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.

Janet’s guest is psychologist, writer, researcher, and Harvard lecturer Susan Linn. For decades, Susan has been a passionate advocate for our children and a steadfast fighter against the infiltration of Big Business and Big Tech into kids’ lives (and parents’ pocketbooks). In an eye-opening discussion, Susan describes how digital culture is designed to indoctrinate children into consumerism and brand loyalty, and how it’s geared to create dependencies on games and devices for stimulation and soothing. She explains how games and devices teach values that are often diametrically opposed to our own, how they can affect learning by shrinking our children’s world and even interfere with parent-child relationships. Ultimately, Susan and Janet focus on the positive actions we can take to lessen the impact of manipulative marketers while realistically acknowledging the role of digitized culture in all of our lives.

Susan Linn:  The idea that they were claiming that babies can read with no evidence that they could teach babies to read and that it was good for babies to read was just terrible. And with “Baby Einstein” claiming that these videos were educational for babies when they had no evidence and when there was starting to be evidence that a lot of screen time isn’t good for babies or toddlers. So I’m really glad that Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood, which is now called Fairplay, I’m really glad that we were able to do that. I mean, the organization was founded by me and some colleagues because we really saw this as a social justice issue. The commercialization of children’s lives and the corporate takeover of childhood was really about rights and freedoms, the rights of children to grow up and the freedom for parents to raise them without being undermined by greed. I’m thrilled at what’s happening at Fairplay today. They’ve really expanded and now they’re working with members of Congress consulting on bills. I’m so proud of them.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. Well you started it and your passion now has extended into… this is your third book, right? Who’s Raising the Kids: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children.  You share some very daunting things. A lot of them I knew, but some of them I never even really thought about… like that we’re training children to be little consumers from an early age. So can you talk a little about some of the things that you consider the most threatening or the biggest concerns that you talk about in the book?

Susan Linn:  One thing that I think is important for people to remember is that the process of advertising and marketing to kids, that it’s not just about selling products. It’s about inculcating values and behaviors. And the values and behaviors that benefit corporations aren’t really good for children.

The primary value of marketing is to convince people that the things we buy will make us happy. And what research is telling us is that the things we buy may make us happy for a little while, but it’s not any kind of sustained happiness. What makes us happy are relationships and experiences. And yet kids immersed in our digitized, overly commercialized culture are just being pounded with that message. And as you know so well, young children’s brains are growing and developing, and the things that we learn in childhood can really become lifelong values, attributes, and behaviors,

Janet Lansbury:  Right, because this the foundational level, and the most intense time of learning

Susan Linn:  Except for video chatting with adults who love them, there really isn’t any benefit to young children being immersed in screens. I mean, it’s at the moment anyway mostly a two dimensional world. It shrinks their world down to less than a square foot. And when babies, when we take them out in the world, we really want them to be engaging with that world, to be looking around and experiencing the people passing by, experiencing nature, or the sights and sounds of the city. When we want kids to be curious about and interested in the world around them, and also to generate their own interests and to be able to soothe and amuse themselves, instead, kids spending hours and hours a day with screens are being trained to turn to screens for stimulation and for soothing. That’s a problem.

There was just a study that came out suggesting that toddlers who have less screen time are more likely to have good executive function skills. They’re more apt to be able to initiate tasks, see them through. And that’s so important for coping in life.

And also, as you know, Janet, they learn in relationship. And one of the things that worries me the most about Big Tech and Big Business today is that they’re coming between parents and children. And they’re disrupting that critical relationship, not just with parents, but also with teachers and other caregivers. For instance, digital assistance like Alexa are being marketed as serving parental functions like helping with homework or reading stories or telling stories, things that ordinarily an adult would do with a child. And that relationship is being disrupted and it’s being disrupted purposely.

Janet Lansbury:   Yes. You go into a lot of the tactics that the corporations and Big Tech use to suck children in and suck parents in with them really. And getting children to…  You talked about the, what is it, “the nag something” <laugh>, “the nag factor.” That one of their goals is to get children to nag their parents to buy them the next thing that they need or the next update to their game or whatever it is.

Susan Linn:  In 1998, a company called Western Media International did a study on nagging. It wasn’t to help parents cope with nagging, it was designed to help corporations help children nag more effectively. And the researchers made suggestions about how corporations could get kids to nag. I mean, it would be funny if it just wasn’t so horrendous. We have these huge conglomerates basically doing things that disrupt family life. And as a colleague of mine said, “to make parents absolutely miserable.”

Janet Lansbury:  Right, and to create this brand loyalty with children for life, they feel like this is a happiness factor, this brand, whatever it is.

Susan Linn:  And I think the other thing that’s changed over the past several years is that I don’t think that we can just think about it in terms of screens anymore. It’s not just screens. I mean, there are also all of these tech enabled toys that sing and dance and do back flips all by themselves or just at the push of a button. And as the saying goes, a good toy, a toy that really promotes the kind of creative play that is beneficial to children is 90% child and only 10% toy. A good toy really just lies there until somebody picks it up and does something with it.

But these tech enabled toys, first of all, they advertise, well, they look like they’re a lot of fun in 15 or 30 second commercials, but really kids get bored with them pretty quickly. And that benefits corporations because if they get bored and if they believe that the things they buy will make them happy, then what they’ll do is go on and buy another thing, a bigger thing, a better thing, a different thing.

Janet Lansbury:  Something that I learned from my mentor, Magda Gerber, is that children are discouraged from exploring and investigating more thoroughly toys that they can’t understand. They can’t understand why that noise happens when they push that button. And so it kind of discourages this active exploration that children are so built to do in the early years.

Susan Linn:  Yeah, I think that’s really, really important.

I am at the moment particularly concerned about digital assistance like Amazon’s Alexa, Amazon makes an Alexa for kids. It comes with a smart speaker that I bought. I bought one and actually it’s incredibly cute, the smart speaker. It’s this little delightful looking tiger. And of course we are wired to respond to cuteness. And the thing is that even though Amazon is claiming that Alexa is commercial free, that Alexa for Kids is commercial free, it has a feature that’s called, “I’m Bored.” So the first thing I did when I got this little Echo Dot, the first thing I did is pretending to be a child. I said, “Alexa, I’m bored.” And it offered me, one after another, five commercial product games that were based on brands. “Would you like to play a Barbie game?”

Janet Lansbury: Oh gosh.

Susan Linn:  I said, “No.”

“Oh, well would you like to play a SpongeBob Squarepants game?”

I said, “No.”

“Would you like to play a Wizarding World game?”

Which is Harry Potter. I said, “No.”

“Would you like to play an American Girl Doll game?”

I mean, every single thing that the child I was pretending to be was offered to do basically was an advertisement for a brand. And what corporations want is for children and parents to think that the only way that they can have fun is with these branded choice.

Janet Lansbury:  As an adult, I have to admit, I miss a lot of the advertising that’s coming at me that’s more hidden like that. It’s just hard enough even for us as adults. And then we’ve got children kind of immersed in these things that they can’t really see. It just becomes normalized for them.

Susan Linn:  And they work with child psychologists to exploit children’s vulnerabilities, to understand what they are and then figure out how to exploit them.

Also, what has changed since my first book Consuming Kids, which was primarily about television and video advertising, is that now we and our children are just being surveilled all the time. So if kids are playing with a smart toy, it means that their play is being surveilled. And that can help corporations better how to market to that child. As you know, children’s play is a window into their hearts and minds.

Janet Lansbury:  Totally, yeah.

Susan shares so much eye opening information and incredible research in her book. And then it’s almost as if you have two books in one, because then you have these chapters at the end that are very detailed and comprehensive about what parents can do, both in their personal life and to make societal change. Some of these points that you make remind me of really common misconceptions that I hear about from parents, and I wanted to talk about a couple of those or bring up those and hear your thoughts.

One is: “Remember that there’s no evidence that children must start using screen technologies in early childhood to succeed in a digital world.”

So that’s a concern that I hear a lot that, “well, I want to get them ready for this, they need to learn this.

Susan Linn:  That is so annoying, isn’t it, that that’s the message that parents are getting, and why shouldn’t they believe it? But in fact, first of all, the technologies are going to change. If you think about when laptops and smartphones and apps were introduced, everybody was saying, “Oh, this is active media. It’s not passive media and this will introduce your child to the technological age.”

But if you look at what kids do on a screen, little kids, what they’re doing primarily is swiping or tapping or making things bigger or smaller. That’s about it. And in fact, we’re going to move away from even touching screens at all. We’re heading towards “voice” where kids will just be able to talk.

And so I’m glad you brought that up because it’s so unfair to parents that that’s the message that they’re getting. And it’s a message unfortunately, that they’re getting not just from corporations, but also from some schools. It’s the justification for introducing tablets to kindergartners or even in preschools, when really, again, there’s no evidence that it’s beneficial. 

The tech, it’s not going to go away.  But what that means is that we really have to think about it in terms of what’s best for children and what kids are going to need in this increasingly digitized and commercialized world. They’re going to need to learn how to think critically. And that comes about through hands-on creative play and conversations with the adults who love them.

They’re going to need to be able to differentiate between what the tech industry calls ” in real life” and Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse that is already this digital corporate-controlled world.

What corporations want from children is not for the children’s wellbeing. What they want is to develop lifetime brand loyalty, to get kids hooked on the technology and to have them turn to the technology for information. And as I said before, is for soothing and amusing. And that means we’re really turning kids over to multinational corporations, basically, who come between parents and children.

Janet Lansbury:  And yet most of the heads of these corporations wouldn’t do that with their own children. So that’s always interesting too.

Susan Linn:  Yeah, there was just an article in the New York Times by a tech executive who was talking about how he makes video games that were marketed to kids and then he had children and decided that his children couldn’t play the video games.

But you know, you have to think about not just your children, we need to think about everybody’s children,

Janet Lansbury:  Right. Because as you so wisely said, a lot of this advice that you give (and that I give) is a lot easier for people with a higher socioeconomic status that are blessed to have two parents and spaces to go that are safe, to be outside, easy ways for them to self-direct their play, environments that make that possible. And that isn’t the case with so many families yet they want the best for their children of course, too. So that’s where societal change matters.

Susan Linn:  Yes, it has to be societal change.

I have a lot of suggestions for parents because societal change takes time and parents need help now, but I didn’t write this book to make parents feel guilty. I think it’s really hard to be a parent today. Parents are stressed about all sorts of things, but this unregulated, seductive, addictive technology, it makes things even harder. And one thing that we do as parents, I mean we all do things for convenience, especially if we’re stressed with our kids, and it’s so convenient and so seductive to hand a toddler or a baby a smartphone because they will be instantly captivated. I think it’s important for parents to know that giving your child a smartphone once or twice, that’s not going to destroy your child. The problem is that once you start, it’s hard to stop. And the more you do it, the less apt your child is going to be able to play on their own.

Janet Lansbury:  Yes, I think there are a lot of people like I once was, I thought that with my first baby, that I needed to entertain her all the time, that she was sort of this empty-headed person that really needed input and needed stimulation.  I had even read a book that told me I should do that. That’s what I thought my child needed until I found this whole other way I’m so passionate about. And the way I found it was that I took her to this little class and they said, just lie her down on her back and let her be and just observe her. And she was perfectly content for a long time and obviously had her own thoughts. That was the first time I actually saw: Oh, this is a person. Not only is it a person, is a person with a lot of stuff going on in her own mind that I want to know about. I feel really blessed that I was able to see that and then start on this track where I had a lot of help in figuring out how to develop what she was doing right there, which was basically entertaining herself. Developing that, and seeing all the gifts of it.

Susan Linn: I’ve watched children when they’re in situations that are boring in line at grocery stores or if they’re going shopping with their parent and their parent has to try on clothes and that kind of thing. And they don’t just stand there, they make funny sounds or they move their bodies in fun ways. They invent things to do in that situation. And if they’re being handed a device, they’re being deprived of that.

Janet Lansbury:  And most of us have lost, well, I don’t want to say most of us, but I’ve lost the ability to, or lost the desire to want to do that in line: just thinking about life, looking at other people. I want to go to my phone because I have it and- 

Susan Linn:  I know it’s a problem, especially if your work is online. So I know I can’t tell if I’m work addicted or screen addicted or both. Constantly checking. And that’s also something that we need to take care of ourselves. I mean, we can’t help children cope with technology unless we can cope with it as well. 

Janet Lansbury:  At least in front of them, at

Susan Linn:   At least in front of them. But that’s really important. And I do encourage parents to try limiting their screen time when they’re with their kids. University of Michigan, I think that it was them, did a study looking at parents at a playground with their kids. And what they found is that if the parents sitting around the playground or the sandbox or whatever, if they were immersed in their phones that they didn’t even hear their kids call them, they didn’t respond anyway. And then when they did respond, they were more likely to respond with irritation. And they didn’t do that if they were involved in analog things like talking to other parents.

It’s so powerful, these screens, and so purposely designed to capture our attention that they’re hard to resist.

My daughter was an infant, a toddler preschooler, long before all this technology. So I’d like to think that I would be a parent who would be able to resist it and things like that. But I think it’s also important for us to acknowledge that being the parent of a young child. I mean there are times when it’s absolutely wonderful. There are also times when it’s really boring,

Janet Lansbury:   Really boring,

Susan Linn:  Really boring. And I’m fascinated by children, but I read a lot. I usually had a book with me when I took my daughter to the park or when she was playing on her own. There are no studies on books and an adult and whether kids can get their attention. I didn’t see a study like that. But with kids, kids reading an analog book or playing with analog toys are not as irritable or hard to separate from what they’re doing. It’s not as hard as when kids are immersed in screens. I suspect that that’s true of adults.

Janet Lansbury:  I believe it definitely is true of adults. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, just my own experience with it. And it’s just a different level of engagement. It is more active because you’re having to exert effort to be engaged in the book. So it’s not like you got sucked into something that has the hold on you. You’re doing the holding.

Susan Linn:  And I thought about this a lot when I was writing. I mean, books can be incredibly engrossing, but the medium itself isn’t designed purposely to be addictive. The words on a page, they don’t move around. We don’t get little rewards every time we turn a page. All the things that with tech give us little squirts of dopamine that make us feel good. I mean, that’s not happening with the book. So one thing that I do suggest to parents is bring something to do when you go to the playground, but try to have it not be your phone. If you like to bring a pad of paper and a pencil or if you knit, knit. For me it was reading

Janet Lansbury:  That is helpful and it acknowledges that maybe we don’t want to sit there and observe all the time. Although that can be beneficial, too, because then our child is getting that attention that they don’t then need to think she has to play with me or he has to play with me, they have to play with me. They’re not going to give me attention if I don’t make them part of it. So showing them that too can really help to encourage their independent play.

Susan Linn:  And the other thing that I talk about in the books is that it’s not that the parents always gave into their children’s requests, but they acknowledged that their children were making a request. Nobody likes to be ignored.

Janet Lansbury:  I really liked what Sherry Turkle said, and you say it too, that it’s not about that we can’t engage with our tech devices, but it’s just having some boundaries for ourselves that, actually, we’ll feel good that we did that sometimes.

Susan Linn:  Yeah, I think that that’s right because otherwise we feel out of control and that’s a really scary feeling

Janet Lansbury:  That we can’t manage the things that we don’t want to be doing, but we find ourselves doing them.

Susan Linn:  And it’s also really important, and I try to make this clear in the book, I’m not, I mean, I worked in television, I worked with Fred Rogers, I was on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. I came of age at a time when there was a lot of hope for television. And, not for younger kids, but for older kids, I do think that there can be benefit. But it it’s the business model that’s the problem, that tech companies are in a war for our attention and they will do anything they can to capture it. And that’s not good for us and it’s not good for our kids.

Janet Lansbury:  So there are other points that I wanted to bring up from your book that stuck out for me and one that kind of surprised me. I never thought of it, but makes a lot of sense. You said to be wary of the difference between active and passive media because what we consider active media is like you said those games were in the beginning. People thought, well, at least they’re actively engaging with the technology and that’s better. But you said these are prepackaged choices and the children’s involvement becomes more reactive than active. But then you talked about how story-based programs and watching a show isn’t necessarily passive because of the effects that can have that are actually evoking deep feelings, empathy, introducing words and concepts. So when we do want to have our child use the screen or tech to consider the options and what might be preferable. What might be better for our child? It’s not what we necessarily thought. The old-fashioned TV might be better than a game on a tech device.

Susan Linn:  Because they are learning narrative, and story-based programming really is a way of helping young children. Again, I’m not talking about babies and toddlers. I think three, when kids can follow a storyline that way, the parents can look for movies and television programs that tell stories. But the apps that are being marketed to kids, first of all, they’re marketed as freemiums, so they’re marketed as free, but they’re really not free. You can do a limited amount of things with them and then you need to upgrade and pay money. And the apps are designed to be frustrating if you don’t upgrade because, again, their purpose is to make money and they also function on rewards and that’s not so good for kids.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, And here comes the nag factor.

Susan Linn:  The nag factor. But the message that kids are getting is that it’s not worth doing anything unless you get a reward, whether it’s a star or some digital little doodad thing.

Janet Lansbury:  Right, there goes the intrinsic motivation.

Susan Linn: Yeah.

Janet Lansbury: I wanted to also bring up your point… I thought this would be a good one to kind of end on. “Remember that one of the most troubling consequences of our commercialized culture is that it thrives on exacerbating some of the worst of human tendencies: envy, selfishness, unthinking, impulsivity and disregard for the common good.” And those aren’t things that we wanna teach our children. So how do we counter that?

Susan Linn:  Yeah, I mean, I call the book “Who’s Raising the Kids” because the digitized, commercialized culture influences children’s values, their learning and their relationships. That’s big for kids. And the idea that we’re letting corporations do that is harmful. What Big Tech and Big Business want us to believe is that this is just the way it is. It is immutable that they have so much power and that it will never change. And that’s just not true.

I see this as not just a family problem, it’s a societal problem and we need to deal with it that way. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I do know that things are more hopeful than they have been, certainly in my advocacy career. There’s more advocacy and activism around tech and, therefore, around commercialism than I have ever seen. And that’s really, really encouraging. Some families are taking a tech sabbath one day a week, for instance. There’s no technology. There are local groups that are forming to help parents deal with technology and help children have a healthy relationship to technology. And so I actually think it’s more hopeful than it’s ever been.

Janet Lansbury:  Well that’s good news.

Susan Linn:  Yeah. Social change doesn’t come easy and it comes from the bottom up and it takes time. But I think that the tech companies and Big Business, they want us to feel as though there’s nothing we can do. And actually there are things that we can do, and I talk about them in my book.

Janet Lansbury:  It’s not a level playing field. That’s one thing that you say. It is tough. We’re not going to, be able to monitor everything, but we can be aware and awareness is powerful and that’s the beginning of any kind of change.

Susan Linn:  And also it’s easier to set limits in early childhood. If kids are growing up with limits, it’s easier to expand than it is to take away. So I encourage parents to really be thinking about technology and how much technology they want their kids to have with the understanding that it increases as they get older.

Janet Lansbury: Yes.

Susan Linn:  And I’m very glad that you brought up the issue that it’s much harder for parents who are stressed and parents working serial jobs and parents who are unemployed or single parents. It’s much harder for them. And that’s why it’s important that we think not just about our own kids, but about what’s best for everybody’s kids.

Janet Lansbury:  Absolutely.

Well, thank you so much for being on my show and I’m just thrilled to finally get a chance to connect with you. As I said, I’ve been a huge fan of yours for a long time. Thank you for all that you do and all that you’re giving our children and us as parents. I really appreciate it.

Susan Linn:  And back at you. Thank you for everything that you do and it was really great to talk to you. I hope we can do that again.

Janet Lansbury:  Me too.

The post Raising Creative, Critical Thinkers in a Commercialized World (with Susan Linn) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Lessons, Sports, and Hobbies: A Child-Led Approach”

Hi. This is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today, I’m going to be talking about an approach that I believe in for handling our children’s extracurriculars as they grow, so lessons, sports, clubs, and other activities. How can we help them navigate these and how can we navigate them ourselves as parents with our own limited resources and time? How can we make the most of these types of opportunities for our children?

I think one of the reasons I’ve hesitated to broach this topic… Well, I guess I have in other podcasts touched on it, but I haven’t really hit this topic head-on because, honestly, I feel like my approach is very unique in that I’m really the only one, even within the communities or people I know who studied with Magda Gerber or study her approach, or follow this way of parenting, I’m sort of the only one that believes in this so strongly, in what I’m going to share.

I see this way of approaching extracurriculars as a very natural extension of what Magda Gerber said in her first principle, that we can have basic trust in an infant as an initiator, an explorer, and a self-learner. They know themselves better than we know them. One of the joys of parenting, of course, is that we get to learn about them.

That’s one of the big benefits of this approach I’m going to share. I’m going to call it the “wait” approach. Just as we waited for our baby to show us what they’re going to be reaching for, what they want to do with that object, whether they even want that object or they’re just reaching out for another reason, checking out the distance between that ball and how far their arm can reach, that we’re not making assumptions about children in their play, that we’re allowing for that wait, that openness on our part.

Instead of saying: Oh, let me give that to her. She must really want it. She’s reaching out for it, we wait to see what they’re actually wanting to learn about rather than me saying, “Here’s some cool toy that I think you should want to learn about right now.” Maybe if I have new toys, I’m just putting them in my child’s play area for them to discover and decide to choose, so they’re not getting this subtle feeling for me that this is what I should want to do right now, rather than what I really want to do.

It’s encouraging inner direction. When we take that approach, it makes for so many wonderful surprises. I thought for sure my child was going to do that with the blocks. Instead, they lined them all up, or who knows. Maybe they were listening to the sound that the block made by hitting different things in their play area, hitting the wall, hitting the floor, hitting another toy.

We’re opening up to seeing our child a little more clearly. We can do that with their extracurriculars. Instead of saying to our child, “Do you want to try this or do you want to try that?” we can actually wait until the idea comes from them. I mean, that’s the really hard part, I guess.

This doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with giving your child options, but it’s important to understand how influential we are as parents. We are very powerful to our children, and the need to please us is strong, even when they’re toddlers and they’re rejecting us or they’re teenagers and they’re pushing us away because developmentally they have to do that to individuate from us. Underneath it all, they really want us to be happy with them. They really want us to be proud of them. When we’re offering suggestions like tee-ball, or, “Don’t you want to play the piano?” or, “Do you want to try this?” even just offering those can sometimes… With some children, it can indicate: My parent wants me to do this. But if we wait for our child to actually share their wish with us or their idea with us of something that they want to do, and, of course, if we can make that happen — we may not be able to with the resources that we have or the time that we have. But if we can, then it really pays off. Here are some of the ways:

We never waste our money or our time signing children up for things that they end up not enjoying, that we end up having to maybe coax them to, or drag them to, or maybe they get there and they don’t participate. All of these things parents share with me can be avoided if we really leave it up to our children to be the ones to tell us what they want to do. Because they know.

In my experience with three children and with the other parents I know that follow this approach, they always benefit. Even if they end up not staying with it for that long, they always benefit from it when it’s their choice. It’s like the way that we choose to take a course rather than feeling like we have to take this course to get our degree or to get the job that we want. When we actually want to take the course, we get so much more out of it. When we want to learn a new hobby or a sport, we get excited about that. We’re engaged, and it’s that engagement that causes us to learn so much more, and be encouraged as a learner, so we actually enjoy the process of learning. Besides learning that specific subject, we’re gaining confidence in our abilities, in our choices, and validation that learning, which is such an important aspect of life, is rich, fun, and exciting.

We’re all born with the ability to do this. But as a child, those messages that come from inside of us, those messages of what we want to do can get a little muddled when we want to do it because our parent is smiling about it, or because our parent seems to think that it’s cool or that we should want to do it.

I’ve never known my children to come up with an idea that wasn’t valid for them at that time, something that would actually enrich them. These are called enrichment, these activities. They’re enriching if our child is drawn to them. But if not, they can be a source of disinterest. They can maybe be a source of feelings of failure and disappointment in themselves.

Another benefit for us, just on a practical level… If you’re anything like me, setting boundaries… I know I talk about it all the time, and that’s because I had to learn this. It’s not my natural way to be a boss, to be a leader with children, to want people to do things that they’re saying they don’t want to do or stop them from doing things that they do want to do. Even though I know how important it is, and I really had to step up and learn all this, I have a limited amount of, I guess, you could call it “boss juice.” If I had to use up some of that juice on getting my kids to go to practice, getting them to go to a class that I signed them up for for six weeks, getting them to stay on that team to finish their commitment, if all of that was up to me, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t. The place that I have to go in myself to step up to try to make my child do something when they’re pushing back, I find it exhausting.

But when we wait, when we use this wait philosophy, and allow children to choose, and allow them to navigate this journey, which is really a life journey and a journey of their passions, their essence exploring itself, then I get to go along for the ride. Just like I do when I practice observing and being responsive in children’s play and don’t put myself in the position of being the teacher or entertainer. This can continue. This is my favorite part of parenting, so of course, I wanted it to continue, but also because I just don’t want to be that person trying to drag kids. I’ve worked with so many parents that have gotten themselves stuck there, and it’s not fun. To my mind, it’s not necessary, and we can wait right from the beginning and not get them started on something that is a little bit more on our agenda than theirs.

The coolest surprise is in the things that children choose. Just like the way that they play so differently than we might expect, they’ll surprise us with their choices in extracurriculars. This can be outside of school as children get older or it can be choices that they make at that school. Did they want to be on this team? Or what language did they want to choose to study? Any time that they have choices in their learning, I believe in honoring that and opening up those green lights for them, because there are so many red and yellow lights. The more green lights we can give children, the easier it is for them to accept the red and yellow lights.

We get to learn about them, see their choices, be surprised, sometimes amazed, get these glimpses of their essence.

It’s questionable how appropriate it is for a child to start taking a lesson when they’re only two, or three, or even four. They’re still benefiting so much from their self-directed play. Lessons or sports can take time away from that.

For children of all ages, free play is therapeutic. It gives them the opportunity to assimilate all the experiences, including educational experiences that they’ve had. It allows children to daydream, learn to entertain themselves with less, and enjoy being with themselves. This is a gift for life.

In that sense, structured activity agendas take time away from these other types of play and learning that really matter most.

And the onus is off of us to try to direct this journey, which maybe for some different personalities than me that’s a disappointment or a problem. For me, it’s a gift. The more I can go along for the ride and enjoy and not have to be the director, the better. I want to keep learning about and understanding my child.

Another benefit is that allowing children to choose and waiting for them to do that is the best way to gauge their readiness. Magda Gerber said, “Readiness is when they do it.” In this case, readiness can also be when they express a desire to do it that comes from them.

Oftentimes, children, we put them into classes, and parents will ask me about that: “Other children seem to be listening. My child isn’t. My child wants to go do their own thing. They don’t want to join in.”

But when a child brings something up that they want to do… I’m going to talk about how that even happens because I can hear parents feeling like: my child’s not going to bring this up. When they bring it up themselves, when it comes from them, that means that they are ready. It means that they’re ready to take direction from others, which doesn’t happen usually until at least, at least three years old, often older, or that maybe they’re ready for that kind of teamwork feeling, that they’re ready to participate in a team, ready to compete. With a lot of these sports, there’s competition. Some people think competition is a bad thing. I don’t agree with that. It’s a positive thing when children are ready for it. When they choose it, it almost always means that they feel ready for it.

But if they’re doing these activities even a little bit for us and then they lose the game or they struggle with the skill, that hurts harder than if they’ve chosen this challenge themselves. It’s still going to hurt, and they learn to deal with that, but it can hurt much more when it feels like, I’m letting my parents down.

Another benefit is this feeling of being trusted. When we trust in our children, that they know themselves, and we’re giving them free rein to decide some of these things, it empowers them. It builds self-confidence. But, it is challenging. I know it’s so challenging. We’re getting peer or societal pressure. “Your child should be doing this. My child’s doing that. Aren’t they doing this?”

I hear about it from parents, whether it’s just other parents or maybe other people that want to sell their programs to you. That’s one of the challenges we face.

To clarify this even more for yourself and combat some of the peer pressure around putting children into activities, David Elkind has a wonderful book, The Hurried Child, with a lot of information on this topic.

Another challenge we might face is our own natural eagerness. I have this for my children to enjoy some of the experiences that I did. I just want them to get to do that. It’s really, really hard to wait.

Again, none of this is make-or-break if you don’t want to wait. This is just my suggestion that, as you can hear in my voice, I totally believe in, but you’ve got to go with what resonates with you, what feels right to you. I’m not even trying to sell you on this. I’m just offering it because it’s been so helpful to me on this path with my children. I see it as so helpful to them. How could I not share something that feels so good to me?

I think when we’re challenging ourselves to try to trust, we can have that sports equipment, or those instruments, or those craft materials, or art materials at home for our children to experiment with at any time. We can see what they’re drawn to or we can even try to show them something and see if they pick up on it.

Children will, If they have those interests, they will explore them at home or at their friend’s house. If they love to dance, then they’re going to dance at home and they’re going to make up dances, and it will be creative for them.

They don’t lose interest by not taking a class that puts structure on these activities for them. They don’t lose interest by not doing that, but they can sometimes lose interest or lose confidence in themselves around that particular talent when they go into something structured where they have to conform to whatever’s going on in that group, or in that class, or with that teacher that they’re not ready for because they haven’t chosen it. It can turn them off, unfortunately.

I think we can all relate to this when something that we just love doing as a hobby is fun. Then, now I’ve got to do it, and I’ve got to do it this way that these people want me to do, and now it’s not fun anymore. Children are very impressionable that way, much more than we are as adults.

What this wait approach does is helps them to stay in tune with that voice inside, that sense of themselves and their inner direction, their calling or callings. If it’s in them, it will naturally build. But putting that structure on children’s natural desires and talents too early can have a negative effect.

How do we do this? Children catch wind of ideas: hobbies, sports, and other things through books, maybe other media, through their friends. We could still maybe expose them if we’re afraid that they don’t know something exists that they might really enjoy. But interestingly, the thing I’ve noticed about readiness is that it really seems to coincide with children being naturally exposed. For example, they hear about that sport, instrument, or type of art through a friend, a book, or other media. That happens and coincides with them being ready for it.

When they’re at those ages where they don’t hear about those things or they don’t relate them to themselves… Like maybe there’s a child in a book that does ballet, but I don’t consider that as something I want to do yet because I’m actually not ready for that. I’m not ready to benefit from that. That’s really what this is. It’s not about that we’re damaging them by putting them in that ballet class at two years old because we really want to see them in the tutu and enjoy that as a parent. It’s not that we’re harming them, but they’re probably not going to benefit from it and it might turn them off. I think if we do want to approach those things that way, just even acknowledging: this is for me, can help us to stay clear on the difference between our child’s inner-directed desires and ours for them.

Our child, let’s say, brings up that they want to do something or they ask about it. The next thing I would do is take my child to go see what that really looks like so their image of dance class, let’s say, because we were talking about that. Their image of what a dance class is like from a book or something might be very different from what it’s really like. So I would take them to go watch the actual class. Or if the people in charge let them try one class, they could do that. No strings attached. Still seeing this in a wide, open way as parents, but just to be more sure that they know what they’re getting into so that it is beneficial and set up for success for them. Keeping that open mind and open heart of trust for our children is really hard, but one of the gifts that this experience of raising children can give us.

Here’s one question that I received on Instagram. This parent says:

Would you consider discussing children’s activities and balancing their desire to try a lot of different things and not overloading them? Also, societal pressure that parents may feel to do everything. My oldest children are six and four, and we homeschool. Somehow, our schedule seems overwhelming at times, but I can’t seem to drop anything, piano, soccer, tee-ball, et cetera, all the while they’re wanting to try martial arts. Thank you. Your work has changed my life. I definitely would not enjoy parenthood this much as a stressed-out military wife and mother of children with neurodiversity if it weren’t for your content and guidance.

That was nice of her.

This is a high-level problem. It’s a privilege to be able to offer children any extracurriculars, especially this many, and that her children are so engaged and interested in all these different activities is cool. I think what I would do is, first of all, consider what works for you, number one. Because the most important thing is that we don’t feel like a harried accommodating parent. That’s the self-care in this. We don’t bite off more than we can chew. We know that downtime and home time are very positive, beneficial experiences and that children aren’t going to lose out if they don’t go to a class. They’re not going to lose out on a talent, cultivating a talent. That interest will remain with them.

What I would do if I did have all these options and my child kept wanting to do more things? I would observe how engaged my child is in these experiences. Sometimes it’s not even just the activity itself, it’s the relationships that they’re making through those experiences with the other children, with the coaches, or the teachers. From there, I would ask them what matters most to them. Certainly the six-year-old could answer that. I would ask them to choose because they can always do something else later. I mean, the positive with a lot of team sports is that they end up being seasonal, so children can maybe do community sports throughout the year. I would ask your child to choose what matters most to them, also using your own experience of observing that child, their interest, and their engagement in the activity. Of course, if they were the ones to choose it from the beginning, there’s probably a lot more chance that they’re more engaged in that.

Now, just to speak one more time about the societal pressure thing, here’s how I feel… There’s never going to be a better reason in our lives to practice ignoring societal and peer pressure, and putting it in its place, than in this experience, this journey of nurturing and building relationships with our children. I would look at where this pressure is actually coming from. Why is it coming at me? Pressure can only work on us if we allow ourselves to be open to it.

For me, I was learning and resonating with Magda Gerber’s approach. It was so out there at the time. It was so different that I learned to jump off that societal pressure track very early on. I knew what I was doing was different, and I became very confident and proud of what I was doing.

That’s what I’m hoping for all parents. I want you to feel confident in your choices. I want you to feel self-reliant.

My hope is that you will cultivate your very own unique parenting model and feel proud modeling it for others. When others doubt you, disagree, or try to convince you that you should validate their choices for whatever reason, hold onto yours. Be that person who believes in yourself so that you can believe in your children. Keep your focus on what matters most — the relationships you’re building, how much you’re enjoying this time of life, and seeing your children thrive overall in the ups and downs that they’re going to experience discovering themselves. We can do this.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlandsbury.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 ebook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or barnesandnoble.com, and in audio, 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!

Recommended in this podcast: The Hurried Child by David Elkind

(Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash)

The post Lessons, Sports, and Hobbies: A Child-Led Approach appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Don’t Let Your Kids Miss Out on Play (with Kisha Reid)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I have the pleasure of hosting Kisha Reid. Kisha’s been in the early childhood field for 28 years. She’s a true veteran and she continues to actively work in the classroom. She’s been a tenacious advocate of developmentally appropriate play-based education for young children for decades and has collaborated with Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood, Explorations Early Learning, and many, many more. She sits on the board of Defending the Early Years, which is an early childhood advocacy group. We’re going to discuss the importance of a play-focused early childhood for all of our children, why this matters, and should even take precedence over other kinds of learning.

Hi, Kisha, thank you so much for being with me today.

Kisha Reid:  Hi Janet, I am so excited to be here and talk with you.

Janet Lansbury:  Me too. I feel like I’ve known you for a long time because I’ve known of you and your work, and you’re quite renowned in my world. And you’re a veteran in this. I think we’ve almost been in this field the same amount of time, or maybe you’ve been in a bit longer even. So I can’t believe we’ve never talked before, but I’m really glad that we’re going to do it finally.

Kisha Reid:  Same here. I feel like I know you. I’ve been listening to your podcast and reading your work and I’m just honored.

Janet Lansbury:  Thank you. Well, I want to jump right in and ask what first lit your fire with the power of play. What made you first realize how important it was to support, protect, defend, and advocate for play in the early years?

Kisha Reid:  I think I have to go honestly all the way back to my own childhood, because that is where I learned who I was, like who I am. That’s where I learned how to take risks, how to be strong and powerful, and where I first learned that: Hey girl, you are smart. Leaning back on those times, those times when I can remember a particular time that my friends and I had ventured further away from home than we had ever ventured. I remember actually having this conversation with myself that I’m doing this without my mom. I’m going far away and I’m doing this exciting thing, and just the exhilarating feeling that I had, that sense of freedom going out on an adventure.

So that feeling is what I always want to evoke in other children because it started from there, and what’s in me… something grew, like just this sense of self and this strongness. I had proven to myself through my adventures outside and play, through my playing in the creek and climbing trees and running fast — it just kept solidifying within me how strong I am, how capable I am, how smart I am. And I took that with me all the way through school. When I felt like something was too tough or I wasn’t ready for something, I was reminded through those times that I was playing, that I can do it, that I’m strong, that I’m confident, that I’m creative. And I just fell back on that.

So when I began working with young children, I just had this playfulness because I’ve always pulled back there. But being in programs that were more traditional and not play-based, I had to keep reminding myself of those feelings and going back to that place so that I can make sure that I provided an environment that evoked that same feeling in young children. So it’s digging way back into myself to remember the importance of childhood.

Janet Lansbury:  And it sounds like even though maybe you weren’t encouraged in school to engage your play self into learning, that you were able to balance that at least beyond school. As you said, you would remind yourself: Oh yeah, I can do stuff. I’m capable. I’ve got all this in me. These people’s measurements aren’t as important or this is just as important and this is who I really am. That’s amazing that you’re able to do that because I think sometimes not all children are able to stay in tune with that side of themselves.

Kisha Reid:  Mm-hmm. Yeah. Working with young children in a more structured environment in the early part of my career, I found that I was always the teacher who had to close her door because we were the noisiest classroom and we let the kids get the messiest. We had the most open-ended materials and maybe we went off the schedule and maybe we stayed outside 30 minutes or 40 minutes longer than we were supposed to. So I was that teacher that everybody else looked at, like, “What is wrong with her? She can’t control her class.” And then a shift for me was that I began to share what I was seeing in young children with their parents and with other educators that worked with me. I did that through photography. I would take pictures of the children. Not having them freeze and smile at the camera, but really taking pictures of what they were doing, really trying to retell the experiences that they were having. I did a lot of writing that went with the photos and I would put them in the hallway.

So this started to create interest. Parents would stop and read it and look at it and start having dialogue around the photos and talking to their child about it in the hallway. And then I think other teachers started to notice: Oh, well, the parents are interested in that. I want them to stand around my door in the hall. So let me kind of figure out what this documentation stuff is. And we just started to value sharing what we knew and saw that children were capable of doing in our play environment, within my classroom, and with others. And it just started to catch on to other teachers in the building.

Janet Lansbury:  That’s so cool. It sounds like you were photographing the process, which is what does get lost when we might wonder as parents: What is my child learning? and then we’re not seeing any concrete example of that. They’re not coming home with a sculpture or a math worksheet. But what you did was find a way to capture the beauty and the much more powerful learning that happens in the process of a child engaging actively in learning, instead of just trying to make a result. That’s what real learning is, is being able to be in a process.

Kisha Reid:  Yes. And watching it unfold. There was a sense of excitement around that. So the language and the idea started to shift from, as you said, that product and, “Mom, this is what I made” to here is a more detailed conversation, a nuanced conversation, that’s back and forth about what we experienced.

Janet Lansbury:  And look how engaged they are.

Kisha Reid:  Yeah. And look how excited they are about the whole idea of learning something and doing something with their whole selves. It wasn’t just sitting at a desk and completing a task that an adult gave to them. It was the opposite. It was standing up moving and doing the things that their bodies told them that they needed to do.

Janet Lansbury:  I love that.

Kisha Reid:  So I was still working in traditional programs for a while even after that. I was always the sore thumb, always the person asking, “Well, why did we have to make everyone nap at the same time? Why can’t they play in the mud?” I was the teacher who took her kids to the creek, stayed all day, came back. I’ll never forget the day we came back and we were muddy. This was not the school for that, but we came back and I had the kids… we were all standing on the wall and I’m like, “All right, I’m going to hose you guys off so we can go in this building.” And right before I turned the hose on, the owner comes up and she gives me just this look. And I’m like, “Oh, don’t worry. We’re going to be clean when we go in the building.”

I had to make compromises, but nothing got in my way of allowing these children to play. If we had a math objective and I had to allow them to go into the forest and search for rocks and sticks and whatever and just document their experiences with those things and then fit it into the curriculum into what was required of me, I’d do that. It may be a little bit extra work for me, but it’s so much more meaningful. So I was just attempting to prove that it didn’t take a worksheet. In fact, real-life experiences were much more valuable.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. Because it’s not only what they’re learning there, but it’s that they’re learning to love learning and they’re learning how learning works and that they can do it. That thing about being capable again, that: Hey, I’m really good at this when I’m into it, because I’m doing it through my own interest. So yeah. I mean, you’re preaching to the choir here. I’m totally on board with this.

One thing you brought up also makes me consider if we do value this type of child-driven play and a lot of parents do, what gets in the way of us allowing this, do you think? As parents, as teachers, and as a society maybe, what are the barriers that are making it harder for us to allow children this extremely valuable, for life, experience?

Kisha Reid:  I think there are so many things. We have more parents who need to work now. We have smaller families. So grandparents may not be living with them. I grew up with my grandmother living with me. So somebody was always home. We were always outside, always able to play. Someone’s mother or grandmother was in some window watching us from somewhere. We knew all of our neighbors. It was just a slower pace. Everything was slower. We weren’t rushing off to soccer, gymnastics, or swimming. Our extracurricular was to go outside and play until the street lights come on.

So I think just the faster pace of life, the necessity for multiple parents to work find children and after-school programs more often. The high-stakes testing and pressure on academics and homework that has started to take up more of children’s lives than they ever did before. So before, you went to school, you came home, you did a five-minute coloring page or something, and then you were out the door. Now it’s so much more of a burden on young children’s time. They just don’t have as much time as they did before.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. I mean, even those after-school programs though could be designed the way you designed your program. They could still offer that. But I think just putting myself in the parent position and all the parents I hear from, we worry sometimes that our child is going to miss out on something else. Or maybe we think that we’re being neglectful or lazy just to let them go run off to the creek or go play or do their own thing. We feel like we’re being better parents to make sure that they’re getting all this enrichment. But it’s exactly what you said. That slow life, that simplicity is where the freedom is for them.

Kisha Reid:  Yes.

Janet Lansbury:  I guess there are worries, maybe as parents. And then the worries as parents get transmitted into the worries as educators. They’re picking up: “What if our child misses out on these windows for language learning, for music, taking an instrument, for sports? They’ve got to know what it’s like to be on a team.” We’re deciding all these experiences that we want to make sure that they have. And therefore we’re eliminating the most important things of all.

Kisha Reid:  Yeah, which is just time and space to be creative, to play, to make friendships with people in authentic ways. I think there’s a time and a place and an age for team sports and those different experiences. But I think when children are young, they don’t need that. “You like soccer? Okay, let’s go kick a ball. Let’s go to the playground, bring a ball, have some friends gather around and experience the idea of kicking the ball, running after the ball, playing with friends, creating new games.”

When I was young, we would arrange huge games of kickball and dodge ball and soccer and all these amazing things that we had to come up with the rules for. We had to organize the players. We had to go around and knock on doors and find the players. We had to negotiate to make teams. We had to decide who was in charge of who is out or who is in, who’s the ref. All of those things we did within our community of mixed-age group players.

So if you really think about it, the only thing that we were missing out on is having someone outside of the play, an adult, tell us how, where, when and what. But how much more valuable is it when you have to organize, you have to plan, you have to think, you have to negotiate? It’s just so much more valuable. And you still get the team play. You still get the collaborative play. You still get the excitement of a win. All of those things that people look to team sports to achieve.

Janet Lansbury:  I would even argue that it’s more conducive to being a team player because when you were saying that, it almost made me picture a lens where you’re all the way zoomed in and you’re just zoomed in, maybe as a parent on I want my child to get the skills in this sport and everything that they need to be on this team. I want to make sure because I’m a caring parent, that my child becomes the best soccer player they could be let’s say. And so we’re zooming in and we’re kind of getting this really myopic perspective on it. Rather than zooming way back out and saying: Oh my gosh, the learning that’s going on here is a million times more important!  And in that zoomed-in less our child maybe feels, “Oh, well, this kid is doing it better maybe and the coach likes them better. They’re getting a better position or they’re getting…” It’s not conducive to real team playing.

Kisha Reid:  And you know what? A lot of this is attached to academics because if you’re going to get into the best college, you got to have a resume. And it’s starting younger and younger where we’re looking for scholarships to such and such a school. So it starts to become this resume builder at such a young age. And it’s a lot of times attached to that academic piece, that ultimate plan of happiness that we, as a society, feel comes with checking off the boxes to getting into the right college so that you can get the right job, chasing after this happiness when really that comes from that sense of knowing, that following of your passions, that sense of community and belonging and all those things that can sometimes be missing when we’re chasing happiness.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, exactly. Those life skills. Absolutely. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense that the rush to get kids ready for the next thing gets in the way with the thing, which is that they need to experience every stage of development ideally and to be trusted to know what they’re ready for and what they’re interested in. And yeah, I mean, it doesn’t really help a lot of parents either… because I do hear from many people who have their child in gymnastics or a music class or dance, and they get frustrated because their child doesn’t want to go. This might be a four-year-old, five-year-old child, or even a six-year-old child or older. The child doesn’t want to go, the child doesn’t want to go to practice. They won’t participate when they get there. It becomes this kind of feeling of failure, I think, for everybody. For the parents, for the child.

So it often doesn’t serve us as parents because now we’re putting ourselves into the situation where we’re frustrated because of our agenda when all we had to do was really let go of our agenda and trust a little bit more.

Kisha Reid:  But it is hard to be that parent who believes these things and have the child who’s not signed up for anything when everybody else in their preschool class is on the tee-ball team or is taking whatever the lessons are. It is hard to be that parent.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, that peer pressure. I know. I hear that a lot from parents too, that they want to trust, but everybody around them, even family members or everyone around them, is giving them more doubt. So that’s why I love that somebody like you is out there. You’re so important because you’re a defender of this type of learning and you’re out there advocating. But yeah, it’s hard to hear that with all the other noise.

Kisha Reid:  My advice for a parent that feels that way, if everyone around you is… their child is in something or multiple things and you just don’t think it’s the best thing for your child but you also feel kind of left out of that, my advice would be to invite them over in your backyard if you have a backyard or a grassy area that you can find and just play. Invite them over for open-ended play so that your child now still has some experiences with these children and they’re doing something, but it is open-ended in its play. And the parent still has that social aspect.

Because I think a lot of it is social for the parents. The kids are in whatever the sport is. They’re playing or they’re practicing. And now the parents can sit back and hang out and chat and talk. There’s a social aspect of it for the parents as well. So I think that we can kind of meet a lot of the needs or a lot of the desires of everyone involved with a simple backyard — bring a snack, bring some balls, and play.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, just a gathering. A weekly gathering.

Kisha Reid:  Just a simple gathering.

Janet Lansbury:  I would say also in my experience that a lot of these things that maybe we’re excited about as parents: the other parents are going to be there and my kids are all on this team or my kids are all in this dance program and that community feeling that I have, or maybe we loved dance as a child and we can’t wait to get our child in there, there were so many things like that. Even taking my child to an amusement park or story time at the library, I couldn’t wait. I was excited to have my child do that. I’d been trained with Magda Gerber who was so much about, “Let the child lead their development.” Trust them, trust them, trust them. Basic trust in them. But I would feel myself being like: Oh gosh, I want to do this now.

I would make myself wait almost always. There were a couple of times I didn’t. And then I learned. You know what? This would’ve been more fun just to be in our backyard this afternoon than to go to that puppet show with the marionettes where she had to sit there.” It wasn’t as great as when I was a kid, or maybe I was older and I was able to appreciate it more. But when we wait and we allow children to come into an experience, first of all, because they want to, because they’re eager, they’re ready and therefore you can trust their wish to do it, if we’re not the ones bringing it up at first. If it actually comes from them, you can really trust my child might be ready for this experience now.  And then maybe we’ve read a book about it, or they’ve gone to watch a practice or they have a real sense of what it is. And then they come into these experiences that we’re so excited for them to have with this grace and all these things that readiness offers that we can’t force.

And so many times that happened where I was like: Oh gosh if I would’ve taken them to this thing earlier, we did it earlier, they would’ve been striving, they would’ve been trying, they maybe would’ve been trying to please me on some level– 

Kisha Reid: I was going to say. Yep.

Janet Lansbury:  Because they feel they should. The idea of coming in at the top of an experience, so ready for it is just this magic, but it’s hard to wait. So I think our impatience sometimes can get in the way.

Kisha Reid:  It’s just this sense of them having an intrinsic motivation versus something that comes from outside of themselves. I had a student once, and she just… I mean, she was born to dance. She’s born to dance. She walked around like a dancer. She carried herself like a dancer. I have a dance background. So she literally had me. I mean, this child had me. She’d grab my arm. She started this at four years old. She would come to school with leotards, not just for herself, but for her friends as well. Ballet slippers. All the things. And she would tell me the different types of music that she wanted to listen to. “Slow. Or I want to listen to just pianos.” And she would say, “Okay, teach me.” And she would have me teach her. “Okay. All right. So what is this called?”

We would do a lesson as long as she wanted to do a lesson. And it was her. It 100% came from within this child that she wanted to do these things. I don’t know if… she probably had seen something or maybe an older sister who did ballet. I’m not sure what it was, but there was a deep interest within this child to move in this way. Even when she wasn’t dancing, she moved with grace and on her toes, stretching her arms out fully.

I don’t deny that.

When there’s an intrinsic passion, by all means, allow them to shower themselves in it, because play and dance are not the same as actually having to do an hour of standing still, waiting your turn, standing up straight. There’s a difference. There’s playing around with the passion until her development is in a place where she can do those things in a structured fashion. I don’t know. I just found it very magical to watch this child grow into her passion at such a young age.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. And sometimes they create their own dances, but then once they start the class, then now they know there’s a right way and a wrong way. And if I only can do it this way, then it actually makes them less free. A child like that…  you were able to follow her lead and do all of that, I can see how parents… Because probably everyone else would be telling them this too. They see this talent and they’re thinking, “You’d better get her in a class now or it’s going to go away somehow.” I think that’s another thing that gets in our way. We think something’s going to disappear. If our child seems interested in reading. Gosh, we might think we better start really teaching them because this might go away and then they’re going to lose this.

Or even with toilet training or something. Maybe their child goes on the potty once, so gosh, we better stay on this track. I’d better make sure that my child doesn’t ever use diapers again because otherwise, she’s going to lose something. So I think we can fear that too, as parents, that somehow our child is going to lose momentum on something. But that’s the opposite of what it’s really like when you’re ready for something. You can’t put it out, really. Or it’s hard to. I guess you can if it becomes not fun. I’ve also known a lot of children with that experience. Something was really fun for them, but then they took the course, maybe too early, or maybe it was the wrong kind of course. And then it wasn’t fun for them anymore.

Kisha Reid:  And they drop it. The passion’s gone.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. So it’s almost like the fear that we might have is in the opposite direction of what we should fear if anything. Not that we should fear anything as parents, but what we should care about protecting.

I love that your podcast was called the Defending the Early Years Podcast. So you’re a defender of play in the early years and you’re promoting developmentally appropriate play-based education. So what goes on in your programs? What are you doing?

Kisha Reid:  Almost everything we’re doing here is playing. When we’re getting dressed, it’s play. When we’re having lunch, when we’re reading stories, when we’re running around outside, it’s all play because they’re choosing to do it. They’re choosing how they do it. They’re choosing with whom they do it. It is creative and playful because they’re leading it.

I think one of the most important things about this place and about what I’m hoping for all early childhood settings is relationships. Just authentic relationships where you know each other, and flexibility so all these different diverse needs can be met. I think the difference between what we’re doing here as opposed to what a more traditional preschool setting does is we’re not getting them ready for our next step. It’s a byproduct of playing. It’s a byproduct of feeling safe and happy and confident in knowing yourself that you’re going to become ready for the next step, but that’s not our focus. Our focus is really on the right now and meeting the needs of right now and what that looks like through the process of inquiry and co-learning and trial and error and creativity.

We’re just playing and living together. We’re eating when we’re hungry. We’re napping when we’re sleepy. We’re crying when we’re sad. It’s a second home for them. It’s not what we as a society would picture a classroom being, but it is what we as a society should decide that a classroom is.

Janet Lansbury:  I love that. So what should parents do if they have concerns that seem valid that their child isn’t at a level that they should be at in some way, or they don’t seem to have their age-appropriate skills? Even a child with disabilities, or…

Kisha Reid:  We have had children that had diverse needs. We still have children that have diverse needs. All of them have diverse needs, but then we have children who have additional needs. I believe that all children need play. All children need freedom. All children need to express their personal passions. I like to think that we can meet those needs. There are cases and times where we need to call in extra help and we need to help parents identify support. For us there are so many local organizations that step in and help with assessment, supporting the parent to understand what the child is going through or where they are developmentally, or what special accommodations they need. And then we do our best to meet those needs.

We have, over the years, been able to observe children who are on the autism spectrum within our play-based program. I’ve worked at lots of places that have a strong belief that those children need structure and control and rewards, punishments, these things that we do not believe, I do not believe, typically developing children need, nor do I believe that children on the spectrum need those things within my program. None of these children need to be fixed. They all need to express who they are within. They all need to be met where they are, loved, and supported in order to have whatever their needs are met.

So if that is to be swinging or moving their body to get that self-regulation, then we figure out a way to put a swing in the classroom and lots of swings outside because we know that that is soothing and that child needs that.

Or if it’s heavy work — they need to really move those muscles and lift up heavy things — we fill our environment with those things. If it is special one-on-one support that they need, we look for the resources. And there are times when we don’t have the resources so we have to go outside of our program. For me, it’s the goal to support every parent that walks through the store in any way that I can. I don’t know all the answers for them, but I will sit with them until we find the answers for their individual child.

Janet Lansbury:  That’s wonderful because I agree with you that every child… I mean, you could even argue that a child with delays or disabilities deserves even more trust, more belief in them than the typical child. But yeah, they all deserve that.

What do you think about summer learning loss?

Kisha Reid:  Well, I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe that when you truly have learned something, deeply understood a concept, you don’t lose it. It’s like riding a bike. You just don’t lose it. I do believe you can forget things that were quickly taught to you, that you learned by memory, or that you were taught by rote, or that you learned for a particular test or that you had zero interest in but you had to learn it because it’s a part of the curriculum. Those things can surely be lost. In fact, they probably are almost pruned out as soon as the test is over, as soon as the school year’s over, as soon as the class is done. But you do not forget the things that you learn through your whole self when you’re using your — I just wrote a post on this — your mind, your body, your hands, your soul, your whole heart. You don’t forget that stuff. You just don’t forget it.

I always joke that sense, it ain’t common. We’re not all born with common sense, but so many of the things that are common knowledge that you never had to read about or ask questions about, or take a class about, that we just learn as humans. Like we observe people walking, we learn to walk. We learn to talk. We learn that some things are heavy and some things are light. We learned that when you throw something up, it comes down. All of these things that we keep gathering.

For example, if you watch children at play and they have multiple items, let’s say rocks because I observed this yesterday. They sort, they arrange. Sometimes they line them up like a graph. They count. They look at what’s different and what’s the same. They can classify them in lots of different ways. This is ingrained in them. They understand these mathematical concepts. They understand these similarities and differences in size and shape and all this. You can’t lose that because you know it.

Janet Lansbury:  Right.

Kisha Reid:  There’s a difference between remembering extrinsically because someone else is telling you you have to and seeking out knowledge.

My daughter, for example, wanted a piano in the house. Somebody was giving away a piano and I’m like, “Okay, we’re going to get this piano, put in the house.” And I said, “Well, I know someone who teaches lessons. Do you want me to sign you up?”

“No, I want to teach myself.”

I’m like, “Okay.”

My other daughter asked for a guitar. This is when they were preteens. And I said, “Do you want to take a class? You can take a class.”

And she said, “No, I’m going to teach myself. I will enjoy it more and I’ll be more proud if I teach it to myself.”

And I’m like, “Okay.”

And they taught themselves. It was a passion from what was in them. And they taught themselves at their own pace, in their own way.

I know I went way off your question.

Janet Lansbury:  No, that excites me too, because we all need to remember and just remind ourselves maybe every day of what you’re talking about. It’s gold. It’s the most powerful thing to be able to create your own learning and have all that autonomy. I mean, you could take lessons for years and never have that.

Again, it’s about the way we’re setting children up for life rather than college, I guess. Which is just so much more important. But yeah, to be trusted to create that learning, there’s no replicating that. And it’s just so much more powerful than any other kind of learning.

I love that they want to do that stuff. It’s so great.

And I also love what you said about “as soon as they’re done with the test, they lose that.” So, well, should summer learning be every day the parent has to drill them? Obviously not. Because if they’re just going to lose it, it wasn’t really embedded learning anyway. It’s not going to carry them into the world. It’s not going to do what it’s supposed to do. So why?

I have a post called “A Summer to Forget ” that’s about… maybe it’s okay for your kids to forget. How important it is to shift gears and have this more freeing, forgetting, but still learning new things the way that you’re talking about, teaching yourself things, or just learning what this certain kind of water in this pond feels like compared to the ocean. I mean this is-

Kisha Reid:  And learning who they are.

Janet Lansbury:  And learning who they are. Yeah.

Kisha Reid:  What would I do if no one was telling me what to do every minute of the day? That’s what I think summer should be about. Honestly, that’s what I think every day should be about.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah.

Kisha Reid:  But if summer’s the time that we’re giving children, then we need to give it to them.

Janet Lansbury:  I would give it after school too, like the way you describe for yourself that you had that.

But with that post or anytime I’ve brought up this idea, I get the response, “Well, that’s a privileged perspective.”

Kisha Reid:  Mm-hmm. I’m sad that that is a privileged perspective. I’m very sad that young children of color or children with a lower economic status aren’t seen to be able to have the same freedom. It upsets me because what I know about play and what I know about how much you actually learn and how far that will actually take you in this world and that sense of self that you’re going to develop, I know that every child, and in some cases especially the child that is not privileged, deserves that.

Janet Lansbury:  I agree.

Kisha Reid:  Part of what I want families to understand. I want to make sure that Black and Brown children are having access to play. I read studies about the number of words that children hear and that there are less words in this type of family and more words in that type of family. I just squint my nose up because I’m in a Brown family and there are so many words. And I’m around a lot of Brown families and there are so many words. I’ve grown up without many means, and there are so many words and so much dialogue and so many experiences. They may be different from the traditional White or American experience, but they’re rich. Listening to family stories and playing games with our families. And so I think that we just need to shift the measuring tool that we use for some of our assessments of young children so that it’s inclusive in values, more diverse things.

Janet Lansbury:  I couldn’t agree more. I think it comes from the same perspective that we’re talking about, that we want to help some group of children that we perceive as disadvantaged. We’re trying to help give them a step up, but that’s the wrong way to look at it because this is actually getting in their way and maybe creating a deficit in the kind of time that’s so much more valuable. These kinds of experiences children get from free play, they’re ultimately much more important for developing higher learning skills and self-confidence.

Back to the story you started about yourself, you actually have been able to stay in tune with yourself. And how confidence-building that was. I don’t think about that a lot for myself, but it’s actually true for me too. For us, it was dolls. My sister and I lived through our dolls. But what we learned about relationships and people and these stories that we created about these families…

I love Stuart Brown’s book (Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul). He talks about how as adults we can say where our talents come from. We can look back and see, Oh, that’s the way that I played. He goes into this whole thing about all these different areas. I looked at them, all that he suggested, and I thought, I’m none of those. But then I realized, Oh my gosh, “storytelling.” It’s a type of talent that’s developed through play. And it was what I was drawn to as a child. And it’s what I’m drawn to now, understanding the story, what’s behind this, what’s happening with these children in this family. Anyway. Yeah.

Kisha Reid:  It’s so deep, isn’t it?

Janet Lansbury:  It’s so deep. And it’s so much more fun as a parent too when we can just relax and trust a little more. Doing nothing is doing a lot. It’s healing when children can come home from school, even a center like you have which sounds so idyllic, and still come home and switch gears into this: You know, I just want to sit and look out the window or, I just want to, I don’t know, do nothing and just see where my mind goes.

Kisha Reid:  Yep. And I love to watch that. I love to just observe the children as they come in and see what’s going to spark their interests, what are they going to do, and where are they going to hang out. That to me… I just wait for that. I don’t put things out. We have our materials that are our materials. They know what’s there. And I just don’t know what’s going to come of it each day. I love to see where it goes and how it develops.

We’ve had balls in a basket in our classroom since the beginning of the school year. I don’t think I recall anyone ever touching them. The other day they had all the balls out and they arranged five different games with the balls. The games kept getting more intricate and involving other materials and rules. It was just so interesting to watch a group of three and four year olds get a spark for an idea from a material that’s so just simple and open ended and play for over an hour on their own, going through conflict and negotiation and figuring it all out. But everybody had one goal and it was to keep that play going. So I got to witness that and it’s amazing to see.

Janet Lansbury:  I’m totally with you on that. I love it with an infant, I love it with a toddler. I love it. As long as my kids will let me watch them, which unfortunately wasn’t that long. At around seven or eight, they were like, “Just stop watching me” with the doll house or something like. Oh my gosh, I get goosebumps, I love it so much. Parents could maybe enjoy the experience so much more if we took a little pressure off of ourselves.

Kisha Reid:  Yep.

Janet Lansbury:  And tune out the people that are making us doubters and listen to people like you.

Where can we hear more about you and the work that you’re doing? I know you have your podcast, the DEY Podcast with Kisha Reid.

Kisha Reid:  You can find that on dey.org. I really enjoy talking with teachers who are working in classrooms and bringing play to public schools or bringing play to communities where maybe there’s not as much access. So many wonderful people doing lots of great work. I’m just excited to be able to amplify their voices and spread the word about all we can do for children, and all we can do really for society, because anything we can do for children, we’re doing for society.

Janet Lansbury:  That sounds really inspiring. I haven’t listened to enough of them and I’m going to listen to all of them because I need this inspiration.

Kisha Reid:  Well, I’ll be listening to you while you’re listening to me.

Janet Lansbury:  It’s so great to be with a kindred spirit in this work, who I’ve again, known and admired for so long. Thank you. Thank you for sharing with us.

Kisha Reid:  Thank you so much. This was great. Thanks.

Here are some links to enjoy more wisdom from Kisha Reid:

Defending The Early Years and Kisha’s podcast

The DEY Facebook Page

Kisha’s center: Discovery Early Learning Center

And please check out the other podcasts and posts on my website. They’re all categorized by topic and you should be able to find whatever you’re looking for. There are many of them. Also, if you’re not aware of my books, please check them out. They’re best sellers on Amazon. No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting are also available on audio at audible.com. You can get one for free by using a link in the liner notes of this podcast. You can also get them in paperback at Amazon, and an ebook at Amazon, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, and apple.com. If you find this podcast helpful, you can help it to continue by giving it a positive review on iTunes and by supporting my sponsors. Thank you again. We can do this.

The post Don’t Let Your Kids Miss Out on Play (with Kisha Reid) 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 “How Our Boundaries Free Children to Play, Create, and Explore”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I’m going to be doing something a little bit different. I’m going to be talking about some thoughts that have come to me recently based on, first of all, a success story that I received that I’m going to read here, and various comments on various things I’ve posted. I’ve been reminded of a way of perceiving our children’s behavior and our role in it that was pivotal for me as a parent and becoming a confident leader for my children.

Basically, this understanding that I want to share today is about seeing our child when they’re being demanding, when they’re repeating an unwanted behavior, challenging behavior. What’s actually going on there a lot of the time is that they are stuck. They are stuck in an uncomfortable place for them. And that’s the part that they can’t really tell us. They can only tell us that through this behavior.

So to generalize, what they need is for us to help them get unstuck. And that usually means that we are more confident in our boundary, and that we’re more welcoming of their feelings around the boundary, which are often loaded with a buildup of emotion that they have that they do need to share. And that’s part of the reason they’re pushing whatever it is or continuing whatever it is.

Then what happens is that we free them.

I just want to encourage it to those that are uncomfortable setting boundaries like I was. I was much more of a people pleaser. I didn’t want to confront and disappoint anybody and make my child upset. There are a lot of parents that lean in this direction. And it was so helpful to me to understand that my reticence wasn’t as loving as the confidence my child needed to be freed from their stuck place.

So rather than keep talking generally about this, I would like to first share this success story. Some of you maybe saw that I posted it on Facebook, and here it is:

I’m a major fan and wanted to share a parenting win I had recently, thanks to your advice. I’ve read your books, listened to every podcast, and work hard to maintain boundaries and encourage independent play.

When I bought my son Legos, I didn’t show him how to use them. And it took him a year to realize they stick together. I didn’t show him how to use blocks. I let him direct the order in which we read the pages of books, et cetera.

Recently, I bought my son his first box of crayons. He always ate them before, but he’s two and a half years old now. I made a rookie mistake. I drew a picture of an excavator with them. From that moment on, he became obsessed with me drawing pictures. Inside, he’d bring me crayons and paper and outside, he’d bring me sidewalk chalk and demand drawings of every kind of truck imaginable anytime I would sit down.

I think I made this mistake because I am an artist and felt so much guilt when I would say no. I started to realize that I just don’t want to draw excavators all the time with sidewalk chalk and that this is a boundaries issue just like anything else. So I pushed past the guilt and told my son I wouldn’t draw pictures anymore.

Of course, he had a lot of strong feelings about that. But remarkably quickly, he became engrossed in drawing on his own. It’s like I set him free. For weeks now he spends hours every day drawing with the chalk and crayons. We had to replace his 30 pack of jumbo chalks because he wore them all down to little nubs in three weeks. I was shocked to watch his lines quickly advance from scratches and dots to swirls and closed shapes, to closed shapes that he colors in, until the other day he drew a pretty accurate dump truck.

Anyway, I was so encouraged at how setting a boundary and giving my toddler back agency in his own learning was so successful and also such a relief for me. Thanks for all that you do.

So in this case the parent got caught up in something very normal and common, which is guilt. I’m prone to guilt, so I am very familiar with that. And there’s very little about our guilt that ever helps our children. What it does is make us doubt our own feelings and our own sense of what’s going on.

So she started something very innocent and normal. And it sounds like she is like I was in wanting my child to be a discoverer of things, because that is such a profound way of learning, and it’s so encouraging to children to be the discovers instead of the followers of the parent’s lead. That’s why taking this to the extreme that I did, and it sounds like this parent was kind of doing — she didn’t show him how to use Legos, she didn’t show them how to use blocks. So those are things that not everyone will choose to do. But yes, I took that approach and I found it was very empowering for my child.

But then she drew something for him. And this is the thing most parents probably would do — to get their child excited about drawing, or just share themselves with their child, or to do something fun while playing with your child. So, really normal thing to do. Then she found out something which also commonly happens, and a lot of parents bring this issue to me, especially whenever I post something about creativity in children. Their child, who may have been drawing before, won’t draw and only wants the parent to draw.

Legendary early childhood educator, Bev Bos, who died in 2016, and I had the pleasure of seeing her speak, she was adamant, “Never draw for a child,” is what she said. I know this is a controversial opinion, but her reason was that a young child can’t possibly draw the way that we do when we make a picture of something. A child sees a product that they can’t recreate or anything close to that. And besides, children are experimenters of materials. They’re not so much into drawing something for someone else, they’re into seeing what chalk does, experimenting with all the different kinds of marks it can make and what it can do. And they do that with all materials. Sometimes they can do this for years and that’s healthy. It’s a process that most of us want to encourage. So Bev Bos noted that when the adult creates something, it can make it harder for the child to want to explore those particular materials.

In this case, she says he became obsessed with me drawing pictures. So it seems like an obsession that he has to keep testing this, pushing her, pushing her that she has to do this, she has to do this. And maybe he was learning something from that about how to draw pictures, but he was also not feeling the confidence to explore himself.

Then what happened is that the parent started to feel something. And this, for all of us with any boundary we need to set, is the signal that’s going to help us recognize when we’re getting caught up in a guilt pattern, or child-pleasing pattern, or a fear of their feelings pattern. We start to feel annoyed. I don’t want to be doing this. I don’t want to be drawing for my child right now. It doesn’t feel right to us.

If you’re a people pleaser like me, you might tend to override that feeling and even feel more guilt about it. Well, I should want to play with my child. I should want to draw with my child. What’s the matter with me?

And then we keep going and our child stays stuck.

There are a lot of things as parents that we have to do to care for our child that we don’t want to do. But in a situation like this, or if your child wants you to play with them and you can’t play, or your child wants to go outside and they’re not safe to go there on their own and you don’t want to go outside with them right now. So many things come under this heading. What I would love to do is give every parent permission to listen to that voice inside them and to know that we’re not doing children any favors saying, “Okay, I’ll do it,” if we really, really don’t want to do it.

Yeah, of course, there are those off moments where our child says, “Let’s go outside,” and we do and we realize we have a great time too. That happens. But more often than not, that voice in us, that feeling in us that doesn’t want to do it, it’s a voice that at least deserves to be heard, if not abided by.

So this parent had the realization that: I just don’t want to draw excavators all the time and that this is a boundaries issue just like anything else. And wow, what a light bulb moment. I can trust my feelings as a parent. I don’t have to do things I don’t want to do that aren’t about primary care for my child. I don’t have to try to entertain and please and be uncomfortable knowing it, be bored, be annoyed.

She listened to that feeling. And she says, “I pushed past the guilt and told my son I wouldn’t draw pictures anymore.”

That’s all we have to do: say no. And when we say no, then we’ve got to hear the feelings on their side about it, which honestly are oftentimes a relief for our child because… and this is the overall point I want to make… they’re in a stuck place there. How does the child feel when they are directing a parent to do something constantly? It doesn’t feel good.

I’ve had the benefit of facilitating classes week to week with parents and their children. So I’ve been able to see and learn a great deal from the dynamic. And when a parent is not setting their limits with confidence and the child has to keep nagging, and whining, and begging and repeating, that child looks so uncomfortable. This is not a happy free explorer. What you see is a tight, controlling: I’m holding something in.  A burdened child.

That’s the stuck place that they go into. And only we in our relationship with them can free them from this — by listening to ourselves and setting the reasonable boundary. Seeing, when our child is in a pattern, that’s the help that they need. And that that is much more loving than allowing it to go on and getting stuck in our own guilt place, getting more and more annoyed. And yeah, we can even start to resent our child and it’s not the child’s fault. I mean not that it’s really our fault either, but we are the ones that have control over this and we’ve let it happen to us. Whether we resent our child or annoyed with them, that’s on us to control.

So this parents said, “Of course, he had a lot of strong feelings about that.” Yes. Finally, he’s releasing this flood of feelings he’s been holding onto as the controlling, bossy child in those moments. So yeah, this tends to be a buildup when children are holding on to control, they’re holding onto control of their feelings. That’s why it’s not a comfortable place. But if this parent is confident like she was when she got that light bulb moment, it clicked for her and she went for it with confidence. And that’s why, remarkably quickly, he released his feelings.

She said, “He became engrossed in drawing on his own. It’s like, I set him free.” She set him free. That’s absolutely what she did.

She shared some of these pictures that he’s drawing and how into it he is. He would even let his 10 month old baby brother be drawing next to him on the same large sheet of paper. That’s comfort, that’s freedom, that’s joy for a child. But it took that hard thing, for the parent to see and be brave.

I like for us to own that we’re heroic a lot of the time as parents. Every one of these moments is pretty heroic — to overcome our guilt, and our fear, and maybe shame, and doubt, to do this most loving thing.

Another thing I had posted was about encouraging independent play in toddlers. So on Instagram there are a lot of messages about it. And I know that parents struggle with this so much. What I try to do is help them to see how uncomfortable a child is when they’re holding onto the parent and trying to control them this way and how much freer and better they feel when they can be explorers, learners and creators, as young children want to be.

This parent in this success story used the term “agency.” Yes, there are books out and lots of talk about how studies show that children are growing up without a sense of agency, because the parents have worked so hard to please them, and look out for them, problem solve for them and help them avoid disappointment and failure. The insecurity that creates for young adults when they’ve been prevented from those experiences of not getting what they want, of disappointment, starting with the parent in a situation like this, they don’t feel free. It’s like they have to continue in that stuck place of dependency and control.

And we can avoid that. Actually, with the track that we start on with our infants and definitely in the toddler years, we can get on a path that completely circumvents hovering, doubting, pleasing our children. This is how to do it. Being in a relationship with them where our feelings matter, where we don’t let them get stuck, or at least not for too long in these places where they just need our confident answer and to share their feelings about it.

So, anyway, one of the comments that I was referring to earlier on Instagram was on a post about encouraging independent play in toddlers, and it was more about separating. “I have to go do something in the kitchen. I can’t keep playing with you.” And this parent wrote:

“Exactly my issue now with my three-year-old. She constantly wants me around her holding her which is difficult as she has a year-old brother. Sometimes I feel guilty not spending as much time with her brother as she always wants my attention.” And the parent put a sad face.

So here’s a rare case where a feeling of guilt could actually be helpful to this parent because it’s an indication that there’s something important to her that she’s missing. I don’t know my exact words commenting back, but I believe that I asked her what she thought her three-year-old was feeling when she, according to this parent, “Constantly wants me around her holding her.” What is that child feeling? And how did this boy feel when he was demanding his mother keep drawing for him?

It’s a stuck feeling. It’s not fun to be calling the shots with your parent and then have them catering to you, even though you know, because children do know, that they don’t want to be doing that. But they’re still doing it. So you’re not getting a clear, authentically joyful connection with your parent. You’re getting this kind of forced, “Okay. All right,” giving into you kind of response. It doesn’t feel good. And it’s not a good message for children to get that people don’t have boundaries with them, that they don’t have to respect what another person wants, that they just keep asking and badgering. The child is stuck.

This is so easy to fall into. I’m raising my hand, you can’t see me, but I’ve been here.

As I said in the beginning of this podcast, turning this on its head, the way that I’m suggesting here is what helped me turn a huge corner and feel confident in myself as a leader, feel that I was being loving, doing the hardest, most loving thing, being heroic, even when my child was strongly disagreeing. Because children can’t express this to us, they can’t express: Oh, this is not comfortable that I have to keep doing this and I’m stuck here.” They’re not even realizing it. And if they were, they couldn’t articulate it. So we’re not going to get that answer straight from them.

And that’s the tough thing about the toddler years and why we all write so much about them and podcast so much about that age, because it’s when children go from infancy, where what they put out there in terms of their requests and their communication, it’s often pretty clear. They need us to pick them up, they need to move their body because they’re really uncomfortable with digestive pain or something, they’re hungry, they’re tired.

But with toddlers, it’s not as clear. There are more layers there and they’re not always telling us on the surface what their actual need is. So we might worry that their need is to be held all the time as in the second example and paid attention to constantly, or that their need is for the parent to demonstrate art to them. But their actual need is: Please give me a boundary because I’m stuck. Please stop me. Please help me out of this stuck place that I am in with you where I’m not making you happy and I’m not making me happy.

I really hope this perspective helps.

And if these podcasts are helpful to you, please let us know by leaving a comment on iTunes, and 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 How Our Boundaries Free Children to Play, Create, and Explore 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 “Kickstarting Your Child’s Learning and Play at Home (with Lisa Griffen-Murphy)”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Needless to say, these are strange and trying times for all of us and some of us have never spent so much time with our children. No doubt, they can be demanding. So if there was ever a time for strong, consistent, confident leadership, this is certainly it. And with so much time on everyone’s hands, not surprisingly, I’m receiving a lot of questions about structuring time for kids, for learning, for play. Parents are feeling a responsibility to take on these roles of not only parent but teacher and camp counselor, among other things. And this is why I invited today’s guest, Lisa Griffen-Murphy.

If you don’t know who she is, she’s an early childhood specialist. She teaches and works with children. She’s been doing that for over 20 years in various environments. She has her own company, Ooey Gooey, Inc., and she offers childhood education workshops, trainings and other resources for parents and caregivers. She’s authored four books, produced dozens of teacher training DVDs, and is a very popular keynote speaker at educational conferences. She presents hundreds of workshops each year to both domestic and international audiences, and her understanding of the importance of play is obvious in her personal and professional life, and that’s why I wanted to bring her on today.

Hey there, Lisa.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  Hi.

Janet Lansbury:  Thank you so much for being on with me.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:   Well, thanks for inviting me.

Janet Lansbury:  Lisa and I, just to give everybody a little backstory, we met at a conference where we were both presenters and she is extraordinary. She is an amazing performer on top of being inspiring, brilliant, insightful, so creative and informative. So if you ever get a chance to see Lisa… I imagine you’re going to be doing things online maybe more? But she tours and, anyway, we met and we made a vow to collaborate.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:   Made a vow. You’re not allowing yourself to toot your own horn here. So the reason that we met is because I got so excited that I was sharing the conference stage with Janet. I flew out to the town a day early thinking that I was going to be able to sit for like a full day and receive her wisdom after only really interacting with her and learning about her online, and I was like, oh my gosh, she’s going to be there. So I flew out a day early. And then I found out she was only like the nighttime presenter. I was like, argh. So I was honored that she was able, I guess, able, willing to sit around and shoot the breeze with me and talk shop after hours. So thank you for that.

Janet Lansbury:  Goodness. Well, thank you so much. I could go back to tooting your horn even more at this point, which is, of course my instinct. But why don’t we get into how we can help.

Parents are having a lot of difficulty right now. They’ve got kids at home, they want them to learn and stay on track. They also want them to be able to be independent and self-directed in their play and work. For the younger children, obviously, it’s just going to be play.

Parents are giving me feedback like: “Well, yes, you talk about self-directed play, you talk about independent play, but my child can’t do that.” Or, “My child won’t do that, because they are an only child and they’re clinging with me if they need me.” Or, “They have ADHD.” Or, “They just can’t do that, they always want me to play with them.” I would love to find some ways to help parents help their children get over this hump.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  I think the answer to that is going to be so very specific and unique to whoever’s ears are listening to what we say. So I’m giving everybody permission to kind of dial it down a little bit. You don’t need to be recreating school right now in your homes for your young children. And I think sometimes just granting permission to take a big breath helps eliminate some of the stress of what folks are feeling. That’s at least what I’m telling everybody.

And as much as everybody wants to be: let’s create a schedule and let’s do some activity planning, that’s awesome. And I’m going to say right now let’s be mindful of where actually we are in the situation. And in the circumstances, if that makes sense, you don’t need to put on your teacher hat and turn your home into a childcare center or a preschool or an elementary school.

I think children are able to play by themselves. I think that families in general have maybe become accustomed to entertaining each other a little bit more. And I don’t say that with any judgment or finger pointing. I think often we’re not comfortable sitting in the time that it might take for children to get an idea for themselves to move on. And so as adults because we get kind of panicky and rushed, we will project our stuff onto the kids and the kids of course they’re going to pick up on that. So we’re like, come on, just pick something, go do something, go do something.

Whereas if maybe we just turned around, we know they’re safe, right? They’re in the house, they’re in their bedroom or whatever, in the living room, the basement, they’re probably for the most part, not in an environment where we need to be overly worried about their physical safety. Let them be bored for a little bit. That’s okay.

Janet Lansbury:  Absolutely. You bring up so many important points. First of all, the pressure that we put on ourselves to have this curriculum and make it all happen and-

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  Yeah, you don’t need to do that at all.

Janet Lansbury:  No.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:   I’m telling you to stop it.

Janet Lansbury:  Just let go of that.

We were in the fire a year and a half ago, and my son was a senior in high school. A lot of important things were happening at that time. There was important work that they were needing to do in their senior year of high school. Had to do college apps. He basically had two months where he hung around with friends and was off the curriculum. And you know what, it really showed me something about this fear that we have that our kids are going to fall behind. They were fine. And this was a situation where it wasn’t the whole world, like it is now. It was just these pockets of kids that were not going to keep up at that point. And it was just such a lesson for me in letting go and trusting-

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  That it’s going to work out, right?

Janet Lansbury:  That it’s going to work out. And there’s so much learning that happens in the things that aren’t academic that people call the “soft skills.” And I don’t really even like that term, because it somehow seems to lessen it. But these skills that are so much more important than academic skills, things like collaboration and critical thinking and problem solving and-

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  And the initiative that you’re talking about. Looking at the stuff that might be available in my home, and maybe it’s okay for me to just lay on my bed and stare at the ceiling or lay outside and stare at the sky. Like, they don’t need to be busy all the time. You have to be mindful, I think, of not feeding the busy monster that is constantly present in our life right now.

I mean, I had a friend she’s like, “At least I haven’t napped this much since I was in college.” Fine. For those of us who aren’t really directly impacted physically, like we’re not sick or anything like that, the world is giving you an opportunity to reboot and recalibrate.

I think it’s okay to kind of get into that, I’m going to say the word “lazy,” because I think that’s a hard word for some of us. When we don’t feel like we’re doing anything, we start to second guess absolutely everything. I want to be the voice saying it’s going to be okay. If you had a laundry list of stuff that as an adult you’ve wanted to take care of and maybe your kids are able to kind of self-entertain themselves for a little bit, go do some of it.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. I think so much of this is about parents being able to let go of the agenda and the busyness. And by doing so, we can release that responsibility that we feel, that guilt that we sometimes feel to keep our child entertained, to keep the plates spinning in the air.

I remember as a kid, I had three sisters and we had nonstop games that required really nothing. I mean, we made them up with what we had. But I still remember saying to my mother, “We’re so bored!” But we got to express it and it was short lived. And then my mother would say, “Do you want to help with the laundry?” or something.

Immediately, we’d get out a list. And what we used to do is we’d write down all the different games that we could play. Maybe one would be a board game, but most of them were things that we made up. Like we’d take sheets of paper… My dad was in the office machine business in those days, and we had these big reams of paper. And we would make scenes together like that everybody’s at the park. And we’d have these different stories of the people and the families and all the things that were going on. They were the kind of like murals. We had this game we made up with my mother’s shoes where we took them out of the closet and hid them in the dark. I mean, she loved that.

But we would make the list and then we would vote, what’s your first choice, second, third, and then whichever had the lowest number, we would do that.

But yeah, we had so many ideas. And it came from my parents’ (and that was kind of a thing in those days) benign neglect, I guess. Nobody was trying to lift us out of boredom. It was just, yeah, sometimes you’re bored. And then at that point, that’s when you think of stuff to do. But if you never get bored, you never think of stuff to do.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  True. And it takes time. And I want to be sure to point that out. It’s very, very important, at least from a child development lens: preparation time. I would bet you dollar for donuts that that was at least a couple of hours of drawing out those scenes, planning out what those stories might have been, making that list and a voting, all that negotiation. The pre-play planning that often happens without adults actually seeing it is often more important than the play that actually transpires. And the common denominator there, and especially for your parent listeners that I want them to hear, is that that takes time. And often as adults, when we watch some of that it doesn’t look like anything “beneficial” is happening.

So often, unintentionally, we squash what could very well be the most important part of the play that is unfolding, whether it’s with siblings or a playgroup, whatever it might be, the group of kids that are playing together, whether it’s a big group of kids or a small group of kids. So just kind of turning a blind eye. I love that benign neglect. I mean, that’s exactly how we were all raised. Nobody got bored. Your mama would make it clean the toilet.

Janet Lansbury:  Oh, my goodness, I feel like I did have so much time as a little kid. We were kind of busy, but you’re right. It was certainly coming from us and not from the outside.

What about somebody with one child?

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  That’s tricky. I think it’s going to depend on what’s been the M.O. up until this point? Are you breaking the standard operating procedure? Are you changing the rules of the game? It’s going to be a lot trickier. If the reality is that your kid is always kind of in your bubble and you always are working together or moving together like as one solid unit, it’s almost like a detoxing, right? You’re going to have to baby step each other away.

And I’m a big fan, especially as kids get older, of calling it what it honestly is. “Hey, guys, mom, auntie, grandma, we’ve all been in the house together and I’m needing some time for myself. I’m going to be in my room, I’m going to be reading a book,” whatever it might be.

“This is going to be for this time of day, in the afternoon or in the morning or whatever, where we’re going to be having to figure stuff out by ourselves.” And owning it, right? You don’t need to over explain it. You don’t need to put anything else around it, language-wise, verbiage-wise but, “This is your time to go play by yourself. You can use stuff in your bedroom, you can do stuff in the living room,” whatever those parameters might be, but not to set yourself up for biting off more than you can chew, right?

I mean, I’m a realist, if nothing else. If you and your kid are always moving together like one person, an hour, let’s be real, that might be too long for everybody. So let’s start small, the next 15 minutes, next 20 minutes. And then you might find that the kid might end up initiating, like, “Hey, I want a little bit longer.” The mama might say, “I want a little bit longer.” You just got to put some parameters on it and be consistent, but be realistic with maybe the new “rules” that you’re putting into place.

Janet Lansbury:  I love that. And I love presenting it positively so that it’s not: now this is bad time that you have to have because I’m doing something. “This is your time to do with whatever you want” (within reason). “But this is your time.”

And then also releasing ourself of that other thing that I get from parents a lot, which is: “I’ve got to make this work for my child. I’ve got to set up the activity. And then they don’t stay with it.” So what would you recommend parents have available?

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  Well, you have to be very mindful of making sure that it’s not stuff that traditionally or typically would require you to have to be in that area with them. You know what I’m saying? Like, if Play-Doh is something that your kids are used to, you don’t have to micromanage it, you don’t have to be worried about the floor. Just put the Play-Doh on the table. “We’re going to make a fresh batch together, and then y’all are going to play with it by yourself for a little bit because mama is going to be over here on the phone with grandma or reading a book for a little bit.” Whatever it might be, right? So we start out together, and then we separate together.

But if you’ve never ever made Play-Doh with your kids before, you might not want to start with something like that, right? Because your brain, even though you think that you’re wanting to, like, let it go, you’re going to be aware. You’ll be like: oh my god, what are they going to do? Are they going to eat it? They’re going to put it in the mouth, they’re going to put it in their hair? Because you don’t know how the kids are going to use it. So you want to start with something that perhaps they’ve already had some element of experience with, right?

You don’t drag the paints and the easel out for the first time ever inside the home, and then actually think that the walls and the carpet aren’t going to get paint on them. So being realistic with what you put out.

I’m a big fan of being a little bit more flexible right now. Maybe you don’t typically let the kids do paint or watercolors or crayons or markers in the kitchen. But maybe this week we’re going to put some butcher paper or big sheets of newspaper down on the floor, and let them actually just change perspective. So maybe markers is something that they all have some experience with. But today we’re going to put the paper on the wall or in the driveway or out on the patio. So you’re just kind of changing the location, changing the scenery, but it’s still… At the end of the day, it’s familiar materials.

The other thing, too, is that even if it is something new, like maybe making a batch of Play-Doh together or oobleck, which is mixing together cornstarch and water, sometimes you just need to be there for the beginning stages of it, and then you can step aside a little bit.

Yesterday I posted kitchen gadget tracing, putting out some unique things that you might have in your kitchen. Open that one drawer that you don’t ever really use and all sorts of unique things might be in there, cookie cutters, wooden spoons, potato mashers. I have clean fly swatters because we paint with them, putting out markers and letting kids trace the shapes. Very basic.

Yesterday I went outside and we did rubbings, like we did crayon rubbings of the sidewalk and crayon rubbings of the manhole and the storm drain cover. And I was like, yeah, maybe you can find some coins or some quarters or some keys. Basic stuff. It doesn’t have to be overly sophisticated.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, those are great ideas. And then I think we see, right, we see what our child is drawn to, what kind of things they want to focus on, and what they have a long attention span for? To not judge that and be open to it, whatever it is. Because children could learn so many things through rubbings. They can learn about colors and shapes and an enormous amount of things just through one experience. So we can really trust our child, right?

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  Here’s the scenario, I’m going to set the scene…

I bet there’s something that all of your children love to do, to where if you said, “Get in the car, we have to leave now.” Like, if they were in the middle of it, they’d be like, “No, this is my most favorite thing!” Whatever that might be, puzzles or trains, or trucks, or Legos, or Magna-Tiles, or drawing, cutting and gluing and pasting or acting out and role playing, whatever that one thing is that your kid hates being interrupted when they’re doing, start with that. You know what I’m saying?

Because sometimes as adults, we forget that although we crave often that novelty and changing it up and something fresh, sometimes your kids are going to be perfectly content finally just being able to do something until they’re done. So I really can’t emphasize that enough, that you don’t have to overthink the situation that we’re all faced with right now. Most kids have a favorite thing to do, and let that be the starting spot, instead of thinking that we got to be changing it up and making it something different every 20 minutes.

Janet Lansbury:  That is so true.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  Because often the adults need that, not the kids.

Janet Lansbury:  And often as parents, we want to interrupt children for them to do something that we feel is a more important activity or something that we feel they would like more or whatever, rather than fostering them to stay longer and go deeper into whatever “boring” looking thing they might be doing, or meaningless looking thing.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  And look at all that stress now you’re putting on yourself as a parent, as an adult, as a caregiver or a provider, aunt, uncle, grandma, whoever you are. Like, leave it alone. You’re making your job harder than it needs to be. You’ve got other stuff that you can go pay attention to. You’ve been craving an afternoon to yourself, now you got one. Now you’re like, what do I do with it? You got to be careful what you wish for.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. I had this wonderful call with a parent the other day. They were feeling a lot of pressure with a 7 and 10 year old to make school happen at home, all those things that you were saying in the beginning of this. And she was doing PE time with her seven year old and that was going to the seaside, I guess, or to the beach. And he was picking up crabs and he wanted to stay doing that. She was getting annoyed because he wasn’t coming back and they needed to go home and do a worksheet for the next part of their day of the schedule. The idea of picking up crab… First of all, I am terrified of picking up a crab. I don’t know how you pick up a crab without it snapping you with its little claws.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  You’ll probably figure it out really quick.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah, but I thought that was such a brilliant activity not to interrupt if she could possibly help it. That, compared to a worksheet. Oh my gosh, as a child, the richness of what you’re actually learning there.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  Yeah. Especially right now, when people are feeling perhaps some self-imposed pressure to recreate school in their home, and they’re doing this homeworky stuff and these to-dos and in these worksheets. Who are they for? Like, are you going to send them back in to the teacher? You’re going to mail them to grandma? Like, why are you doing them? I think it’s okay to pause and ask ourselves that question. Look at that rich, amazing experience that was perhaps undermined because we felt that we had to go like turn it into a lesson. But the lesson was a lot more rich and relevant and real and meaningful before you stopped it.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. Giving ourselves a break, letting go of this fear of keeping up, I guess.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  But I think, honestly, if you sit people down, especially… And I love to do this when I talk to parent groups. When you sit them down and you talk to them individually, a lot of times, if they’re honest, they’re only doing that stuff because they think they’re supposed to be doing it or because the lady down the street is doing it. Whatever. But individually, most of the time, nobody ever says, “Well, I think this is what should be happening.” There’s this general sense of, it’s just what has to be happening. So we’re like fueling this myth. But individually, nobody really is going to raise their hand and be like, “Yeah, I 100% believe that this is what my kid is supposed to be doing.”

So I give adults and parents, especially, permission to kind of bring it back in. Who is this actually for? I’m showing you how to get some time back in your own life, in your family life by not feeling that you have to be jumping through this pen and paper meaningless work, especially when you could take in the time that you’re saving on not doing that kind of stuff. And you transfer that time to having rich, meaningful experiences on the beach with the crabs, just outside digging in the dirt with your own kid, having real conversations instead of thinking that absolutely everything I do with my child has to somehow be translated into this academic teachy moment. It doesn’t.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. And as you are noting, we can also enjoy the play when we do have time to be with them. There’s play happening all around us with children, but we don’t see it as play. Or we don’t see it as valuable learning type play, which all play is.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  Then we end up sending a message to the children that it’s not really valid unless the adult sees value in it. And so then, again, now we’re adding to that cycle of, on one side of our mouth, we might complain or whine that, “My gosh, my kid always seems to need me up in the middle of it.” But then if you’ve actually like had a video and a rewind button, and you watch how you essentially started training your children to require you to get in, because they started to see that the adult doesn’t value what they’re doing organically. So of course: why would I even bother starting to do something because you’re going to come in and tell me how you want me to be doing it anyway? So we’ve we’ve often created our own problem.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. And I think this situation offers us an opportunity to really, as you said, do less and start to see through a different lens, really the way children see the world, which is a lot more interesting than the way we see the world, to be honest.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  What you just said, doing less, and at the same time, believing it when people like me say things like doing less does not mean that you’re shirking your duties, right? Doing less doesn’t mean that you’re not being a good parent. Calming down and taking a breath and slowing down a little bit does not mean that you’re not doing your job. Many of us and the teachers that I work with are included in this. It’s like if it’s not difficult in some way, does that mean I’m not doing my job? Does it have to be hard for it to be valid? Does it have to be something big in order to mean that it’s meaningful?

Sometimes we don’t realize how much of that Kool-Aid we’ve been drinking until we find ourselves in this moment of slowing down and doing less. Then that little creepy voice comes in and it’s like, no, this is how to make it better. This is how to make it more Pinterest worthy. This is how to do it so I can take a picture and post it and see how many likes I get. It’s okay. Like, you don’t realize how addicted sometimes we’ve gotten to that outside social media approval of some of it. Instead of just being 100% in the moment, and receiving the moment as it is, not as how we want to tweak it and send it out into the world.

Janet Lansbury:  Right, exactly. And what you’re saying about what we’re presented with right now that could open up this new way for us… I was just thinking also about a parent that I worked with on the phone who had a child that she’d adopted as a young toddler. And she was very hooked into playing with him, really felt like she needed to, because he would continue to ask for that. And believing that because of his situation, and he’d had a difficult early first year, that he needed that extra help. So I was trying to help her see how she could trust him. That he was capable of entertaining himself and that it would be okay. I was trying to help her with that.

And then she wrote back to me that she’d gotten the flu and actually couldn’t play with him. What happened? He started playing by himself. He started playing kind of in a doll play role-play type thing. Setting things up, making stories. Yeah. So it had to get to that point where it was so clear to her that she could not do anything. Maybe that’s a benefit in where we are now — that it’s going to become clearer for people that they can’t be there propping up their children’s play all the time or motivating it.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  There are lots of definitions of play. There are lots of checkmark bullet points like, “how do you know it’s play?” But what are the common denominators through all the different individual theories is that it’s freely chosen and you can quit when you’re done.

Janet Lansbury:  Exactly.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  And just even considering those two characteristics of play, just those two of the hundreds that we could probably identify, freely chosen and I can quit when I’m done. Right? That almost requires the adults to be on the sidelines. And it’s not to say that the kids aren’t enjoying themselves when the adult is with them. But does it actually undermine the true playfulness of what is actually happening? And where did it come from that we think that we needed to be involved? That’s a whole conversation in and of itself.

Janet Lansbury:  Yes. Because if we can learn to be with children in that less actively involved way around play, that also translates for them into an easier transition to when we’re not there. So we can be there knowing that children feel our presence, and that that is very validating — to have a parent just interested in you without you having to bring them in to join you and think of the imaginary thing that your parent has to be. Just to be able to sit and daydream and have your parent there with you and be with you and interested in you without you having to perform anything. It’s so much more validating, anyway. So yeah, stepping back and-

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  I had a six-year-old child tell me once, “Ms. Lisa, you are always in the middle, but you’re never in the way.”

Janet Lansbury:  That’s beautiful.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  Probably the best compliment I’ve ever gotten in my life.

I broke up with the word “teacher” a long time ago and really have explored, probably for this most recent last 15, 20 years of my career, the idea of being a facilitator within the space as opposed to being the teacher or the keeper. How can I allow the children to have deep, rich explorations within this space without needing to be front and center? Moving to the sidelines of their lives.

Janet Lansbury:  There’s a good message in that for all of us.

Well, Lisa, thank you so much for being with me and sharing your wisdom for parents out there that I’m sure will benefit from this. Lisa has a book, she has several books, but this one: Lisa Murphy on Play: The Foundation of Children’s Learning gives you the basics for how important play is, all the things that they’re learning and how to provide it.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  Yes. My books are published by Redleaf Press. So there’s the shameless plug there. You can get all five of my books from Redleaf Press website.

Currently, we’re calling it the corona vacation, the coronacation, I don’t know if it’s too soon for that. But we are posting a lot of like daily videos on YouTube of me reading books and of various easy around-the-house activities that folks can be doing. So if you are brand new to me, I’ll give you that shameless plug. I’m @OoeyGooeyLady on Instagram and also on YouTube and you can follow along there.

Janet Lansbury:  Great. So your YouTube channel is called OoeyGooeyLady?

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  Correct. OoeyGooeyLady lady. Pretty much OoeyGooeyLady for everything.

Janet Lansbury:  Fantastic.

Lisa Griffen-Murphy:  Thank you very much for having me on your show and it was an honor and I hope that we can chat again.

Janet Lansbury:  Thank you, Lisa. This has been great. I think it’s going to be really helpful.

Also, 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, No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting. You can find them through my website or on audible.com, and you can also get them in paperback at Amazon and in ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple.com.

Thanks for listening. We can do this.

The post Kickstarting Your Child’s Learning and Play at Home (with Lisa Griffen-Murphy) 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 “The Way We Praise Matters”

Hi there. This is Janet Lansbury, welcome to Unruffled. Today I have a question about praise. This parent is interested in how to give positive feedback without using value judgments, and I thought this was great because praise is a misunderstood topic and I’m excited for the chance to weigh in on it.

Okay, here’s the email I received:

“Dear Janet, thank you so much for all the insight you have shared. It has helped our family immensely as we work every day to raise our children differently from how we were raised with respect, with kindness and with authenticity.

One aspect we’re not perfectly clear about is giving positive feedback authentically without putting unintended or intended pressure on our kids to meet those expectations of whatever a compliment implies. With activities, we’re very consistent, ‘I love hearing you play sing, watching you dance. You look like you’re having so much fun. How does it feel to twirl? I really enjoy your paintings. I see you use seven different colors on this one,’ and so on.

One dearly loved caregiver is extremely verbally adept and we love her influence. She’s fond of verbal encouragement and it comes through in the children. When they see us working hard, they offer phrases like, ‘Good work, Momma or you’re working very hard with that shovel,’ et cetera.

Here’s my question, our children will say, ‘That was very thoughtful/generous of you to share or you are the best momma in the whole wide world and you were so brave when the wasp stung you.’ Those last three are the kinds of phrases where my ears perk up and I feel like things are starting to tilt toward an adult imposed value. But it’s such a fine line between genuine appreciation of an action, ‘Thank you for helping me find that clean washcloth,’ is a clear authentic sharing whereas, ‘Thank you for being a helper,’ starts to cross over into setting up the ‘helper/non helper dichotomy’. Would you agree?

I’ve stayed away from discussing the subtleties of these phrases with the caregiver and my husband because I honestly do not see them causing serious harm unless they are used in a manipulative way.

But again, there are times when that is not clear. For example, ‘Would you please be a helper with me right now? I see you’re having a hard time hearing me and we need to get up to the bath, so we have time to read a book.’ The use of being a helper there bothers me, but I wonder if I’m overthinking it. If you have insights to share with us, we would greatly appreciate your support.”

Okay, well this is the kind of note that I could geek out on for several hours because I actually think she is way overthinking this, but I tend to do that too. I love to toss things around and pull them apart, especially on this topic: the topic of raising our children and being what this mother calls, she actually nails it right in the beginning… She says, “One aspect we’re not perfectly clear about is giving positive feedback authentically.” So being in an authentic relationship with our children from the time they are born is the challenge that my mentor, Magda Gerber gave us as parents.

What does that look like? What does that feel like? To be honest and authentic with a tiny human being, who maybe isn’t even talking yet, who we obviously want to encourage to be a good person… How do we do that? That’s another conversation. How do we encourage children to have these character traits that we admire? Mostly we do that by modeling and that goes for authenticity as well. So if we want to raise children who are authentic adults, we have to show them what that looks like by being authentic with them.

But to put this all in perspective, every word we use with children is not this heavy, important thing. And I would especially not be so concerned about the words that other people use with my child because the most important relationship, the most defining relationship for our children is the one that we, as parents have with them, as primary caregivers. So that matters most. It sounds like this caregiver the family has is wonderful, she seems great. She’s so enthusiastic, she’s so encouraging. I would not overthink her at all.

She sounds very much in the ballpark of everything that you’d want in a caregiver. It’s really okay if she doesn’t live up to our authentic ideals. The most important thing is that she cares about the children, that she appreciates them and enjoys them. And it sounds like, in this case, she definitely does.

So I want to go through all the different examples this parent brings up because I think they’re all interesting in terms of seeing our authenticity as kind of a shape sorter that some things will fit through and other statements we make or words we choose don’t quite fit as well.

What drew me into Magda Gerber’s approach was the clarity of it. I am a cluttered person in terms of stuff. I’m working on that. But what I have with parenting, with our relationships with children and our role with them, what they need from us, is very, very clear because of Magda. Magda’s teachings have been affirmed for me again and again and again through my own children and through the families that I work with, which just gives me more conviction in the clarity of this approach.

And when we have clarity, we actually don’t have to go over everything we say or search for words or wonder how to handle certain situations. We are on that path and if we do kind of veer away, we’ll notice that, that doesn’t fit with the way we want to be. We’ll have that monitor for ourselves.

And with encouragement or praise and Magda liked to say, “Instead of praise, acknowledgements.” Let’s acknowledge what children are doing.” It’s all about being real with them and when we’re real with them, we don’t do what this parent is concerned about, which is putting pressure on them to meet our expectations. They don’t feel manipulated by us through what we’re saying. They feel our sincerity, they feel our relationship with them.

So let’s start where this parent does. She says she doesn’t want to put pressure on her kids to meet those expectations of whatever a compliment implies. Yes, she wants to be authentic. Perfect. She says, “With activities, we’re very consistent. I love hearing you play, sing, watching you dance.” So yes, if that’s true, we might absolutely say those things.

But we wouldn’t say them just to try to get our child to dance more or sing more, that we feel like somehow there’s a deficit and we need to build them up by telling them how much we love what they’re doing. The thing about children is they’re so intuitive, especially with their parents. They know. They know when we’re gushing and it’s not quite anchored in sincerity. It’s not even so much the words we say, although there are some fixed mindset words that Carol Dweck studied that we do want to avoid. Things like, “You’re smart,” which children could feel is the label they have to live up to.

Saying you’re a good this or a good that can get in our children’s way. Rather than, “You love to spend a lot of time doing this.” So yes, there are some “fixed mindset “words that we don’t want to say. But generally, it’s not about what we say, it’s about our intention. And if, again, our intentions aren’t quite pure, that will come across, so, “You look like you’re having so much fun.” Yes, absolutely, if that’s genuine, “How does it feel to twirl?” Sure, if we really do have that interest, if that’s where we go when watching our child twirl. But not because we want them to talk more about it, not because we’re trying to teach them more about it or have them explore it through our little subtle direction. No, just because that’s where we went, “Wow, how does that feel?” Our intention will come through and it will affect the way we say something.

“I really enjoy your paintings. I see you used seven different colors on this one,” and so on. Sure, if that’s genuinely something that comes to our mind when we look at that. But this is a little controversial because that’s a common one that we hear suggested…

When I’m looking at paintings, I’m not usually counting the colors, so I wouldn’t say it just to say something. I wouldn’t say it just because we feel like again, that our child needs us to bolster them when they’re doing these activities. I definitely wouldn’t say it in an interruptive way. If my child is focusing on something. I wouldn’t do something that jars them a little and now they’re counting colors instead of being in the moment of what they’re doing, in that flow. That’s the most important thing that we want to protect.

So when we acknowledge can matter. One of the easiest ways to know when we’re not interrupting is when our child stops and looks at us and then we might say, “You’ve been working hard on that. I’m enjoying watching you,” or something else that we’re genuinely thinking right there. We don’t have to come up with a response. We don’t have to try to find a way to encourage our child. What encourages them is our presence. So if we are actually watching them when they’re creating, then they feel that without us saying anything. Children are so in tune to us, they can feel when they have our attention.

So even some of these ways of talking to children that are commonly recommended, like talking about the colors, don’t necessarily have that pure intention on our part. So they might not quite fit through that shape sorter of authenticity.

Then this mother talks about the caregiver who, again, sounds fantastic. I love this woman. She says she’s fond of verbal encouragement and it comes through in the children. So now the children are saying these wonderful, encouraging things. I mean, just the fact they want to say this stuff is so sweet and lovely. She says they offer praises like, “Good work, Momma.”

“Good job” gets a lot of bad rap, rightfully, because it is kind of used as this stamp of approval that can be said automatically on our part. And if we think about it, again going to that honest intention, it can be a little manipulative, “Oh good job, good job.” I want to keep you doing this. I need you to keep doing this. I need you to keep helping me. So I’m just going to give you this sort of empty praise again and again.

So there’s a reason it gets a bad rap, but there’s also a way to say “good job” to somebody that’s quite authentic, where you’re looking in their eyes and you know that they’ve been struggling with this and now they do it. And you might then genuinely say, “Whoa, good job.” And it’s not the end of the world because you said, “Good job.” It’s about our authenticity. It’s about our intention. No ulterior motives. I just want to connect, just sharing with you how I feel, what I’m noticing. That’s the reason to say these things,

“You’re working hard with that shovel.” Working hard, that’s not a value judgment. You can tell when somebody’s working hard.

So I wouldn’t worry about your children echoing that kind of language.

So here’s the part she’s questioning, “That was very thoughtful, generous of you to share.” Thoughtfulness and generosity are quite specific and if we are saying those kinds of things authentically, your child is not going to go to, If I don’t do these things, I’m not being thoughtful or generous and that’s a bad thing. So it’s quite different from when we say, “Oh good job, good job, good job.” And then if our child doesn’t get that response, then they have to assume it was a bad job.

But thoughtfulness, generosity, kindness, bravery. She says, “You were so brave when the wasp stung you.” These are all traits that we want our children to learn about, to learn what they mean. And maybe we see that as, Oh oh, if I’m not generous, that’s something bad. Children don’t necessarily see that way. Kindness, generosity, thoughtfulness, there’s certainly nothing wrong with using those terms, when they’re true and when we’re really genuinely noticing that.

“You’re the best momma in the whole wide world.”. Well you can’t not like that, it’s sweet and it’s the kind of thing we say to our close loved ones. I wouldn’t question that, there’s no reason to. But this mother says, “Those last three are the kinds of phrases where my ears perk up and I feel like things are starting to tilt toward an adult imposed value.” I don’t think that’s imposed. I’d see those as human values that we do want our children to rise to.

She says, “It’s such a fine line between genuine appreciation of an action, ‘Thank you for helping me find the clean washcloth.'” She says, “That’s clear, authentic sharing.” Absolutely, whereas, “Thank you for being a helper,” starts to cross into setting up the helper/non helper dichotomy.

So to me, it doesn’t fit through the shape sorter because we wouldn’t say that to anyone but a child. “Be a good helper.” We would say, “Thank you for helping me. Can you help me please?” So yeah, that’s more of a value judgment, I guess, that you are a helper or you aren’t a helper. But in the scheme of things I wouldn’t be concerned.

The interesting thing is, again, when you start to get into this and you take all these weeds out of the picture and you can really see clearly, you really see your child as another person in your relationship, somebody you would never dream of being dishonest with or manipulative… I’ll dangle this bit of praise if you help me out, we won’t be able to go there.

So this mother says, “I’ve stayed away from discussing the subtleties of these phrases with the caregiver and my husband because I honestly don’t see them causing serious harm.” Absolutely, I would not nitpick around these ideas. I would just explore this for yourself, so that you can be clear. And then she says, “But again, there are times when that is not clear. For example, ‘Would you please be a helper with me right now? I see you’re having a hard time hearing me and we need to get up to the bath. So we have time to read a book.’ The use of being a helper there bothers me, but I wonder if I’m overthinking it.”.

So I wouldn’t worry about your children echoing that kind of language.

So yeah, “be a helper” is just unnecessary and it kind of puts child-speak into this, where we’re talking a little bit down to the child.

And then I wouldn’t necessarily myself say, “I see you have a hard time hearing me,” because for children it’s usually not about hearing. It’s about moving. It’s about doing the thing that we want them to do. So the way I would rephrase that is to say something like, “Could you please come now, so we have time to read a book?”

And then I would also understand that if this is bedtime especially, it’s really, really difficult for my child to make these transitions at the end of the day and I would be there with my arm around my child saying, “I’m going to help you. Yeah, you’re having a hard time coming on your own. So we’re going to go in because I want to have plenty of time to read to you.” Knowing that our child needs help, that it’s not about repeating myself or saying it differently or thinking that my child isn’t hearing me.

So that’s basically it. Those are my insights, just that everything needs to be authentic. And if we have these other intentions or motivations, to really look at those and say, I must be having a hard time trusting that my child can really enjoy these creative activities. Or that I can see what’s really going on here. That it’s not that my child is not being a helper, they’re just having a hard time in that moment. This clarity will free us to be the kind of parents we want to be, to be proud of ourselves and our relationship with our children. And we will see the results of that. We’ll see that we’ve instilled these qualities in our children.

I really hope some of that helps.

Communicating to our children with *authenticity* is vital for bonding, modeling character traits, effective boundary setting and more. We cannot be respectful without being honest. Our children FEEL the difference and we will too. I explain all of this in great detail in my new master course: http://nobadkidscourse.com Check it out!

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. Both of my books are available on audio, No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting. You can 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. Or you can go to the books section of my website. can also get them in paperback at Amazon, and in E-book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and apple.com. You can also get them in paperback at Amazon and in eBook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble an apple.com.

Also, my exclusive audio series, Sessions. These are six individual recordings of consultations with parents discussing their specific parenting issues. These are available by going to sessionsaudio.com. That’s sessions, plural, audio.com. You can read a description of each episode and order them individually or get them all about three hours of audio for just under $20. Sessionsaudio.com.

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

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