This is Your Child,” I think the program was called. He was very excited. It was very well-intentioned and I really don’t know a lot about it, except that it was based on the new research about the first three years of life, how many brain cells and neurons and all of that. All of that that’s happening in the first three years. Well then, then the marketers jumped in and they aren’t necessarily well-intentioned except to line their pockets.

Janet Lansbury:  True.

Rae Pica:  But they jumped in with, “Well, you need these flashcards and you need infant lap wear, and you need all of these doodads.” So parents wanted to be good parents and they rushed out and bought them. It was based on the idea that enrichment matters in the first three years, but nobody told them that enrichment is really as simple as paying loving attention to your child.

Janet Lansbury:  Right, and trusting them to play and see what they’re interested in. Taking a step back and observing who they are.

Yeah, so I think the other part is this sort of general idea that I know I had before I started working with Magda Gerber and learning from her, that children respond because we do something to them first. That we have to teach them everything that they are going to learn.

Both of those ideas, the “super baby” and this other kind of more general idea that if we don’t pull a child’s hand up and get them on their feet, they will not walk…

Rae Pica:  Yes.

Janet Lansbury:  Magda countered that with, no, children are actually born self-learners. That there’s a wisdom in all children that should be trusted in terms of their timetable, what they’re working on, who they uniquely are, and that there is something there. They’re not just blank, waiting to be filled in by us.

Rae Pica:  Exactly. Exactly, they’re born with a love of learning. I mean, they’re all about learning and asking questions, exploring and discovering, and they need the time and the space to do that.

I hear so many stories about children who were really excited about learning and so they were excited about going to preschool and kindergarten and, days in, they’re miserable and they’re burnt-out in kindergarten, because learning, this is where the policymaker piece comes in, the curriculum has been pushed down to accommodate this education race, and it’s just preposterous. Again, child development cannot be accelerated. So why has kindergarten become the new first grade?

A University of Virginia study showed the differences between kindergarten then and kindergarten now, and, oh, it’s just horrifying. You talk about your empty vessels. We’re trying to pour information into their little blank heads, forcing them to sit and do worksheets, and it’s just …

Janet Lansbury:  And there’s no joy in it for the adults, either because, again, as we were saying, the whole onus is on us to do everything. So, of course it’s, well, let’s get it done sooner because then we’ll be done with that and onto the next thing and we’re doing a better job that way if we get them all doing this, really.

Rae Pica:  Yeah, it’s a terrible amount of pressure. Parenting, I think, has become harder because of all this misinformation.

I remember the young mom who approached me after a keynote speech and said … this was a few years ago. She said, “Is it okay if I don’t sometimes… if I don’t always play with my child?” I honestly, Janet, did not know what the heck she was saying. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it, and then it dawned on me. She thought she had to play with her child all the time in order to be a good mom. “I have to keep my child entertained” is another one of those myths that I’m trying to debunk.

I like my mother, I love my mother, but I can’t imagine her playing with me all the time when I was little. Benign neglect was sort of our parents’ parenting style and it worked fine. I mean, I think I turned out okay.

Janet Lansbury:  I think we can say yes on that. I think also that parents do want to be more involved. I mean, that’s why they’re taking in all this information and they’re excited and they want to learn, and that’s such a positive thing.

The thing about the benign neglect is that you can give children the benefits of that, that you got and I got when I was just playing all day, making up games, discovering our own ways to play. They can have that benefit, but still be involved, if we can learn to tune in and just enjoy what our child is doing and be the audience, not the player. So we can still have that.

I don’t think it’s a question of: Well, I’m just ignoring my child, or I’m playing with them. There’s this whole other area that brings so much joy and discovery of our own child. It’s so educational for us. We’re the passive partner in their play, just responding when they’re asking us to, and letting them know that we’re there and we’re present sometimes when we can be.

Rae Pica:  You’re right, there’s definitely a balance involved. I’m just encouraging parents to know that it doesn’t have to be as challenging as maybe it’s been to this point.

Janet Lansbury:  Yes.

One more thing I just thought of when you were saying about the parent believing that we need to entertain and play with our children all the time, which I definitely did at first. I believed that with my infant, that I had to keep her busy. In fact, I was completely over-stimulating her and then she would get really cranky and I wasn’t understanding the sensitivity of her to stimulation actually.

But one of the big pieces of misinformation parents are getting is that their children being disappointed or having feelings or crying about something is actually dangerous. That whenever a child is crying, because they maybe want the parent to do something the parent can’t do it right then or doesn’t want to do in terms of play, or any boundary, really, the child is disappointed and cries about it, then that child is in danger of what people call “cry it out” and this causes brain damage. So there are parents living in that fear.

This was brought to my attention recently by a psychologist who follows my work and said she finally realized that this fear was what was behind parents never wanting to say no to their child in regard to play or anything. So that’s heavy.

Rae Pica:  If you hear these things often enough, of course, you’re going to believe them and that puts even more pressure on you, doesn’t it? You must say yes to your child all the time.

I mean, I think that boredom is a gift for children because then they will use their creativities, their imagination, their wonderful mind to come up with something to do. Now, I’m not saying that you just say, “Go away.” Maybe you have to ease into the child learning how to play on his or her own. You set up some art materials over here and maybe some blocks and Legos, construction materials over there, and you give the child a choice. “Well, there’s this over here. There’s this over here. Pick one.”

Do you want to hear some other myths?

Janet Lansbury:  Yes, I absolutely do.

Rae Pica:  One is that “play isn’t a productive use of time,” and it’s closely linked to “earlier is better,” because if we believe that earlier is better, then what we value is accomplishment and productivity, and I’m not so sure those two words should be associated with early childhood. So, play seems like something frivolous, not a productive use of time. But nature had a plan in mind and we really can’t imagine that we have a better one. Nature intended for the young of almost every species, including human species, to learn through play. It’s the basis of the adult personality. They learn self-discipline, conflict resolution, negotiation, cooperation, and collaboration, how to take the perspective of others. They learn all of these skills that will serve them so well throughout life through play, through free play.

Free play, authentic play, is child-initiated and child-directed, which is why we can’t put them in an organized soccer game and feel that they’re getting the opportunity to play. It’s not the same thing.

Play is how they express their fears and their feelings. During the pandemic, a lot of children were playing doctor or hospital. Right after 911, a lot of children were building block towers and knocking them down, and that is how they take some control of their world and they need to have that. No matter how loving we are toward them, how much love and attention we shower on them, they still need to have some control, make some sense of their world. And they do that through play.

Janet Lansbury:  This is true on their own, not just with others as well, right?

Rae Pica:  Oh yes, absolutely.

When I did workshops in the past on creativity, I would ask the participants to list some words related to creativity and then list some words related to play and they always, they always intertwined. There was such an overlap there. We give a lot of lip service to creativity in our society, but we don’t do a lot to promote it. We don’t really value it the way we should. It might be because we associate creativity simply with the arts, but we need creativity in business and industry, technology, science, medicine. Creativity is about problem-solving. It’s about seeing beyond what already exists, seeing beyond the problem to the solution.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, I think we can get caught up seeing creativity as a product, that our child is able to finish a drawing or something like that. Instead, it’s a process, it’s a way of thinking. It’s an aspect that I think we all have in ourselves to some degree. It’s not just certain people are creative and others aren’t.

Rae Pica:  In early childhood education, we’ve been saying it for decades, if not longer: with young children it’s all about the process, not the product. It doesn’t matter if the finger painting ends up all black. It really doesn’t matter, that’s the product. What matters is the process in getting there. So, yeah, it’s hard to describe how important these things are in early childhood.

Janet Lansbury:  One of my mentors actually, an associate that also studied with Magda, she, I remember, brought up an example once of a teacher going over to a child who was painting, a young child, and saying, “What are you painting?” and the child says, “Paper.”

Rae Pica:  I love that. I love that.

Janet Lansbury:  That’s a good answer.

Rae Pica:  Yeah. Well, there’s a whole podcast to be done on how we should respond. “Oh, I see you’re using a lot of purple in that drawing,” is non-judgmental and gives the child some information and values the process, not the product, so yeah.

Janet Lansbury:  It’s all about the process, and that’s the learning process that we want them to stay in love with as they get older.

One of the things we notice with young children, with what I do, we notice in infants that they’re fine with not being able to reach what they’re reaching for, unless we start to react to that. They don’t mind challenges. They don’t mind “failing.” I don’t think they even understand that’s a concept that applies to life. It’s just: I’m doing this, I’m reaching my arm out. I’m trying to touch this. It’s beyond my reach. Let me try something else. Or not, and I’ll do something else altogether.

So it’s just not this fraught thing that we can sometimes feel as parents like: Oh my gosh, I better get it for her because she needs it.

Rae Pica:  Exactly, because the reaching is the process and if you get there, that’s great. But if we make a big deal about them not getting there, then we’re putting our emphasis on the product again.

And that’s one of the other myths, that “we have to protect them from ‘failure and mistakes.‘” My gosh, you and I know we learn more from mistakes and from failure than from successes, and there’s not a single life that avoids failure and mistakes. Not that they have to get used to it when they’re little, but they have to learn how to begin to learn how to deal with it in a positive way.

Janet Lansbury:  And that is normal, right? I mean-

Rae Pica:  Yes.

Janet Lansbury:  And we’re not trying to train them into that. It will happen, if we can trust that it’s okay. It will just naturally happen. Children will seek out those challenges that are just beyond their reach, or…

Rae Pica:  Yes. Taking those risks, climbing the tree or hanging upside down from the monkey bars, and all those things that we’re frightened of these days, because we’ve been made to be frightened of them. We’ve gone a little bit overboard on that.

Janet Lansbury:  Would that be another myth that we need to-

Rae Pica:  Yes.

Janet Lansbury:  … protect them from doing anything that could possibly be a failure or dangerous, or?

Rae Pica:  Exactly. I mean, it’s funny, I had a call this morning, a voicemail on my phone from a grandmother. She follows my work and she and I have become friendly. She had to pop in to say, “I’m here at the playground with the little ones, and even with everything I know about how we should let them take risks and find the edge of what they’re capable of doing,” she said, “I heard myself saying, ‘Be careful.'” I thought: Well, of course, you did! I mean, we all have to retrain ourselves, right?

Janet Lansbury:  Yes.

Rae Pica:  I mean, I know the statistics, and this is true, that it is the safest time to be a kid in America. It’s the truth, and the information is out there. I know all of that. Yet we hear so many horror stories through the media that if I see a little one outside playing by herself, my first instinct is, “Huh,” and then I have to think it through, like someone who knows better, but it’s hard.

Janet Lansbury:  It really, really is hard to calm ourselves. And I think that’s a good place for us to segue right now…

Okay, so we know that these myths are getting in our way, but how do we stop? How do we trust that it’s okay for my child to be doing what they’re doing right now, and not doing this next thing that my friends are doing?  Or that I saw somebody on the internet doing? That their kids can do? How do we find that in ourselves? How do you help parents and professionals understand this?

Rae Pica:  The comparisons are brutal, aren’t they? I mean, if you do happen to believe and know in your heart that your child doesn’t need to be enrolled in 47 million programs, but another parent looks at you and says, “Seriously?” with horror on her face, then you’re going to start to doubt yourself.

So, you’ve used the word “trust” several times and we do have to trust our instincts, trust our hearts, trust that the children know best.

One of the ways that I’m trying to help parents … Obviously, if you’re finding information, you need to be able to trust the people you’re getting that information from.  Like you. And, I hope, like me. And I’m not sure how we know that we’re the right people to get information from, but I have started a new program for parents, because I want to reassure them, and I want to make parenting easier. I want to help them to make their children’s lives… to live that life that we’re talking about, the healthy, physical, social, emotional, all of that. It’s a monthly membership program and anybody who wants to know anything about me can go to raepica.com.

Janet Lansbury:  Well, tell me a little about what you’re going to be doing in the program.

Rae Pica:  Well, I’m offering a video a month and it’s just 10 minutes max, because parents are busy, so I keep them short. In each video I tackle a myth.  I don’t think it’ll be ending anytime soon because there are so darn many of them floating around out there!  And then there’s also a transcript.

Maybe, most importantly, there is a private Facebook group with like-minded parents. Because I want to also share… What kind of things do you say to the mom who looks at you in horror or doubts what you’re doing? How do you respond to that?

So I want to support the parents, but it will also help early childhood education. Because so many parents believe that play isn’t productive, that they have asked when they’re interviewing at preschools… They want to find the academics-oriented ones. And the play-oriented ones are sort of going the way of the dodo bird and we can’t have that happen.

So anyway, I’ve taken on this huge task and I would just love to have people join me on this journey.

Janet Lansbury:  Well, I’m sure they will.

What you were saying about preschools, that’s absolutely the case that the one that my children went to. Didn’t have a fancy name for the philosophy or anything, it was just the old-fashioned kind that I’m sure you endorse, that I know Magda Gerber used to endorse, which is this-

Rae Pica:  It didn’t have academy in the name?

Janet Lansbury:  No, just learn through play, what we used to call “developmental preschool,” right? But then they started having to make an agenda for parents that said “science” and “math.” Then what science would actually be was that their children were playing with water tables and sand or something like that, but they would translate that to make the parents feel more confident that they’re not going to fall behind, that they’re going to be learning all the things they’re supposed to be learning.

So that was unfortunate that they had to do it that way, and then, of course, the school did go away, like you said, like the dodo bird. So I’m totally with you on that. I would love to see the re-emergence of places that really understand development and where children can really thrive and enjoy learning.

Rae Pica:  Exactly. I mean, other myths are that “sitting equals learning.” Absolutely false, but the belief in it has children sitting for hours either in front of a screen or doing worksheets.

When we look at play, and it is hard to have to justify play in terms of academics or whatever, I mean, the truth is that they are gaining academic knowledge through play, if we could just trust that that’s happening. The research shows that the more senses we use in the learning process, the more information we attain and retain. Doing worksheets isn’t authentic learning and it’s not indicative of what’s being learned. It’s not indicative of intelligence and it doesn’t provide evidence of any kind of what children are capable of. Of course, it uses one sense, the sight.

Janet Lansbury:  And that’s the exciting thing about children that makes them so fun to watch. When they’re given free rein to play and do what they want to do, they use their whole body. They put everything into something, whether it’s an emotion that they’re having or the way they’re playing or the way they’re learning. And that’s what they’re supposed to do. And that’s how it integrates into our whole system — what we’re learning — and it becomes part of us, instead of just this lesson that someone gave us.

Rae Pica:  Exactly, exactly. You just touched on another myth, that “the brain and the body have nothing to do with one another,” and that, that goes way back. That goes back to Descartes saying, “I think therefore I am.” Again, it’s not the truth. There’s more and more research about how the two are … They’re interdependent, and when we make children sit, we’re not providing opportunity for optimal brain development. They do learn with their whole selves and all of their senses.

So if we want children to be successful and to thrive … and I’m talking about successful in terms of being happy and healthy and all the ways that you mentioned … then we need to let child development guide the process and we need to let child development guide our decisions. So I’m on a mission to make sure that happens.

Janet Lansbury:  Well, I’m with you all the way, and thank you so much for sharing with us, and especially sharing your program as well so that we can turn parents onto that. Our job is doing less and enjoying them more.

Rae Pica:  I like that.

Janet Lansbury:  That was a phrase out of Magda Gerber, “Do less, enjoy more.”

Rae Pica:  Writing this down. Magda said, “Do less, enjoy more.”

Janet Lansbury:  Enjoy more. She actually said also, “Do less, observe more, enjoy most,” about children.

Rae Pica:  What a brilliant woman.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, she really was. But anyway, I love all of it, and I’m really glad that you’re out there supporting children, and love you. So thank you again.

Rae Pica:  Thank you, Janet.

Rae Pica’s exciting new (reasonably priced!) program for parents is called: “The Truth About Children.” You can get more information and sign up HERE.

Also, please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, JanetLansbury.com. There are many of them and they’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in.

And both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon: No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting.  You can get them in eBook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play or barnesandnoble.com, and an audio at Audible.com. Actually, you can get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the link in the liner notes of this podcast.

Thank you so much for listening and all your kind support. We can do this.

The post “Earlier Is Better” and Other Child Development Myths (with Rae Pica) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “It’s Not Regression”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury, welcome to Unruffled. Today I’m going to be addressing an email I received from a parent whose major concern is that her son, who’s four-and-a-half years old, seems to be showing what she describes as a huge regression. There are a lot of upsetting elements in this family’s life, and she notices that her son is being disrespectful of her body and seems to be regressing in other areas as well, and she’s resorted to hitting him, which she feels terrible about. So I hope to offer this family some perspective and help.

Here’s the email I received. It’s kind of long, so please bear with me, because I think all of these details are important:

Hi, Janet. I’m grateful for all your podcasts and support. I hope I am becoming a better parent as a result, but today I am certainly questioning that. It has definitely been a stressful time for parents everywhere. Our family lives half a block from the Minneapolis riots, and we’ve been navigating a lot from the pandemic, including working from home with pre-school closed, and now having tough social justice conversations. On top of it all is the trauma of recent events, feeling unsafe at home for nearly a week, and our city having so much grief and recovery ahead.

My son is four-and-a-half years old and before the pandemic hit he was in Montessori and becoming very independent. Little by little, we’ve seen a huge regression in his behavior. Little things that he’d left behind, such as hitting, kicking, throwing, or destroying things when he’s mad, are now daily occurrences. He consistently is disrespectful of my body and daily I have to tell him multiple times that he’s not allowed to touch my breasts, but he persists with that behavior.

He will no longer wipe his own butt after using the toilet. This particular issue created a straw that broke the camel’s back this morning. For 30 minutes, I coached him with encouragement that he could do it himself, and if he needed help, I was right here and after he had a turn, I’d take a turn. He’s extremely persistent and resistant. None of that positive coaching seemed to work on him.

Finally, after a major emotional escalation for both of us, me feeling like I’m getting nowhere and needing to get back to work, I said, “You have two options: you can wipe your own butt, or I’ll do it, but then you’re going to get a smack and it’s going to hurt and you aren’t going to like it.”

What I did next is horrific. He didn’t choose to wipe his own butt, so I did it, and I slapped him too hard. I’ve never hit or spanked him before, and I don’t know why I resorted to this tactic, except that I can’t remember ever feeling so stressed in general.

My son and I are both in therapy to try to manage this time, and have been since the pandemic hit. I’m engaged in daily stress reduction activities, so I show up more resourced, but it’s apparently not enough. I don’t want it to get to this point ever again, where I feel my only option is to use physical force. I feel horrible, and I know this is incredibly damaging psychologically. I’ve apologized, but that also doesn’t feel like enough. How do I help get through this stressful time without giving him a pass on learning to be independent in the ways he’s able to be, and without resorting to negative and hurtful parenting tactics? Thank you for your help.

So I feel like she gets to the crux of the issue at the end here, where she says, “How do I help him get through this stressful time without giving him a pass on learning to be independent in the ways he’s able to be and without resorting to negative and hurtful parenting tactics?” And then in the beginning of the note, she talks about regression. I want to get to that first. I actually looked up the dictionary definition just to confirm my thoughts around this. And the first definition I saw is: “a return to a former less developed state.” And I want to assure this parent, or anyone else that has noticed that their child seems to be regressing, this is not regression.

Returning to a former, less developed state is impossible for a neurotypical young child, in that, they literally can’t go backwards and erase development. They can’t unlearn what they have learned.

Children are developing emotionally at the same time that they’re developing skills. But what happens is that children become easily overwhelmed with stress and emotion that makes it impossible for them to do things. And this is a temporary issue. It is not falling backwards. It’s more like a pause, where they need our help or they need to do it differently.

So let’s take the example of an infant learning to walk. Let’s say this infant who’s been crawling on their knees (or some people call that creeping), has taken some steps and we were excited. And they were excited that they were able to do that. But now the next day, or several days later, we see our child is on their knees again, moving around that way, crawling.

There are a number of reasons that our child is doing that, one might be that they really want to get to that toy over there or that object or that person and they get there more quickly on their hands and knees. So that’s the way they go. It’s easier for them to crawl there.

Another reason could be that our child is working on something else that day, and they’re not thinking about wanting to work on that skill. They’re working on, maybe, fine motor skills or understanding the relationship between objects. They’re working on language. They’re just not working on walking that day.

Another reason, that is more in line with what’s going on with this parent and child, is they are maybe exhausted and maybe they sense that their parent is overwhelmed and uncomfortable, unsettled. So now, as this child, I want to stay close to that parent and I don’t have the energy or motivation to be practicing skills. And I’m rattled, too, because my parent that I look to to set the tone for whether I’m safe, whether everything’s okay, is clearly not okay. I’m reading that. So now as this infant, I’m going to want to be right next to my parent, on his or her lap. I don’t want to get up and go walk, even if my parent is trying to coax me to do it. I’m just not feeling it. I’m not able to in that moment.

So this parent is describing some very upsetting, stressful situations that she’s dealing with. And even if her son didn’t have his own reactions to all the disruption of his life with the pandemic, disruption in his routines, even if he didn’t have any stress of his own around these situations, he’s totally feeling his mother’s, and he’s feeling it in every cell in his body, the way children feel their feelings. The feelings take over them. They haven’t developed that ability to easily self-regulate.

This parent makes a couple of interesting statements around this. She says her child is extremely persistent and resistant, and then later that, “He didn’t choose to wipe his own butt, so I did it and I slapped him too hard.” And she doesn’t know why she resorted to this, what she calls a tactic.

What I would like to point out to this parent is that she wasn’t making a conscious choice when she hit. This wasn’t a tactic that she sat with and reasonably decided was going to be helpful in this situation. It was an impulse that came out of her own, very understandable, frustration and overwhelm.

And just as that was not a choice, her son’s behavior that he’s showing right now, believe it or not, is not a choice. Just as this mother wouldn’t choose to do something that she feels terrible about, he is not choosing to be getting his mother so angry with him, frustrating her, being incapable. It’s not a choice.

So what I think I can help this parent with, or any other parent going through anything like this, is her perception. Because it’s her own perception of this situation that is making her so upset.

What she said about being frustrated, that it’s understandable. It is understandable because of the way that she’s perceiving her son and her role with him in these situations. She feels like she’s giving him a pass on learning to be independent if he doesn’t do these skills that she knows he can do at other times.

So she’s taken on this job that… I don’t know if she’s misunderstanding the Montessori school’s advice or if the school might be misunderstanding Maria Montessori’s teachings, which were not just about achieving skills, but also understanding the emotional state of children. Yes, they are amazingly capable. They can achieve all these surprising things when they’re feeling up to it, when they feel safe and calm enough in their home. But when they can’t, they can’t, and it’s not a failure on their part.

So I would encourage this parent to see that there’s nothing wrong going on here with her child behaving in these ways. She hasn’t failed in helping him to be independent and capable. Take that pressure off of yourself. This is a time to get through, when there’s stress. This is a time to just help him when he can’t do these things and not waste your precious energy trying to coax him and coach him and, “Come on, you can do this. You can do this.”

Because what happens there is she gets more frustrated and he gets more frustrated because he doesn’t feel understood, he doesn’t feel seen, he feels he’s doing something wrong, disappointing his mother. And all those feelings in him make it even less possible for him to wipe himself. He’s too stuck.

I would give herself a pass from being the teacher and coach that needs to get him doing things. And I would give him a pass on what he’s able to do right now.

Independence and skill building are a choice that a child makes. Our job is to hold space for it, but not try to push it and make it happen. Holding space for it means we’re going to give a moment. We’re going to see. If my child want to do this, we’re going to offer a chance, “Do you want to do this yourself? Or do you need my help?”

But when we see that they can’t, even though they’ve been doing it for months, when we see that they can’t, that they pause, then we say, “Okay, you know what? I’m going to do this.”

And then I would be ready to do it again the next time, because my child is showing me that this is an area where they’re getting stuck. They’re not regressing, they’re pausing.

So let’s talk about practical advice here for how to handle what’s going on. Meditating on a clear vision of our child and what’s happening right now is the key and the basis for everything that we do. And it does change everything, because it changes the way we feel about things. We’re not going to get as frustrated when we realize: I’m dealing with a basket case right now. I’m feeling it and he’s feeling it. And whatever I’m feeling, he’s going to be reflecting in some way. But I, as the adult, can understand this and he can’t, so this part’s up to me.

And the part that I haven’t brought up yet is where she says that he’s hitting, kicking, throwing and destroying things when he’s mad and that he’s disrespectful of her body. Daily, she has to tell him multiple times that he’s not allowed to touch her breasts.

So again, if we see this as: My child is just very impulsive right now, he’s really having a hard time containing himself and controlling himself. Even if he looks very together and conscious, he is dysregulated.  Just like this mother might’ve looked conscious when she slapped him, but it wasn’t a choice.

When we see it that way, we’re going to help him by not putting him in situations where he can easily throw and destroy things. And when we see something starting, we’re going to have a safe response. We’re going to be the safe person instead of getting mad at him for making this choice, because we realize it’s not a choice. We’re going to say, “Oh, oh. Whoa, whoa. Yeah, buddy, I can’t let you do that. You seem so frustrated, but I’ve got to stop you.” And you’re going to stop his hand right away.

So when you’re saying these things, it’s while you are physically stopping him. Ideally you’re emitting safety and calm, so you’re not adding to his overwhelm with your own feelings. And the only way to do that is for you to perceive that you’ve got a dysregulated child on your hands. And there’s a reason, there’s always a reason, and one of the main reasons is that we’re feeling upset ourselves, or we’re very stressed.

So if he’s trying to hit me, I’m going to be holding his wrist, I’m going to be stopping his hands, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, I can’t let you do that.”

And in my mind, I’m seeing: Whoa, this guy is really feeling overwhelmed. Something big going on with him right now. I’m not seeing this as, that I’ve failed or that this is my problem, I’m interested in how I can help.

And if he’s disrespectful of my body… Again, I’m not going to waste my energy telling him multiple times not to do something as if he is making a reasonable choice in his head and thinks: Oh, my mother likes this when I grab at her or touch her. He knows very well that she doesn’t, but he’s doing it anyway. He can’t stop himself.

So, just stop him. Don’t worry that he’s regressed or doesn’t understand that it’s not okay. He does. He’s showing you that he needs help. He needs safety. And I would have my hand there right away, being safe, making as little a deal out of it as I can like, “Nope, that’s not okay, got to stop you.”

I have a period at the end of my sentence. I’m not asking him, “Can you stop? Stop! What are you doing?”

I’m confident, but I’m not emotionally charged, because that’s only going to create more problems for me the rest of the day. So don’t let his hand get anywhere near you, especially if you see him in that grabby state. You can see.

I think I bring this up a lot, but it’s important to tune into your child. Usually we can see when they’re in a state where all bets are off and they’re not going to be able to contain themselves. We can often see that. Sometimes we can’t. Sometimes they look very conscious and they’re smiling and they look very together when they’re doing these defiant-seeming things, but often we can see that their frequency is — that it’s a rocky frequency.

So I’m going to be ready. Yup, he’s going to grab at me. He’s going to do all the things that I’ve gotten angry about in the past. Because he’s in an impulsive state. So I’m ready. Bring it on. “Uh-uh buddy. Nope.” There goes the hand. “Oh, very funny. No, we’re not doing that. Nope. I’m not going to let you do that.”

Much less talk about it. In fact, very little talk about it and just more safe, protective action, but not protective as a victim: “Please stop. Don’t do this to me.” Really feeling your power here because we have a lot of power. And when we have power, we don’t have to push it. We can be on top of things.

Yeah, sometimes it’s going to get away from us and we’re not going to see it coming. And there it goes, and he grabbed me. “Wise guy. No. Uh-uh.” Comfortable. I’m comfortable because I see where this guy is. He’s not threatening to me. I’m not worried that he’s losing something and I’m losing something and I’m failing something. It’s just this temporary thing that’s going on.

And the more you can respond in the ways that I’m suggesting, the sooner it’s going to go away. Because a big part of it is that I’m reacting to it. And every time I react to it, it creates more discomfort in my child, and there’s less chance that he’s going to be able to exert some self control.

So this isn’t blaming anybody. It’s just understanding the power dynamic and how aware our children are of us, how affected they are by us.

And it’s interesting… children often, I’m going to say, seem to regress in these ways that are about caregiving. I have a lot of parents that ask about their child dressing themselves. Their child knows how to dress themselves, but there’s a new baby in the house or a toddler that’s becoming more of a person and a rival for that older child. “And suddenly my older child can’t get dressed in the morning. And I’m telling them to, and I’m asking them to, I’m talking to them about it and they still can’t do it. And I don’t want to give them a helping hand because then I’m worried that means that they’ve lost their skill.”

They haven’t lost their skill.

Just give them a helping hand, especially with caregiving. If, right away, this parent was ready with the wipe and, “Okay, let’s wipe your butt now,” her son will very soon want to do this himself. Because he’ll have gotten what he needs, which is my mom sees me, she accepts me, where I am right now, there’s nothing to be afraid of, I’m just a little overwhelmed. And sometimes I need my parent to carry me through.

And then this parent won’t be getting herself frustrated trying to get him to do something. That’s making it so much harder for both of them. The amount of energy it takes to wipe him is so much less than the coaxing and the pushing and the threatening, and then doing something that she regrets that only makes her feel worse and makes it harder for her to proceed with confidence in herself as a parent.

She can totally do this.

It’s good that she’s in therapy, but it makes sense that the stress reduction activities aren’t completely helping because she’s taking on so much here that isn’t her job: to get him to achieve skills, to get him to be back where he was before he was stressed out. If she can release that, she’s going to have a lot less stress herself.

And when she sees her child reacting to her stress this way, she can remind herself: Oh yeah, of course he’s doing this, because of how I’ve been feeling. And that doesn’t make me a bad mom or that I’m doing something wrong. It’s just important to know so that we can see clearly.

I really hope some of that helps.

And by the way, if my podcasts are helpful to you, you can help the podcast continue by giving it a positive review on iTunes. So grateful to all of you for listening! And please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, JanetLansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in.

And both of my books are available on audio, please check them out. Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting and No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame. You can even get them for free from Audible by following the link in the liner notes of this podcast, or you can go to the books section of my website and find them there. You can also get them in paperback at Amazon, and in ebook at Amazon, Barnes And Noble, and apple.com.

Thanks again for listening. We can do this.

The post It’s Not Regression appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Stop Worrying About Your Preschooler’s Education”

Hi. This is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I have a special guest, Tom Hobson. He’s affectionately known as Teacher Tom. He’s an early childhood educator, international speaker, education consultant, author, teacher of teachers, and my very good friend. Tom’s experience with preschoolers is vast and his ability to see life through a child’s eyes is invaluable. He’s perfected this art, really, and our practices and philosophies are similar on so many levels, starting with trust in our children, valuing independent play, and encouraging organic learning. Welcome. Thank you so much for coming on.

Teacher Tom:  I’m so excited to be here.

Janet Lansbury:  Well it’s a delight to have you. There are a million things I would love to talk with you about. As you know, we’re in a very difficult time, heartbreaking time and strange time, especially for parents with young children, I feel. Is that what you’re noticing too?

Teacher Tom:  Oh yeah. No, these are unprecedented times. You know, all these parents are at home having to do the teacher role. I actually think probably most of the kids are pretty thrilled right now because how often do they get to just spend all day at home with their mom and dad? I mean, for a lot of kids, they’ve been going to preschool as long as they remember, and this is a really special time for them. So I have a feeling more of the anxiety and fear has to do with the parents more than the kids right now. Because for the kids, this might be the best time of their young life.

Janet Lansbury:  Yes. I’ve actually heard from a couple of families that have very highly sensitive children, and they’re saying we’re actually seeing more calm and less meltdowns. So yes, it can absolutely work that way and I think that’s important for parents to know.

Teacher Tom:  Yeah.

Janet Lansbury:  Just taking care of their physical needs and having that be your schedule and then releasing yourself of trying to do the other type of enrichment stuff. You had a wonderful post that thousands of people shared. It’s called, “There Are Plenty of Things to Worry About Right Now: Your Preschooler’s Education is Not One of Them.” And you shared this wonderful insight about your work and what you and other preschool teachers do, which is, you are researchers of children.

Teacher Tom:  Well, and that’s what you do too, right? That’s the right message as well. To me, that’s the piece that I think people don’t understand about what we do, is that we’re not there to instruct the children. We’re not there to tell them what to do. Really, what we’re there is to study them and understand them, to kind of figure out who this human being is we’re with. And when you do that, you find out just how incredibly competent they are.

I’ve already had parents say to me things like, “My kid’s five and they can fry eggs.” And of course they can. They can do all kinds of things at this age. It’s just we haven’t given them the opportunity and now they’re getting the chance.

The other way I think about it is that it’s about listening. It’s about listening, not just with your ears but with your whole soul, your whole being. Because, first of all, you demonstrate to the child you’re connected to them, that you’re there for them and you give them that sense of security. But the other piece, too, is that’s the only way you’re really, really, really going to learn about them, rather than just fall back on your preconceived notions.

Janet Lansbury:  Absolutely. And my mentor, Magda Gerber and her mentor, pediatrician, Emmi Pikler, they talked a lot about sensitive observation, and it’s a core aspect of the approach that I teach, and actually in the classes that we do, which are parent-child classes that start from three-month-old babies. And we recommend doing these things before the baby’s three months, but that’s as young as they could be taken out into a class.

Sensitive observation teaches us everything we need to know about our child and their needs: how to be affirming, how to support them in their learning, all these wonderful things. So I loved that you were recommending for parents that if this hasn’t been your approach, now’s the perfect time to focus in on that. And I loved how you said to let go of this thing where we have to say “good job” and trying to shape what they’re doing and kind of mold it the way we think it should go by encouraging them to do this over that or whatever.

Teacher Tom:  Yes, we have this misperception that some of our kids won’t do anything without us constantly either scolding them or cajoling them or encouraging them. You just hear that mantra, you’ve heard it all the time, right? You hear that good job thing going on over and over again and some people can’t… I mean honestly, they’re trying, but they can’t stop. It’s become so ingrained for most of us.

And I also want to say that all of this, what we’re talking about right now as far as observing and being researchers — this works with adult relationships as well, because listening, that’s what Mr. Rogers always talked about, there’s almost no way to distinguish between listening and love. And when you’re listening to people, you learn so much about them. That’s one of the things that I’m having a really hard time with. I come from, being 58-years-old and having grown up in the culture I’m in, I’m used to being the one doing all the talking, like I’m doing right now, mansplaining everything. And I’ve really learned a great deal of power in just sitting back and listening to people power in the most positive way.

Janet Lansbury:  I remember when my children, each of them got to the age where they weren’t talking to their toys and having those conversations in front of me anymore. I couldn’t observe them in that kind of play. It went a little more private or they didn’t say it out loud so much and they didn’t put it out there, and I remember just how much I missed that. What I love about working with young children is that they put everything out there. They show you what kind of therapy they’re doing with themselves.

Teacher Tom:  That’s why I became a teacher. I was the stay at home parent with my girl and when she got to be five or six and started going to kindergarten, I didn’t know what to do with my time, and so I decided to become a teacher so I could hang out with those kids.

Janet Lansbury:  I love that. I love your story. And you’ve of course been able to see how capable and competent children are and how they problem solve, how they are able to develop their own motor skills without really any assistance at all and developing their creativity.

Teacher Tom:  I seem to tell this story a lot, I say, what would you think, any parent, anybody out there… you watch somebody hovering over their two-month-old baby, drilling them on vowel sounds, you would think they were crazy, right?

Kids learn how to talk. We would think they were crazy if they had the five-month-old out there and they were trying to teach him how to walk, and any doctor who recommended it, we call him a quack.

And I’m convinced the only reason that we believe we need schools to teach children how to read is because we’ve been using schools to teach them how to read for a long time. There’s incredible amount of evidence out there that reading is a really natural human thing to do. So that the older the children get, they’re much more competent than we tend to think. And we actually have really infantalized young children, even infants, we’ve infantalized them.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, we’ve underestimated them.

Teacher Tom:  And that’s the only way to know, really, that what they’re doing is to research. To me that research is such a key part, because everything children are doing, when they are choosing their own activity, I should say… So that was what the fundamental definition of play for me, is a self-selected activity. And when children have chosen, there’s always, behind everything they do there’s a question. They have a question they’re trying to get answered. We might not know what the question is. They might not even know what the question is, but they are engaged in a scientific pursuit trying to get some kind of answer to something. It might just be, can I do this?

I’ll never forget a little boy. He was walking along. He had one of these, it wasn’t a traffic cone, but it was like these traffic cylinder things… And, you know, I have a junk yard playground, you’ve seen it before, so you know it’s kind of full of a mishmash of stuff. Anyway, this kid was carrying it on his shoulder and I watched him put it down on the ground and he arranged it really carefully. He had something in mind, but I didn’t know what it was. And then he climbed up on this big crate that was beside it, and he jumped off, and crack! He broke it.

And I said, “Henry, what’d you do that for?”

And he said, “Well, I wanted to see if I could break it.”

Duh. He had set up a perfect experiment. He had an idea. He was curious.

And children are doing this all day long when they are engaged, even when they’re just watching shadows on the wall. They have a question behind that. What is that? How is that working? It’s not formulated.

I think the hard part for us is, so often as adults, that we want to go test them, right? We want to step in and say, “Well, what did you learn?” Or maybe we ask in a more subtle way. But we try to figure out what they learned.

And you know what? They might not know at that moment.

And, of course, you’re working with children whose communication is pre-verbal. So they of course can’t tell you. And a lot of these things we’ve learned… I know things I’ve learned in my life… if something happens to me in a moment, I don’t learn it in that moment. It might be six months later or 12 months later when suddenly it clicks for me. Oh, aha, that’s what was going on back then. And I think that happens with children all the time.

Janet Lansbury:  Yes, absolutely. Really what we’re talking about is trying to shift this overriding idea that learning is something that is taught to a child by an adult and that that’s our job. And what we’ve seen a million times over with children is that, actually, the things we’re teaching are more through our modeling and the way that we interact with them. But in terms of all the skills, they are self-taught, if we provide the environment that allows for that and encourages that. They’re self taught.

And what this also does for parents, and this is what I really want to help get across — what you got across so beautifully in your article that we’re talking about is that this is a more fun way to be. This is more joyful. You get to bond deeply with your child by understanding your child and just affirming whatever it is that they’re doing, and that trust that you give them. And it can stop being a chore when we start to get into it and we realize this is the joy. This is why I had children so that I could discover them and learn about them.

Teacher Tom:  I don’t know if you’re familiar with Alison Gopnik?

Janet Lansbury:  Oh, absolutely.

Teacher Tom:  She was a clinical psychologist. I was rereading The Gardener and the Carpenter not long ago, and she mentions the fact that the word “parenting” is actually a brand new word. She did a search, used a Google search to go back through all kinds of documents, back through time and found very few uses of the word “parenting” before about 1962. And it’s really significant because the truth is, up until that point we talked about being a parent. Being a parent was a relationship we had with our children. But by turning it into a verb, by making it parenting, suddenly it made it a job we had to do. In any of our other significant relationships, we don’t do them as a verb. We don’t do friending, we don’t do husbanding, we don’t do childing, but suddenly it’s a job.

And the inner metaphor is really beautiful because she says, once we’ve made it a verb, it’s turned parents into carpenters. And a carpenter, if you’re going to build a table, there’s certain standards you have to meet. It has to be flat on top, it has to have four legs, it has to be functional, it has to be sturdy, and you’re going to be judged by how that turns out.

Whereas, when we just are a parent in a relationship, we’re more like the gardener. We plant the seed, we keep it safe, we water it, make sure it gets some sun. But other than that, it’s the seed’s job to grow. And I think that we have lost sight of that role of parents. We’re always about parenting when really it’s just about having a relationship with our child, and understanding we shouldn’t be judging people for how their children turn out. It’s more like the relationship. I’m not going to get judged by how my friend Janet Lansbury turns out. You know what I mean? I’m not going to be judged by how my wife turns out, but I’m going to be judged by how good that relationship is.

And at the same time this has happened, we have lost our grandmas. We suddenly moved away from our grandparents. Everybody is raising their kids without grandparent’s influence. And humans evolved this post-menopausal period for females because it takes a lot of adults to raise children. You can’t just do it with one or two people. But we’ve broken up our society to such a degree that we have the adults doing the work in one corner, the kids doing their school in another corner, and that elderly people are all in the nursing home somewhere. To me that’s been a foundational shift. And one of the things I’m trying to encourage people to get back to is understanding that you cannot raise a child by yourself. You need your whole village. And that involves, hopefully… if you don’t have grandmas, find some people like that, because older women know a lot about raising kids.

Janet Lansbury:  That’s true. And so what you’re saying is that not only do we have less support, but we are putting more pressure on ourselves and judgment on ourselves to do a job that feels like it’s supposed to be very active and that we are responsible for so much more than we need to be.

So, if we can’t have more of a village, at least we can free people of this other idea that is making our life so much harder as parents, which is that, Oh my friend is doing this many playgroups and classes and I have to do that.

One of the questions I’ve received lately from a few people, and I wanted to answer it somewhere so maybe I’ll answer it here, is concern, understandable concern that because their child isn’t going to preschool and able to have play dates, that they’re going to miss being social. They’re going to be lonely and not get enough of that in their lives. And I loved what Magda Gerber used to say, which is: sure, a group situation can be helpful once in a while, or one friend over can be great for a young child, but they don’t need that every day. That’s something that can happen in preschool, but they learn social skills through their parents primarily — all the interactions that we have with our children, and how they see us interacting with each other and with them. And the neighbor that, now at this point of course, we’re just waving to over the fence and maybe talking to. Or the people we’re seeing when we’re on our walk and we can say hello. And that’s really all they need.

Also, maybe it could be that parents, we have this sense of loss and we’re maybe projecting that our child is going to feel it. But children really don’t. They don’t need that as much. Yeah, they might miss the school and teacher Tom and their friends, but…

Teacher Tom:  That’s why you have to be a researcher, right? Because some kids are going to demand more and some kids don’t want more. I know my daughter when she was as young as three years old she used to say to me, because I’m a homebody, I would just hang around the house with her sometimes and she would start saying to me, “We need to go somewhere.” So we would go to a park or something, I would go somewhere with her because she would want to get out of the house and go somewhere. Didn’t necessarily mean hanging out with other people.

But I think that’s hopefully, that’s one of the blessings that comes out of this time, parents do get to understand their children more and get to spend more time with them. I’m hoping that more and more people take on this opportunity. And I understand that the people who are going to be able to do this are the more privileged people, people who have the opportunity, because many of us are out there scrambling to make money right now and it might not be a good chance to connect with your kids. But your kids are home and there’s no better time now than to try to connect with them. And I’m hoping the legacy of this is that kids look back on this as one of the best times of their lives.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, I think that’s very possible. We had a situation once, of course no comparison to this, but we were doing some much needed updating on our home and we were given a place to stay by a relative who wasn’t using it anymore, and it was not in great shape. It was tiny and I had my two daughters and my husband and me and our dog all staying there. And we all actually got very, very sick. I had the worst flu I’ve ever had. The weather was pretty extreme in this area and it was rough. It felt very, very rough. And my older daughter was, I think, about six at that time. And when we finally moved back into our house… and this was luxury now, comparatively, she missed that situation so much. She missed us all being close together. She missed that. It was romanticized to her as this wonderful time.

Teacher Tom:  And I think that’s true for all of us in a way.

One of my fondest memories is when my whole family moved from the east coast to the west coast and we spent a week and a half driving across the country in two cars, and that intimacy of us all being together in the same hotel rooms and eating in the same restaurants and driving, it was just incredibly bonding. I would not trade that experience for anything in the world. We could have got there faster by plane, but boy, that was a better way to go.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. And that’s a child’s perspective and that’s what we can understand if we see our role with our own children, our role in their play as researchers. You, with all the research you’ve done, you probably see situations from a child’s perspective or you can put yourself there pretty easily. Right?

Teacher Tom:  Well, I sure try to, because a lot of times that helps me understand my own perspective. There’s a purity to the way children are looking at things. There are a lot of aspects of our world that taint what we’re doing, one of which is this constant pressure to earn a living, the constant pressure to get food on the table at a certain time. All these scheduled things that we have in our lives. And I think that it’s really great to be able to step back and let the children lead in that regard. And to me, that’s what I mean by learning from children so much is that, very often, when I don’t know what to do, I just shut up and sit back and let the kids lead.

Janet Lansbury:  Because they’ll show you.

Teacher Tom:  They will show me a different perspective on it and they usually have a better idea than I have.

Janet Lansbury:  Oh yeah. Yeah. Much better. Though I’ve tried to be a practiced observer with children, ideas always come to me how I could make it better, how I could make them learn more, some interesting twist on it. And it’s an interesting fun challenge to try to let go of that and then get the surprise from what they do.

Teacher Tom:  From an adult perspective, the way I think about this is: if someone was doing all that kind of stuff to you as an adult, we would call it unsolicited advice.

Janet Lansbury:  Absolutely.

Teacher Tom:  And I think you could almost argue that almost everything that happens in schools, is unsolicited advice. Nobody likes it.

Janet Lansbury:  Do you have any thoughts about making this role an easier transition for parents or…

Teacher Tom:  What I’m saying to people is right now just relax and try to get a rhythm with your child. We’re so focused on the idea of a schedule. Kids do need some predictability and all that kind of stuff, but instead of dictating a schedule, I’m trying to have people think about it as creating a rhythm. And I think creating those “yes spaces” that you talk about, and I think outdoors is one of the best yes spaces there are, your backyard or whatever. I’m encouraging people that they should get out there and walk your neighborhood. You can stay six feet apart from people. Don’t go to the playground because that’s where the people are crowded in, but just kind of wander your way through your neighborhood and see new things. Walk the dog more often.

You mentioned before role modeling. And this is a great time to do some role modeling. To me, what a great time to pick up your DIY projects and start repairing broken things around the house. Get out your sewing kit and start darning socks or hammer the baseboards back in that are coming off or repaint a wall. Just doing a lot of those kinds of projects around the house, and the kids can take part in that. They can engage with it, or at least they’re going to see you taking care of your world in a different way.

It is not unprecedented in the scope of human history to get work done while your kids are there. In fact, for most of human history, our whole hunter gatherer past, for 95% of our existence, there was no distinction between work and play. The children were just there with the adults and they pitched in where they could or didn’t if they chose not to.

And to me, I think that if we can give kids a chance for the novelty of being home alone with mom and dad to wear off a little bit, we’re going to find ourselves in a position where you’re going to, again, really discover how competent they can be, how productive they can be, and how much they want to participate in the real stuff of life.

I find myself so often frustrated about the abundance of toys that children have right now. And the truth is is that children do not need toys. They much prefer the real world and the real things we find there. When you’re outside, the leaves and the sticks and the rocks are what they want. If you are in your garage and you have a toy lawn mower and a real lawnmower, every kid’s going to play with real lawnmower. They don’t want to play with the toy one. If you’re sweeping up around the house, hand them a broom, they’re going to participate in the sweeping up too. They might not do jobs up to your standards, but that’s not the point. The point is to allow children to develop their competencies where they see fit.

Janet Lansbury:  That’s great advice. Thank you so much again, Tom, for coming on and sharing your wisdom. You always have an interesting perspective to share with us.

Teacher Tom:  Well, and thank you Janet. This has been such a lot of fun. I hope people get something out of it.

Janet Lansbury:  So tell us the best place to find some of your resources.

Teacher Tom:  My blog is called Teacher Tom and the URL is teachertomsblog.blogspot.com, then also, my book, if somebody is interested, up until May 18th we’re offering a discount because it’s pre-publication price, Teacher Tom’s Second Book. And you can find that by going to teachertomsecondbook.com/books.

Janet Lansbury:  Great, and the first book is fantastic too, by the way.

Teacher Tom:  You can also buy that at the same place. It’s on the same page and we’re also offering a discount on that.

Janet Lansbury:  Wonderful. All right, well you have a great rest of your day and thank you so much again.

Teacher Tom:  Take care Janet, bye.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in, and both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon, Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting and No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame.  You can get them in ebook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or barnesandnoble.com and in audio at audible.com. As a matter of fact, you can get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the LINK in the liner notes of this podcast.

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

The post Stop Worrying About Your Preschooler’s Education appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “What Children Really Need to Succeed in School… and Life (with Rick Ackerly)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I have a special guest joining me, Rick Ackerly. Rick is a nationally recognized educator, author and speaker with a master’s in education from Harvard University and in his first book, The Genius In Every Child: Encouraging Character, Curiosity and Creativity in Children, Rick explains that genius is not just about intelligence and aptitude, it’s also a word that embodies our inner soul, nature and character. His heartwarming stories as a former principal and father shed insight into children and the process of education. Rick has served as a head of five schools since 1974, and he currently consults with schools and speaks to parent groups around the country. He publishes essays on parenting and education weekly on his blog, geniusinchildren.org, so I know you’ll be excited to hear from him. So here he is. Hello Rick.

Rick Ackerly:  Hi Janet, how are you?

Janet Lansbury:  Thank you so much for being willing to come on and share with us.

Rick Ackerly:  Always my pleasure.

Janet Lansbury:  You were probably one of the first comrades that I met online, in social media. I can’t even remember how we connected.

Rick Ackerly:  I remember. You were one of my first Twitter friends and I quoted you after following you a little while. “Janet Lansbury says, ‘Children are whole people.'” And I put that on one of my early blogs.

Janet Lansbury:  It’s been such a gift to have your support, your corroboration, your insights from your very different perspective that are completely compatible with mine, I feel.

Rick Ackerly:  Yeah.

Janet Lansbury:  Really, I can’t appreciate you enough.

Rick Ackerly:  Thank you. And likewise.

Janet Lansbury:  What I wanted to focus on with you today is when we talk about things like school readiness and how to give our children the tools or help them hone the tools that they need to succeed and thrive. And as you and I both know, thriving in school is the same as thriving in life. We need the same traits…

Rick Ackerly:  Yes.

Janet Lansbury:  And you have, of course, this long time perspective as a problem solver type administrator. You worked directly with a lot of the children when they were having issues. And I was wondering if you had seen certain trends, or noticed certain traits that stood out as signs that children could thrive in these environments.

Rick Ackerly:  Well, the most important research, if someone could read only one thing, it would be Alison Gopnik. She’s written a couple … at least a couple of really good books or go to one of her Ted talks. The core concept is that kids are not empty vessels to be filled up with information. They’re not so much needing to be trained, they are scientists. They are born scientists, and every move they make for the first five years of their lives is testing the environment. So every move they make is a hypothesis, and they test that hypothesis against that reality and they readjust the hypothesis, and they keep going like that.

Every minute of every day they’re studying how people react, how to build relationships, how to make friends, how to collaborate. Everything from playing with Legos to building a tree house or playing a game, eating dinner, or helping the family prepare for dinner or all of that. They’re learning how to make it in the world. So that by the time they walk in the door of a kindergarten, they have been doing research on the world for 43,000 hours.

But the most important thing, which is ignored by most schools and not handled that well by many parents, is that they think we have to do stuff to kids to get them educated. And that’s completely opposite. We have to create the conditions in which we facilitate them doing it.

Janet Lansbury:  Well, they are the experts at this, right? That’s what Alison Gopnik says.

Rick Ackerly:  That’s right. Act as if they are the experts.

Janet Lansbury:  Well, they really are, because they’re built to learn more in these early years than in the whole rest of their lives put together, in terms of gathering knowledge. So we don’t want to get in the way of that. We want to support them, understand that they know what they’re doing.

Rick Ackerly:  Yes, treat them as if they know what they’re doing.

Janet Lansbury:  And of course they need our boundaries and to help keep them safe and keep them appropriate. But yes, absolutely. I love that you brought up Alison Gopnik because I’m in love with all the understanding that she’s brought to the public about the way children learn and how, again, they are the experts and they’ve got the tools. And we do make that mistake, I think, as parents. Even when we understand this research — that they are absorbing and learning so much in these early years, it can be tempting to want to say: well, let me give them numbers and letters and colors, math problems, let me put more stuff into them. But the way that they’re taking things in is so much more profound. They’re practicing their higher learning abilities.

Rick Ackerly:  That’s right. Yeah. I think it’s very important for parents who are looking forward to school, or looking forward with terror to school or, whatever, anxiety, fear or confidence. I hear over and over again that the main thing is reading. It’s all about reading. Well, first of all, it’s not all about reading. But let’s just say it is all about reading… The average age at which a child is physiologically ready in every way is six and a half, which is why first grade is when it used to be reading is taught, quote, taught. But the range at which someone is ready to read is anywhere from three years old to nine years old. Not when they do read, but when they’re physiologically and neurologically ready to read. That varies a lot between kids. And our whole culture is: Oh my God, we’ve got to get them reading early. If they’re not reading, by the time they’re ready for kindergarten, you know they’re going to be failing.

That is like trying to take a car that’s in second gear and drive it 60 miles an hour. You have to work with the child at their point of readiness. And they can be ready for other things. If you put words in front of them and their eyes bounce off the page, that’s fine. That’s fine. See what they are ready to do and help them do things that they’re ready to do. It’ll all feed into reading when it’s time for them to read, because the entire world, their environment is so full of letters and numbers, and everybody else is doing it. At some point they’re going to want to do it and they’ll, in their own way, figure out how to do it. I mean, I didn’t read until I was in fifth grade and I got a great education. I went to Williams College, I went to Harvard graduate school and I’ve written the books. It’s not a killer if you can’t read.

Janet Lansbury:  How was that handled when you were in school? Because that’s, of course, the danger when we do try to harness some types of knowledge that children aren’t ready for, that they lose confidence in themselves as learners. What gets thwarted is this most precious thing that we have, which is I’m capable, I can do things, I can learn, and I know what I’m doing. That is the precious part that we don’t want to interfere with. How did that go for you? Were you made to feel less than, or …

Rick Ackerly:  Let’s start with the blessings that made it easier. The first is that my parents didn’t let on much that they were anxious about it, and they didn’t feed that anxiety to me. They acted as if I’m accountable to my teacher and the teacher’s accountable for doing whatever is necessary to get me to read. It wasn’t that I couldn’t read, it was that I was a slow reader. It didn’t feel good to be behind other people in reading. I do remember in first grade we were sitting in circles and we were literally reading: “See Jane run.” There was those books. And Johnny read, “See Jane run, look, look, look.” And then it got to me and I haltingly read the words that were in front of me, and we went around the circle and it was okay. A week later or something like that, maybe the next day, Johnny is in a different group and I’m in this group and I said, “Wait, why is Johnny in that other group?” A: Johnny was my friend and, B: I compared myself to Johnny.

I used Johnny as sort of a benchmark for how I was doing and I thought I was keeping up with him. And the teacher said, “That’s the good reading group and you’re in the slow reading group.”

And I went, “Wait, wait, wait. That’s not correct. I’ve been comparing myself to Johnny and we’re the same.”

She said, “No you aren’t. He’s a better reader than you.”

And that was a blow. That was not good. It didn’t ruin me. And I kept trying to read and my parents had books by the side of my bed, mostly picture books. But I learned how to read. But one of the real blessings I had is that dyslexia hadn’t been invented yet. I’m sure I would have been diagnosed with dyslexia, but it wouldn’t have done me any good. I needed to learn how to read in my own way. And the entire environment was conspiring to get me to read.

I did. I’m still a slow reader because I read every word and I think about it and I go back. My wife, who’s a very fast reader says, “Everybody says I’m a good reader and you’re a bad reader. But the thing is, I can read a whole book in a weekend, but I don’t remember a thing. And you remember everything you read.” So who’s the good reader and who’s a bad reader? Schools and parents need to be very careful about getting all bent out of shape about reading, and especially at an early age because there are so many other pathways to success. Not that there’s nothing to worry about, but worrying is not that constructive. That’s all.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. It’s that thing of children not being able to learn as well when there’s too much stress in the environment.

Rick Ackerly: Yes.

Janet Lansbury:  And what you’re also reminding me of with your comment about comprehension is that, when children are younger, there are some children that are vocalizing language much earlier than others. Parents get worried about that and, yes, of course, like you said, there are things to look at and maybe get checked at some point, but oftentimes that child is comprehending just as much, if not more, than the child who’s speaking.

Rick Ackerly:  Yes. It’s one of the neuroses in our society. Get there quicker, faster, sooner, and you’ll be better.

Janet Lansbury:  Right.

Rick Ackerly:  So one of my daughters, she’s a teacher, she has three sons. None of them spoke at all fluently until four and a half years old. None of them. I don’t know why. But under those circumstances, a lot of people, including me, might be inclined to think: Well, they just don’t know what’s going on. Maybe they’re even stupid. They don’t seem to know stuff.

That was wrong. They are so observant. They’re picking up everything. The words that we spoke to them were in their head. And it really became clear to me when the first one, from between four and a half and five, he started to stutter and his mother said, “Gee, maybe we should get him tested.” And I said, “Well, let’s just wait a little bit.”

I had a hypothesis that he’s having a motor problem. He knows the words, he hears the words, he knows the meaning, he knows what’s going on, but there’s some glitch between that and it coming out of his mouth. And sure enough, his stuttering was about working through this motor problem. By five, he was speaking quite fluently. He’s 11 now, he’s getting good grades in school, and you should see him in action. Absolutely no dysfunction whatsoever. He’s right up there with everybody else. But just another example of, in our society, one of the neuroses is the faster you move up the ladder, the smarter, better, more successful you will be, and that’s wrong. It’s just not correct. There’s no data to support that at all.

Janet Lansbury:  The only thing I feel like earlier is better in is for the parents to start trusting their child as a capable person. Because the comprehension thing, I see it in infants. When you start talking to infants about what you’re doing with them, they respond as if they understand, because they do. So a child who’s speaking at age two, let’s say, speaking words, has absorbed all this language for years already.

Rick Ackerly:  And that’s kind of what I was saying about my grandsons. It’s not that they didn’t understand. It’s not that they didn’t know the words and they couldn’t follow the directions, and it wasn’t that they didn’t know what was going on. But to make like it’s a problem is a mistake. It’s just how they’re developing. And that’s sort of a theme running through everything you say, and what you said in the very beginning. The first step is to believe in them, know that in their own peculiar, sometimes distressing way, they will develop.

Janet Lansbury:  And Magda Gerber said this all along, not these exact words, but why can’t we enjoy what children are doing instead of focusing on what they’re not doing? And that aligns directly with your book, The Genius In Every Child.

Rick Ackerly:  Yes.

Janet Lansbury:  As parents we’re always going to worry about something. There’s always something to worry about. I know that I have three children, they’re all adults now. I’m always worried about them. So, to tame our own worries and take that leap of faith to trust, it is very challenging. It’s not easy. But it’s so important that we encourage what our child does have. And that not only helps them to hone those talents and foster them, but it helps them on this most important level of the self confidence, the belief in self as able.

Rick Ackerly:  So Howard Gardner is important because he shows that one’s intelligence, one’s self, one’s way of manifesting in the world, what you’re good at, what you’re not good at will show up in a wide variety of ways. There are all sorts of different ways that the complex organism of the brain organizes itself. For instance, when I was a kid, I was always on the floor of building things. I played with blocks and the precursors of Legos, and nobody would have said, “Oh, that’s going to really help you in math someday.” But it did.

I can literally say that… when was it? In fifth grade we started multiplying and dividing fractions. It was not at all a surprise to me that four times one over two equals two, because we had a block, and then we had half blocks and four half blocks equals a double. That was built into my brain from block building. So it was easy when it came time to put symbols to it.

The other people who hadn’t been building with blocks found it very difficult. It’s just another way of saying what you’ve been saying all along and what Gerber says is trust their way of approaching the world, of doing their research on the world, of diagnosing the world, and support it and engage with it. Ask questions, participate. Make it your research project.

Gosh, how does he learn? How does she handle this? And they come home, “So and so’s picking on me.”

“Well, tell me about that. How does that work? Tell me what exactly what happened on the playground.” Right?

“What did she do? What did you do?” Not with any sort of: I’ve got to solve this problem. Because it’s not your problem. It’s the kid’s problem.

Janet Lansbury:  Exactly. Is that what you did as an administrator when …?

Rick Ackerly:  Oh yeah. So the normal thing to do is if two kids — third graders — are fighting on the playground or something like that and they’re sent to my office, the normal thing to do is sit them both down and say, “What’s your side of the story? What’s your side of the story?” Because it takes two to tango. Well, it may take two to tango, but that’s not the best way to empower each child to become better and better at negotiating the world.

I would send one into the hall to sit in a chair in the hallway while I talked to one of them. And I would say, “What did you do to get yourself here?”

And the child might say, “I didn’t do anything. The teacher’s being unfair.”

“Okay, but what did you do?”

“Well, it’s no fair because she …”

“Okay, the next word out of your mouth has to be ‘I’ and then there’s a verb and then you can say anything you want. I what?”

“Poked my finger in his eye.”

“Okay.”

In other words, I’m trying to maximize everybody’s responsibility. 100%- zero, not 50/50. Sure, technically it takes two to tango, but that’s disempowering. I want every kid to know how not to get sent to my office.

Janet Lansbury:  That’s brilliant.

Rick Ackerly:  On their own. “Okay, you made a mistake, yeah. What are you going to do about it? Okay, say you’re sorry? Will that work, will that be sufficient? It’s not sufficient. What do you have to do? Well, maybe you have to … ”

All problem solving. That person in front of me is the only person that matters right now. The person out in the hallway, that’ll come. The teacher who wants to make sure I handle the problem properly, that’ll happen later. But that student in front of me is the only thing that matters right now. And what matters about that student? Their empowerment, their self actualization, their ability to do what they want to with their lives, and they probably don’t want to spend in the headmaster’s office.

So then I just send that person out, bring the other person in and I do the same thing. And maybe, it depends on what they say, they might both come back in and they’d both say something to each other.

And I’d say to one, “Did that fix the problem?”

“Yes.”

And I’d say to the other, “Did that fix the problem?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Do you have to do anything else?”

“Yeah, I think we better go talk to the teacher.”

But it’s all their self-determination. We have to empower their ability to make something of themselves. That’s the whole thing.

Janet Lansbury:  That’s great. I think you’ve actually answered my other question, which was what to do as parents if maybe we haven’t given our child this space to develop their own talents and their own view of the world? What if we we’re coming to this later and we want to make changes? And I think your answer… it sounds like would be: “Just open it up now. Empower them now. Be curious about them, give them ownership of their lives and their conflicts, and just make that change at any time.”

Rick Ackerly:  Right. And we’re not giving this to them. They have it. Their inclination to self-determine, they come into the world with it. We’re respecting it. We’re appreciating it. Working with it.

Janet Lansbury:  Exactly. We’re acknowledging that it has been there the whole time. There was a quote that I actually shared yesterday and it got a very big response on one of my pages. It’s from Seth Godin. It just sounds spot on for your book, The Genius In Every Child and also the work that I do with infants and toddlers and preschoolers. He says, “My proposed solution is simple. Don’t waste a lot of time and money pushing kids in directions. They don’t want to go. Instead, find out what weirdness they excel at and encourage them to do that. Then get out of the way.”

Rick Ackerly:  And I agree with that. Except the “get out of the way” part. Yes, don’t be in the way, but go hand in hand, or at least follow them. I am not for leaving your kids alone so much as building a relationship with them that respects their autonomy and their drive for self-determination. And you have to play your role, which is to set boundaries maybe sometimes. They’re actually looking to you, who has, what? 30 to 40 years of experience, to know stuff that they don’t know. Yes, I am a scientist. Yes, I will investigate the world. Yes, I’m going to determine my own life. But you know a lot more, so you could whisper something in my ear.

Not wanting to be an authoritarian doesn’t mean you ought to keep your mouth shut. You have all sorts of things you could tell them about what might be a better move, as long as you’re not implying that they’re not very good at making decisions. But have a relationship with them, make sure they know they’re loved, they need to know that you’ve got their back.

Janet Lansbury:  Absolutely. And I would also add that as parents, if we can learn to let go of those worries, the hovering, and that super interventionist approach, we can enjoy who our child is. It’s a process of discovery. It’s much more fun as a parent than trying to second guess and maybe fail because I’ve spent a lot of money putting you into this and putting you into that thing that I thought would be the best, and it didn’t work. So we can free ourselves of all of that.

A wonderful thing about parents today that I’ve noticed is that they want to be more involved, and that’s great. You can be so involved, as you’re saying, in an enjoyment and fostering level that’s so healthy and wonderful for your child and it builds an amazing relationship. It doesn’t need to be: well, either I’m involved and I’m hovering and taking over or I’m not involved at all. I’m out of the way and I don’t care about them and I’m just standing back.

No, as you said, we can be right there observing and supporting, if we can work on taking our worries out of the picture. If we can take our own: oh, I’ve got a better idea for how these blocks should go out of the picture. If we just put these blocks over here, I could teach him red because there’s a red one.

I know that I get so many great ideas as a teacher with young children when they’re playing and I feel them all coming up and I try to pause and tell myself: Oh no, just wait and see. They always surprise you with something much more interesting because it comes from them. This can be the joy of parenting, watching our child unfold, what Seth Godin calls the weirdness, or you call the genius.

Rick Ackerly:  Yes.

Janet Lansbury:  I love Magda Gerber’s magic word “wait” too. So waiting a little first, because they may figure it out in a different way. So just being in that more responsive mode. Now I see my child is really stuck and I’ve given it that wait moment or two, and now maybe I can give them some kind of minimal guidance so that they could do more.

Well, Rick, I just want to tell everyone, if you haven’t already, please check out Rick’s book, The Genius In Every Child. I’ll be linking to it in the transcript and I’ve been recommending it on my website for… forever. You’ll find that, again, it’s very compatible with everything that I talk about in early childhood, but it really takes it a step further because of Rick’s incredible experience as a school head and inspirer of not only children, but adults and teachers. He’s a blessing. So thank you so much Rick, and we’ll do it again, I hope.

Rick Ackerly:  Good. I hope so too. It’s always good to talk to you.

Also, both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon, No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting.  You can get them in ebook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or barnesandnoble.com, and in audio at audible.com.

Thank you so much for listening. We can do this.

Rick Ackerly’s book is available here: The Genius in Every Child

The post What Children Really Need to Succeed in School… and Life (with Rick Ackerly) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Raising Self-Directed Learners in Any School Environment”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. This week I’m thrilled to have Laura Grace Weldon back to discuss how her self-directed, free-range learning ideas can benefit children who go to traditional schools like mine did. And we’ll be discussing a lot of other things as well.

For those who aren’t familiar with her work, Laura Grace Weldon is the author of Free Range Learning which is a comprehensive guide for families interested in homeschooling and unschooling. In our previous podcast together, Laura shared an extremely compelling case for homeschooling. If you haven’t listened to that episode and you’re interested in exploring less conventional schooling possibilities, it’s really a must. The tile of that podcast is “Adventures in Free-Range Learning,” and I know you’ll be as inspired as I was by Laura’s experiences and discoveries. Her whole journey. It’s really incredible and I believe she’s a genius.

Laura agreed to join me again to explore the other side of the coin, conventional schooling, which is still the route that most families take by either choice or necessity.

Welcome Laura and thank you so much for being here.

Laura Grace Weldon:  Hello Janet. Thank you so much for inviting me again.

Janet Lansbury:  So in the personal story that you shared last time, you mentioned that your children were originally in school and you touched a little bit on how you were an advocate for their education and their individuality in that setting. Can you talk a little about how you managed that and what, if any, progress you were able to make?

Laura Grace Weldon:  I think like many really involved parents, I volunteer in classrooms, I served on committees, I managed to work with a group of moms in institute and all of day work program where we brought working artists into the school, which shows that our school had a lot of flexibility to work with us. I did plenty of things that weren’t successful, like try to change the school lunch room offerings to be healthier and tried to advocate for my kids when there were mandated things. I remember one was an all school Sea World field trip and I very politely said that my kids would be staying home that day because I didn’t want them to learn about marine mammals in a captive situation.

I think I was the only person who did that and considered crazy by everybody else but I think we always have the right to stick up for what we care about and whether that’s saying that there is no research showing that homework is a value in elementary grades and that we advocate for our kids to have less or no homework at that time. It’s something we have the right to do. Maybe to advocate for our kids not taking standardized tests, which more and more people are doing, is a way of sticking up for our kids. I know that I ended up having to take one of my kids out of the school and take him to Case Western Reserve University for IQ testing because they didn’t want to put him in the gifted program because he was not getting his work done because he was bored but that was one of the qualification is you had to be super responsible kid.

Janet Lansbury:  Oh my goodness.

Laura Grace Weldon:  Yeah, we just had to follow our instincts and do what we think is right, even if it’s hard.

Janet Lansbury:  What was your approach in those days with their after school time and their weekend time and their holiday time? Did they have the balance of self-directed learning and lying around and deciding what that time was about?

Laura Grace Weldon:  We always de-emphasized structure programs outside of school and in part, that was because so many of the families we were friends with, once their kids were school age, they were just gone incessantly. They were in travel soccer or they were in so many theater lessons or they were just gone. It was like our kids plans were completely unavailable unless you scheduled them in and it made me so sad for what childhood. So, I was the horrible mom who would throw away those little flyers that came in backpacks that tried to have all these enticing things to do and I even threw out the sports things, which I know is just unbelievable to so many people but when I tried to research it, it showed that, at least for elementary aged kids, there’s no real benefit to early sports and kids who start young are not any more likely to be high school athletes and about 75% of kids who are in league sports drop out by the time they’re 13. So, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me, which gave my kids all sorts of time to ride their bikes and read library books and go hiking and make their own little inventions and do kid things.

Janet Lansbury: Also, there’s this idea of allowing them to assimilate, even just for educational purposes. To be able to have time pondering what you’ve taken in, the learning experiences or the enrichment experiences that you had. I mean, children need a lot of time down to be able to absorb and throw it around in their mind and make sense of it and that is real learning.

Laura Grace Weldon: Right and that’s true for all of us. I think the more low-key approach makes it so much less stressful for everyone in the family and parents are not incessantly driving around and trapping the littlest ones in car seats and strollers to the older kid’s activities and everyone is just a great deal more relaxed when you have a low key approach.

Janet Lansbury: Definitely, and it gives them that space to figure out what they’re passionate about. So, my approach was more about really trusting them to know themselves during their downtime, during their after school time, weekend time and that meant, in a couple cases, signing up to do a sport or something that generally they did stay with and they didn’t ever complain about going to do these things because it was completely their choice. This was maybe one per child, a one day a week situation per child where they would have that after school. If they got an inkling that they wanted to try something, I saw that as a way to give them confidence in those voices inside and sometimes it was just, especially with instruments and thinking of one of my children in particular, she took probably four different instruments. Took lessons briefly in each of those instruments. We always let her quit and I know that’s controversial for parents. We trusted her to have gotten what she needed from that and move on to the next thing. Now, she doesn’t really play any instruments but she just graduated with high honors from college and she’s got a lot of talents and I’m sure she got something from those experiences.

Laura Grace Weldon: Yeah. Learning is never wasted and you took that approach where you were letting her explore and I don’t mean to say that we should just let our kids do nothing. What you were doing was letting your kids explore their passions, whether it was sports or music or whatever and I think that’s the key is we really pay attention to the individual child and some kids are more daydreamy and lie around on their stomachs and draw pictures and do make believe and some kids are more geared toward inventing things and building things and some kids are just driven to be with other kids and to sing and dance and act and that’s how we support their passion is make sure that they are exposed to new things but we still build in that freedom to explore those things and drop them if they’re no longer interesting.

Janet Lansbury:  So, we can still take a free range type learning approach, whether kids are in school or not, right?

Laura Grace Weldon:  Yes, absolutely. That’s actually how I ended up writing this book. I would be advocating to parents at a talk or at a gathering or something about less structure and more freedom and people would say, “Well, then, how am I reinforcing math and reading and how am I getting my kids to advance?” So, I would try to talk about what kids actually lean toward when we give them freedom and I ended up giving all these examples over and over, “Well, here are things that are open ended and unstructured to do and here are some other things.” And that became the last 100 pages of my book. I’ve got all these ideas that are appropriate for families or kids to do with friends or to do by themselves and they’re kind of spring board. So, say you want your kid over the summer to be doing work on math stuff and you don’t want to do worksheets. So, make up a secret code and sent messages. Sketch little maps, maybe a treasure map and hide some little silly thing or collect funny information about your family. Make a guess about how many times the cat sleeps here versus the time the cat sleeps there and you can chart it and find out. Track how much money you’re saving towards a big family event that you’re looking forward too. You can put math into all kinds of stuff.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. So, it’s meaningful to them and that’s how we all learn. When it’s meaningful, we learn quickly, we learn deeply, we learn best and it stays with us when we learn that way. So, how else have you supported your kids interests and passions besides their school time? Which for you, I guess, became all day.

Laura Grace Weldon:  One of the things I noticed is that kids seem so drawn to doing stuff with other kids and when left to their own devices, they kind of form these groups around interest. When a couple of my older kids were in a book group, my youngest and a couple other younger siblings of these kids were at loose ends and normally, I would have gathered them around in the books to remember something but instead, they started, in an impromptu way, making up and acting out stories. So, we called them the play rights and of course, every story they made up was constantly changed as they were then acting it out and they would come up with props, just from around the house or the yard and they had a hilarious, wonderful time and I ended up doing this for years and as they got older and were able to read and write, they would write down a rough outline of their stories and become more and more elaborate in the way that they acted it out and firstly, building all this emotional intelligence by arguing with each other about what was better and how to do it differently and stuff like that and it just seemed like this beautiful, organic group they had formed.

That happens often in a homeschooling, unschooling world, where kids get together and their parents help them to do that to expand on some interests like building electronics or learning darkroom techniques or something, and I learned slowly, but I learned that those things are most successful when parents don’t take over. If parents are super interested and, “Oh, let’s reenact Medieval History,” the kids usually are not the ones interested in doing it. It has to be the kid.

Janet Lansbury:  Absolutely, and I think that is why we love self-directed learning and why it’s so important for children because it does come from them and it’s a way of expressing themselves.

Laura Grace Weldon:  We had a bunch of boys who decided they wanted to do science club and the parents really ran this for a while and that we’d meet at different homes and the parents would have an activity out and all the materials and the boys would do mouse trap cars or some experiment and then the parent would explain if things didn’t go right and the boys were interested but they also wanted to play afterwards, and as the parents got more laid back and the boys got older, they just took over their science club and that became the play for them, is engaging in science and they would come up with these bigger and more elaborate projects they wanted to do and nobody was there explaining the scientific principles. Nobody was ruling over them, telling them how to do anything and they put so much rigor and depth into what they were learning and they made these marvelous projects. They build a hover craft that actually hovered. They built tennis ball cannons that shot amazing distances and that became this endeavor that was so important to them that they did this for years. They did this until they went off to college and I’m not sure if this is relevant, but a number of them did go into science fields. I can’t attribute that to science club but it showed the power of just stepping back and letting them do this on their own.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. For me, the joy in parenting has been the stuff my kids come up with and that’s been since they were born. Seeing that they were staring at something for a really long time that I never would have noticed and to them, it was interesting and learning about them through their self-directed activities and their passions and their hobbies, which there’s so many surprises along the way as parents and for me, that makes all the hard stuff worthwhile. That’s the gift in this, to get to be excited about the unfolding of our children. Seeing how powerful it is for them to feel that we appreciate them as they are. We’re not trying to make them a little more of a pianist or a soccer player. That we just get a kick out of exactly where they’re at and who they are.

Laura Grace Weldon: They’re still oriented towards their own wholeness and their integrity if we give them space to do that.

Janet Lansbury:  I was thinking of this before we talked today. I wanted to ask you if you’d ever had the sense that any of your children would have preferred conventional schooling at any time or did they want to go back, any of them? Did they ever ask about that or were they quite immersed in enjoying what you were able to give them?

Laura Grace Weldon:  I know a lot of homeschooling, unschooling kids are interested in schools if they hadn’t ever gone and I think it’s really nice to have the freedom in a family to say to your kids, “Of course you can try it out. Of course you can go back and see what you think or start school and see what you think. Some kids do go back in the junior high or high school years. Since my kids had been in school, they did not express any interest in going back into it because they were pretty familiar with what that was like and they wanted those structures to be done. So, it goes both ways.

Janet Lansbury:  In our last podcast, I had a longing for the ability to give that to my children. It really sounded so nurturing and so exciting. But we live in a pretty small community and for two of my three children, to have all the children they knew going off somewhere that they weren’t going, it would have been a punishment to them. They are both all about other people. So, I realized that the way you’ve done this, they have had incredible social experiences and a lot of opportunity for that. Where I live, they wouldn’t have had that.

Laura Grace Weldon:  Being in a small community and far from everything, I have certainly done my share of driving 45 minutes for anything that seemed enriching and fun and before my kids were homeschooled and after, I was always a big fan of having stuff at my house. It’s easier for me. Maybe it’s the hermit in me that’s like, “You guys come here.” When they were tiny, the thing that we did was family is we would do box parties, which was in BYOB, bring your own box and the coolest families brought refrigerator boxes or giant couch boxes or something like that and then the adults would sit comfortably in chairs and chat and drink and laugh and the kids would make things out of these boxes. Quite often, they joined them all together into mazes or cool castles or something and they could play the entire afternoon and well into evening just with nothing else but boxes. We always and still do have art parties, just because I like to have all sorts of cool supplies out and we have 50 people over and the kids do all sorts of fun stuff and the adults do fun stuff and those kinds of things are fun for me and it builds this sense of community that’s multi-age. I don’t know, it’s a different kind of a support that you can do whether your kids are in school or not.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, I loved having the children over at my house too, especially when they were very little and I was so into the philosophy I now teach and I wanted to be able to practice this with my children, with other children and if our neighbors were happy to have me babysit all the three year olds and it was great. I guess what I wanted to add to our talk last time was to reassure parents that they can still benefit from trusting their children’s passions. They can still allow children to explore all those things while also attending school.

Laura Grace Weldon: Absolutely.

Janet Lansbury:  The school that my kids went to, they had art and they had music. It was all much more structured then I would have ever designed it or wanted it, but they had this foundation from the early years that they could do these things themselves and that their way was the right way in terms of creativity, and those things were part of who they were, because that happens in the early years. That’s when children do get this core of self. I felt like they had a balance. They had a balance of when they weren’t in school, it was their time.

I was not going to tell them what to do or definitely not insist on anything and it helped them to keep trusting and it balanced out that time where they were in a structured learning situation. And I can also say, this definitely isn’t as true with public school, unfortunately, but at the private school, having that personal feedback and I guess you can call it assessment, but it was more the consultations you would have hearing about your children and how they’re doing. These people became my extended family, some of the administrators at that school. It was so reassuring to have them say, “They’re doing fine and this is what we see.” To have that outside assessment of your child that for us, as parents, we’re so in it that we really can’t get that objective sense of how they’re doing. So, that was a gift for sure that we were privileged to have. The way you did it, you had to trust even more.

Laura Grace Weldon: Yeah, I do think it’s so terribly important, public or private school to have a really respectful and friendly relationship with the teachers and staff. It sounds like your assessment situation worked out really well, but I also had kids who were underachievers and their grades didn’t match their IQ and to my regret of taking things away from a particular child, the things he really loved to do, all of his sciencey, nerdy, interest hand radio and model trains and stuff delayed to his assignments and some part of him was just, “I’m still not finishing these things. This is who I am. I’m not fitting into this structure.” And it’s that tug because your mom self is saying, “He’s already whole and himself as he is and the school is giving him this label and he is not enough.” It’s the structure and it is grievous. That doesn’t happen to every family but most creative kids do have trouble fitting into situations like that, and I know I read a study that the kids who were most deemed trouble makers in third grades were the kids who were very gifted. Often unidentified gifted.

I just finished David Sedaris’ book Calypso, which is another wonderful book of his and I had read about his childhood. Talk about a kid who did not do well in school. He had so much anxiety and so many compulsions and ticks that in school, he counted his steps, he hit himself in the head and he couldn’t stop himself from licking things, including light bulbs and light switches. He was deemed to be uneducatable. He talked on college and did odd jobs through his 20s and from an assessment rep, David Sedaris was doomed and here he is, this best selling rock star of an author who everybody loves. It is kind of interesting.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah and there are thousands of stories like that by the way, I’m sure you know-

Laura Grace Weldon: Yep.

Janet Lansbury:  Of very successful people and-

Laura Grace Weldon:  I sometimes think that as our kids get to the pre-teen, teen years, they’ve got 100 problems that are adults are telling them, “You can do better here and you need to be more motivated.” And I think sometimes that the kids who seem like they’re failing at challenges are actually just really looking for a worthy challenge, something bigger.

Janet Lansbury:  Self-chosen.

Laura Grace Weldon:  Yeah, and I think sometimes we have to talk with our kids about what really big challenge do you want? Let’s buy this beater MG. If you can fix it in three years, then you have your own car at 16 or how about you earn money this way and you and your friend can go on a backpacking trip when you’re 16 or some bigger challenge. Some service trip. It’s often the kids that you would least likely give those kinds of privileges who need them the most and rise to the occasion relies. Those are my regrets about what I didn’t do for this child that I kept taking the things away from because he wasn’t giving into the school mold.

Janet Lansbury:  We’ve gotta keep listening, I guess. We’ve gotta keep observing. Every child has interests and talents and things that they would focus on and have a very long attention span for if we can be open to that, but it’s hard when you’re trying to fit them into a mold that’s not working. I think these are all very hard choices that we have to make — these educational choices — and it feels like a big deal and I think parents should know that they can make changes, and it’s a process, and they don’t have to have all the answers, and they don’t have to get it all right the first time, and it’s okay. Children learn from all these situations. And if we stay their advocate and we stay on their side and believe in them and have that basic trust in them.

Laura Grace Weldon:  Right and it’s not an all or nothing. We don’t have to pull kids out of school because of a problem, we can just maybe a little fiercer in our advocacy for trusting them as who they are.

Janet Lansbury: Yes. Well, thank you so much Laura for talking with me again. I feel like we can talk all day and night and-

Laura Grace Weldon:  Well, thank you so much for including me and it’s always good to talk to you.

For more about the helpful ideas that Laura shared here today, please check out her book Free Range Learning. It’s available on Amazon and elsewhere and you can also check out her website lauragraceweldon.com and her Facebook community, Free Range Learning and please check out some of my other podcasts on my website janetlansbury.com. There are well over 100 and they’re all indexed by subject and category. So, you should be able to find whatever topic you’re interested in and remember both of my books are available on audio at audible.com. That’s No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and  Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting.  You can get them also in paperback at Amazon and an Ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple.com.

Thank you for listening. We can do this.

The post Raising Self-Directed Learners in Any School Environment (with Laura Grace Weldon) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Adventures in Free Range Learning with Laura Grace Weldon”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today, I’m thrilled to have a very special guest with me on the phone, Laura Grace Weldon. Laura’s popular book, Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything, is an indispensable guide to natural learning. Laura is an author, an educator, a self-described farm wench. She’s a poet and a perpetual optimist. And for me and, really, one of the reasons I wanted Laura on here besides her pearls of wisdom and her expertise on this topic that I know will be interesting to my listeners, is that I find her a kindred spirit.

I’ve only engaged with her online, and still I feel a kinship with her. I feel like we have a lot in common. We have, kind of, a similar sense of humor. There are a lot of downsides to the way that we engage with each other, I think, these days on computers, but for me, this is one of the upsides, that you can actually meet someone, feel like you know someone a little bit just through their writing and the way that you’ve engaged with them online.

And we share each other’s work, and I’ve just really enjoyed getting to know her. And this is the first time I’m getting to speak to her as a live person, so I’m very excited about that.

A warm welcome to Laura Grace Weldon, author of Free Range Learning, who’s going to talk about home schooling, unschooling, and everything in between. So, welcome Laura.

Laura Grace Weldon: Thank you so much, Janet. I think that’s the nicest introduction I’ve ever gotten. It’s really an honor to be able to talk to you, and thank you so much.

Janet Lansbury: Totally my pleasure. I’m going to say straight off that I have not read your book. And-

Laura Grace Weldon: Why, it’s only 300-some pages?

Janet Lansbury:  Exactly, it’s very comprehensive, but I actually want to be able to ask you questions from a place of being totally uninformed on this topic, which I am. I considered it very, very briefly with my children, 22 years ago when my first daughter, when we were considering her schooling. At that time, it was thought of as a very fringe thing to do, I think. It wasn’t as wide-spread and normal as it is now. And I think that’s a gift to everybody that’s involved in it, that it’s become almost mainstream to make this choice.

But I don’t have any experience with it. And I thought that it would be nice to be able to ask you questions without knowing the answer myself because I read your book, which feels a little more authentic to me. And it’s actually … My mentor, Magda Gerber, used to say … One of her bits of advice was: don’t ask a child something you already know the answer to.

Laura Grace Weldon: Yeah. Wise advice.

Janet Lansbury:  Because that’s not authentic, and it makes them feel like you’re quizzing them and putting them on the spot. Anyway, I thought I could ask all the dumb questions, and I would feel more honest.

So, the first thing I want to know is, what brought you to this choice?

Laura Grace Weldon: You know, I probably was a weird little child to start with, because when I would run out of reading material at home, I would read my mother’s Parenting magazines. And my father, who was a schoolteacher, I would read his John Holt books, which were the thing at the time. It’s kind of weird to read about child development as a child and, you know, to ponder what makes people themselves.

I also had a brief stint in my very short career as a social worker, working for Child Protective Services, which I do not have the emotional strength to continue, doing that sort of thing. It also motivated me to see what we can do to prevent problems, instead of working from the opposite end of having problems that need to be fixed. So, I was very interested in the earliest years, and what, how we can help people grow into themselves without causing all sorts of problems.

When I had my own kids, it was very important to me to be there along every step of the way, and to be involved in their schooling. And I wasn’t necessarily a big fan on the way public school operates, but home schooling didn’t seem like an option for most people, especially when you have to work.

So, I volunteered in the classroom, and I volunteered on committees. And even though I was trying to make a difference, there was not much difference I could make. And I could see school wasn’t really working for my four kids. And it was all for different reasons.

My kindergartner could read before he got to school, but he had to work on reinforcing activities day after day on sight words like run and go. And my second-grader was a lively engaged little chap who didn’t really want to do worksheets and screen activities. And so, he would help out other kids and do things. And his teacher was extremely frustrated with him and wanted him on Ritalin.

And my fifth-grader was very interested in the sciency things she could do on her own at home, and she was a really avid reader; Was reading high school and even college-level adult books. But the gifted program had been cut back, so she, in her fifth-grade class, had to do the same curriculum everybody else did, including … I think she was reading Mouse On A Motorcycle in fifth grade, which she had read on her own in second grade.

My oldest was a freshman. He was really tired of the hours of homework, and there were a group of kids that were hassling a bunch of other kids and he was sticking up for them, which didn’t go too well for him because then they were hassling him. And he would come home and tell me about all these incidences of really severe … assaulting a girl, somebody’s arm got broken. Kind of, all these really severe things.

And I would ask the principal and the teachers and they’d say, “Oh, those are rumors. Don’t worry.” One day he called me from school, and one of these bullies had showed him a gun that morning and said, “You’re not gonna live through the day.” So I had no option. I told him to run. Run. Just get out of there. Run home.

And I called the school. I asked them to call the police. It was just, it was just a nightmare. They never did call the police. We ended up calling the police, and they told me all the incidents my son had talked about had happened.

And so, I went and I met with the superintendent. And in my work life, I worked for and organization that taught non-violence and conflict resolution to non-profits and to school systems. And so, I talked to the superintendent. I offered to do that free for the school system, to get community leaders involved and to change some of these patterns in schools, and he completely denied there was any problem at all, and suggested that maybe my son would feel safer out of the school system. So, we very suddenly and unexpectedly became home schoolers that day.

Janet Lansbury: But then, this turned out to be a gift to you and your family, it sounds like.

Laura Grace Weldon: It really did turn out to be a blessing, and one of my biggest regrets is that I just didn’t pay attention to all the ways that school didn’t work. Like, the million little nagging mom feelings that you get. And no fault of the teachers; There’s this structure that inhibits so much real learning, that I could just see all these million ways that their curiosity and their enthusiasm and their eagerness was kind of, being squelched. And I wish I had listened to that many years earlier.

Janet Lansbury: Well, you know, we do what we do. We make the choices that we make. And we’re always, I think as parents, just doing the best that we can with what we know at that time. And yeah, it’s easy to go back for all of us and, I think, regret certain choices. We’re all on our journey, and-

Laura Grace Weldon: My mother used to say that we live life forward and understand it backwards.

Jane Lansbury: Exactly, but I think giving ourselves that grace as parents, too, is very, very important. And I think this whole school choice issue, it is difficult. You know, you obviously want your child to thrive wherever they are. And you see all their talents and their interests, and you want those to be engaged at school, as well as at home or in their own free time. And so, it’s a struggle, I think, for all of us. I think these are the toughest decisions to have to make, as parents, these school choices.

So, now that you’ve learned a lot about home schooling, and you are, I would say, hands down, an expert in this, what kind of advice would you give other parents in terms of getting started? Any drawbacks that they should know about? Making it easier? Making it work for your family?

Laura Grace Weldon: What’s hardest for me, and I may still be struggling with this, is to get past the school mindset that we’re all encultured with. We spend so many years sitting in those chairs and, you know, pay attention and doing what we’re told. And it takes a long time to unlearn that mindset. And I think that it is really kind of, bled out into the whole culture of parenting, this, kind of, school mindset.

And to me, that is the belief that anything that’s real learning flows from instruction. That it’s … Those two are connected. And so, by that logic, the more time that kids spend being instructed, and the more adult-led activities that they’re in, the more that they’re gonna learn.

So, parents, especially if they feel like they want to be “good parents,” try to give kids those benefits. And so, there are educational toys and educational electronics and lessons and enrichment programs. And they start really early, and they fill kids free time with that sort of thing.

I can understand all of the very best intentions behind that, but what we’re forgetting is, is how much this subtracts from family life, how much stress that adds, and money that costs. And at the other hand, there’s no convincing evidence that any of this has long-term benefit for kids.

What we do have is, evidence that this is harmful. So, this is very much like the RIE approach to very young children. We know the more adults instruct and, kind of, interfere and get in the way, the less motivated kids are and the less creative they are in their responses. So, if you show a child how to use a new toy or a new object, the kid’s less likely to use it in innovate and playful and unique ways.

And we do this thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of times each year in a child’s life. Do it this way, do it this way, do it this way. And that’s enculturing them not to think for themselves. It’s enculturing them to think, this is what the authority in your life tells you, so don’t think for yourself.

The research also shows that the kids who have the most structure activities in their regular weeks have the most diminished executive function. And that’s the kind of thing that’s built during free playing, and executive function is the biggie. That’s the one that’s most connected to long-term happiness and satisfaction and success in adulthood. And we’re subtracting that by our very best intentions to do all these good things for kids.

Janet Lansbury: Yes.

Laura Grace Weldon: That’s what we have to unlearn.

Janet Lansbury:  Yes, and it’s true that with the RIE approach, we take this attitude right away that our child knows more about what he or she is ready to learn and how they want to learn it than we do. And not only does that take a lot of stress off our children, and allow them to really take joy in learning and discovering their world, being self-learners, as Magda Gerber encouraged us to perceive them as, but it also takes a load of stress off us as parents.

I remember before I learned about the RIE approach, I thought that I had to stimulate my child in this way, at this many months. And now my infant needs this kind of stimulation. I have to do this. And am I getting everything in here? And I wasn’t really doing that because it was all too overwhelming for me, just taking care of her needs and, you know, keeping her content. But the pressure to feel like I’ve got to fill them with all these things. And I’ve got to do the right things at the right time. It feels like a newer mentality in the last 30 years or something, that’s developed somehow, where we feel that if we want our children to learn something, we have to teach it directly to them.

Laura Grace Weldon: Right.

Janet Lansbury: We have to teach them to say thank you. We have to get them up on their feet walking. All these things that rob our child of the self-confidence and the love for learning and the joy in our relationship, too, of somebody that’s really affirming to you and is really interested in who you are, rather than trying to make you what they think you should be. All of those things get lost. So it is really, really important. And that’s why I’m … Obviously, my cause is sharing this with parents so that they can get started on the right foot in early childhood and have this foundation for their child’s way of learning and developing. And their child making choices. And so, yeah, I think that’s why a lot of people, they want to continue that approach with school, which to a lot of people, means they want to homeschool or unschool. What is the difference between homeschool and unschooling?

Laura Grace Weldon: To me, it’s kind of a spectrum. And I think there’s a problem with both of those words. There’s a lot of problems with those words. One is, that the word home is in home schooling. People just naturally believe that a child is segregated and is away from the real diversity offered by a school. And they’re insulated from friendships and that sort of thing. And what we experienced is that it’s the age-segregated classrooms where you don’t have the freedom of conversation and play where you’re actually more segregated.

I was very surprised to find, when we started homeschooling, how much age mixing there is in home schooling and unschooling events. Big kids play with little kids. There’s not the suffocating peer culture. And there’s also this whole world beyond. So my kids, just being able to pursue their quirky little interests, like train-spotting and wildlife rehab, and bagpipe band, made friends and established their mentoring relationships with people who were, some of them were in their seventies. And these were long-term, just really rich relationships that they never could have had if they were in classrooms and then had hours of homework afterwards.

The word home is a problem. But even in both of those, the word school is still there. You know, it gives people who are outside of that world the idea that the parent has to be the teacher. As we talked about, you don’t have to really instruct so much, but it takes a great deal less stress and frustration to not wake the kid up in the morning and not go through the rituals of getting out the door. And not dealing with school activities, and not doing all the homework, it’s an immediate reduction in the whole household tension to drop that.

And even the people who choose to, kind of, replicate school conditions at home by having a curriculum, even people who do that, which is the opposite end of the spectrum from unschooling, they find that, as any adult would when you’re working with the kid, you can see if the kid has mastered the understanding of math problems and let them do 10 of them instead of three screens or three sheets of 100 each. And that leaves them time, where you can let them free-read books that are interesting to them instead of assigned books and write book reports. And studies have shown that the six hours of school instruction or school day, actually, is about an hour’s worth of actual learning time and instructional time.

Janet Lansbury: Wow.

Laura: So people even who do curriculum … Yeah, really. There’s so much time lining up and discipline. And, you know, explaining instruction on tests, preparing on tests. People who even do curriculum at home tell me they can get a six-hour school day in, in about an hour, hour and a half. And then their kids are, again, free to read, run around, play. That’s the one end of the spectrum is home schooling where you actually have a curriculum. We never afforded a curriculum or wanted one ourselves.

At the other end of the spectrum is unschooling where it’s completely self-directed by the child. And they do what they’re ready to and interested to do at the time, and the parent acts as a facilitator. Which, I believe the parent acts as a facilitator any of those times.

Janet: And if you don’t have a curriculum at all and you want your child to be able to learn subjects that they’re not organically drawn to, how do you do that?

Laura: I think that was one of the things that kept me awake at night, just, like, trembling. Because I couldn’t imagine that I would be able to replicate things like chemistry class and music. And, like, how on earth could I do any of that sort of thing? I just assumed it required experts. And what I gradually came to understand is, that in the whole span of human history, 99.9 percent of that time, school had not been invented. formal instruction hadn’t happened. And we, as a species, evolved beautifully with each generation of kids maturing into capable adults who mastered the skills for their society perfectly well by paying attention to role models, taking on responsibility, playing, learning, growing.

And we don’t live in tribes or villages anymore, but one of the things I talk about in Free Range Learning that I gradually stumbled on is called knowledge networks. And those are very simply the people that we know and the people that they know. People with skills and wisdom that they are able to impart to the next generation. And it’s almost, kind of, coded into us ancestrally to do that. So, when you ask people … You know, they may be woodworkers or chemists or farmers or stockbrokers. Whatever they are, can you share a little of what you know with these kids because they’re interest? Or, can you show them what you do? When you use the word share, people are very willing, in my experience, to do that. Maybe not immediately; Maybe next month. If you ask people to teach your kids, that scares them. They freeze up. They get the whole school mindset, and they think they have to have something structured.

So, in our experience, we have spent time with chefs, archeologists, potters, small business owners. It’s just, the list is extraordinary. And these people have spent afternoons, whole days, sometimes much longer with kids. They’re excited because the kids ask more questions. They’re thrilled that the kids want to learn. We would leave those things, and I often think the adults got more out of it than the kids. Because they would say things like, “I have never had this good a day at work.” Or, “I never imagined kids would be interested in this.” Or they would say, “I really hope you think about going into this professional yourself.”

It’s almost, you’re, like, witnessing a spark. There’s this beautiful current that goes between people when there’s a passion shared. And it’s not hard to ask somebody who does something they love. People do say yes. And right outside of our own knowledge network is our whole community, which is a great deal bigger than the tribe. We’re used to formal things like museums, which have classes, which are awesome. But for somebody like me, I could never afford awesome things that are available to some home schoolers.

There are home schoolers that do amazing things. You know, they backpack through Peru and their kids learn great things. And I would love to do that, but we were kind of limited to more free type things. But what we encountered over and over again are these organizations that are right there. And their whole mandate is really to spread what they know. They’re, like, ethnic centers, service organizations, clubs that are based on interests. Any … Name an interest, there’s an organization out there for kids who are into herpetology or astronomy or ham radio, or anything, and most of these organizations, in my experience, are made up of people who are so excited to find kids who want to learn Ukrainian dancing, or pierogi making, or drum making, or anything.

And so, this kind of richness was much bigger than anything I could have ever afforded. And it was way bigger than they could have gotten in school.

Janet Lansbury: So, did you not feel there were any gaps at all in their education or things that they were missing? Did they go to college?

Laura Grace Weldon: I did worry horribly about gaps. A lot of home schoolers very early on go to community college classes. We didn’t happen upon that particular wisdom until the third and fourth kids. My deepest fears for my fourth kid, he was the one we were closest to unschooling. We would do, like, “Oh, man, have we done any spelling this month at all?”

He was just very self-taught. Very interested, very busy, and he said when he was, maybe, 14, that he wanted to go into engineering. We had friends whose kids were in school, and I knew full well that these kids were taking an AP trig and calculus. And here was my brilliant sweetheart at home. And he was doing an online math program when he would get around to it. And I would say sweetly to him, “Oh, you know, you can go off to college and you can check it out. And if it doesn’t sound interesting, you can always go into some other field.”

And I would lie awake at night thinking, oh my gosh, this poor kid. I’ve short-circuited his growth horribly. So, he took one or two community college classes to catch up. I think he took trig and something else.

Janet Lansbury: Was this as a high schooler or as, in college age?

Laura Grace Weldon: He was probably 16 when he took those classes. His first class he’d ever taken was a driver’s test, so he was not too familiar with tests. He did take the SAT to get into college. He scored amazingly well for somebody who had, really, no formal education. And he got a nice scholarship at a nice, private university with a very specialized engineering program. I was still terrified for him. Because, of course, he didn’t have all these AP classes. You know, he had years of hands-on projects and experiments at home, but to me, no academics except for these brief community college classes. You know, a quarter here or there.

And as my other kids felt in college, he felt that his classmates were so completely turned off from learning. They just wanted to know what they needed for the grade. They were not that interested in lectures or projects. And Sam was fascinated. He would go up and talk to these professors afterwards, and get involved in things.

What he also noticed was, particularly in engineering, if you don’t have a lot of hands-on experience, you can’t conceptualize math and science very easily. So, his classmates were memorizing, studying like crazy, and struggling. And Sam would just listen to lecturers and read the book once. And he was doing his projects with no problem. Helping everybody else out. His physics professor begged him to change his major to physics. He had Sam teaching his physics class. And here’s this little home school kid, lived on a farm. But he had approached it from a whole different angle.

Janet Lansbury: He was in the practice of listening and retaining what he heard, because he was interested in it.

Laura Grace Weldon: Yes, and he also hadn’t sat in a chair for 12 years, being given theoretical approaches to math and engineering and science. He had been actually doing the hands-on things. I’ve had conversations with mathematics experts who say that’s how mathematics works. That you don’t do the theoretical first. But the way we teach kids, we actually do the hands on so they have an intuitive understanding of math and science. And then all of the theories and all of the formulas make sense to them. Einstein said, “If I can’t see it, I don’t understand it.”

So, it sounds like a bragging mom, and it probably is, but Sam graduated with the top honors.

Janet Lansbury: Wow.

Laura Grace Weldon: He got an amazing job. His name is on a patent already. He came up with a quick innovation when he was at his company just for a few months, and said, “Whoa, why don’t we just change the manufacturing this way and we’d save a bunch of money instead of retooling.” Which saved them several million dollars. And he’s just turned 25. So, it didn’t hold him back not to have the AP math classes after all.

Janet Lansbury: And did you feel like you ever had to be the task master and be setting a lot of limits? Or did it feel like you were actually doing less of that than you would if you had to make sure kids did homework and things like that?

Laura Grace Weldon: I think, definitely, it was a great deal less. Because there wasn’t the same kind of homework imposed. But I will admit that I started out home schooling in that emergency situation, thinking, oh my gosh, I’ve got these kids, and I have to do exactly what the school was doing in order to have them succeed.

I did notice, particularly with my third child, the one the teacher wanted on Ritalin, that anytime I tried any sort of school approach, he would do basically what the teacher said he would do. He would drop his pencil, he would crawl under the table and look for it, and he’d be down there a long time. Or, we’d be planning to go to the park just as soon as you get this thing done. And he would never get that thing done.

But if I stepped back and I didn’t impose that kind of stuff. And I looked at what he was teaching himself, pretty much like, the self-directed education, I would notice that as a little seven and eight-year-old, he was designing his own airplanes and lockets out of balsa, that he was making perfect little diagrams. And as they failed and didn’t work, he would design them better. And he was reading these big research books from the library on the principals of flight, and learning the history of flight documentaries. And just digging deeper and deeper into any subject he was interested in.

I think that’s actually surprising to anybody who’s not familiar with home schooling or unschooling, is how rigorous kids can be in the pursuit of their own interests. So, the more I stepped back, the more almost, academically oriented my kids became. It was fascinating.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, I definitely see that in infants and toddlers and preschoolers. And my children at home, actually, too, because I think they had that foundation that, yes, you would see them doing something that was interesting to them. And they were totally involved. And nothing got them down, they could face all the problems and the frustration, and keep going. And have that motivation that, I think, again, like you said, if we try to motivate, it actually does the opposite.

If we put ourselves in the position of being the motivator, we will make that a permanent job for ourselves.

Laura Grace Weldon: Home schooling is so nice to encourage them to follow their interests. But we, as parents, because we live in this culture, can make that our job. And we can get ourselves so involved and so over-enthused. And overwhelm them with so many resources that it becomes about us. And then, we’ve taken it away from them.

Janet Lansbury: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. How often would your children be with other children then? Was that a daily … Well, you had four, so they were with each other. But with peers or maybe, peers that weren’t exactly their age, but other children, other students? How much of their week did they spend?

Laura Grace Weldon: It’s the funniest part about the word home, because there’s so much out there to do, particularly now that home schooling and unschooling is a big thing, that you have to almost protect your time to make sure you’re getting to spend some family time. Because all of the facilities around us that are empty during the day because kids are in school open for home schoolers. So they can be skating or going to rock climbing gyms, or swimming pools, or whatever during the day with home schooling and unschooling groups. They can go on field trips. They can be getting together with friends. They can have, you know, movie making clubs, or whatever they’re doing.

So, we actually had to protect our time and make sure we stayed home enough so that we felt some peace in ourselves.

Janet Lansbury: And did they ever go to things they didn’t want to go to?

Laura Grace Weldon: Probably; I did a lot of dragging around to art events. They saw a lot of plays. A lot of concerts. A lot of that kind of stuff. Because I’m interested in it, so … You know, if they could just keep me from singing on the way out or dancing on the way out, it was pretty successful for them. So, you know, we’d pack in some kind of [inaudible 00:30:08] lunch or something afterwards, and things were good.

Janet Lansbury: Aww, that’s sweet too. You didn’t have to cajole and drag and-

Laura Grace Weldon: I think my worst cajoling is now a family legend. We live in a ridiculously healthy food household. And I was known to break out chocolate when I wanted them to watch documentary. And the worst was a Werner Herzog documentary about Tibetan salt miners, or Mongolian salt miners, which was so slow that we could watch it in fast forward and still read the captions. The English subtitles. The kids will still say, “Oh, this is almost as bad as Mongolian salt mining.” So-

Janet Lansbury: So, you did it, but it wasn’t your day. I mean, I think that’s a drawback that, somebody like me, that as much as I’ve had to learn how to set limits with my children and that you have to insist on certain things. Or you have to insist on “no” to certain things, that that’s not my personality. My personality doesn’t lend myself to that. It’s more enjoying what other people are doing, and the choices they’re making. And so, I would be intimidated by the idea of having to do even more of that than I already have to do, just as a parent.

I think that would be a drawback for me in thinking about home schooling. But the way you’re describing it, it’s really … You really didn’t have to do a lot of that.

Laura Grace Weldon: Well, I think what I haven’t mentioned is the alliances you make with other parents. There are so many of these wonderful things to do, but it doesn’t require your constant presence. We would just pick up each other’s kids and have a swatch of kids. I ended up with a pretty large van, which is very cliché for home schooling. And, you know, I would drag kids downtown to cool science things and concerts. And everybody else got to stay home. And then, they would drag my kids other places.

Janet Lansbury: That sounds like it worked really well. I could ask you a million more questions. I really want to know more, so if possible, could we do a part two?

Laura Grace Weldon: I would love to do a part two.

Janet Lansbury: That would be great. Well, thank you so much, Laura. And thank you for all the wonderful work that you’re doing, inspiring parents, showing them the possibilities, and the joy, in this different way that is becoming a very valid choice for a lot of people. So thank you for that.

And please, everybody, don’t forget to check out Laura’s book, Free Range Learning. It’s at Amazon, and it’s also on your website. Is that LauraGraceWeldon.com?

Laura Grace Weldon: It is, yes. And we have a very vibrant Facebook community called Free Range Learning.

Janet Lansbury: Wonderful. So you have a discussion community there. That would be something for parents to definitely want to join and ask all their questions. Well, thank you again. It’s great to talk to you. I’m gonna, I want to leave with this image of you singing your way out of the musicals and dancing.

We should all go through life like that.

Laura Grace Weldon: Aww, the poor kids.

Janet Lansbury: Well, they’ll get over it. Yeah, it was interesting for me how that changed. First they didn’t mind when they’re really young. They kind of think it’s funny. Then it’s just total mortification when they’re whatever, like, 10 or 11. And it’s, like, ugh. And anything you do. You can even think about singing, and they see it in your eyes, and they’re mortified.

Laura Grace Weldon: Yes, from across the room, looks like, “Don’t start, Mom. Just don’t start.”

Janet Lansbury: “No, no!” And then they get a little older, and they’re these wonderful adults that you have warm friendships with. And then they kind of think it’s funny again. And they enjoy it, so it’s nice to see how it all changes. And we can be our crazy selves. I’m definitely one to dance in the car. You get certain songs going, and I’m gonna be dancing in the car, and driving with one hand sometimes. Well, you take care, my dear.

Laura Grace Weldon: All right, bye bye.

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Please check out some of my other podcasts at Janetlansbury.com. And both of my books are available on audio at Audible.com; No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame, and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting. You can also get them in paperback at Amazon, and in e-book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple.com.

Thanks for listening. We can do this.

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