Author: Elanchezhian Narayanasamy

Dr. Jennifer Eberhart, author of the best-selling book Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, joins Janet to discuss how racial bias develops in the brain and creates disparities in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and the criminal justice system. As the mother of three sons, Jennifer has also witnessed the effects of bias in real time. She and Janet explore some of the steps parents can take to combat the development of bias in their children. “Preschoolers are picking this up and determining who’s a good person, who’s a bad person… They need our help in comprehending what’s going on around them and helping them to make sense of it.”

Jennifer is a Stanford University professor and a faculty director of SPARQ , a university initiative to use social psychological research to address pressing social problems. She has been named a MacArthur Fellow, one of “Foreign Policy”’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers, and elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Hi. This is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I have the great pleasure and honor of welcoming a guest to the podcast, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt. She is a professor of psychology at Stanford University. She’s the recipient of a 2014 MacArthur genius grant. She’s the co-founder and co-director of SPARQ, which is a Stanford center that brings together researchers and practitioners to address significant problems.

Jennifer has focused her work on bias. She has a ground-breaking new book called Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do. It is her personal journey to understanding how bias works in the brain and how racial bias, particularly, has developed, beginning at its roots. And then she also talks about how she applies her research in America’s boardrooms and police precincts to come up with constructive solutions to effect change. Thank you again for being here, Jennifer.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Thank you have having me.

Janet Lansbury:  First of all, I just want to say that I was completely blown away by your book. I found it so deeply moving, your journey, all the stories that you shared. I can’t recall learning so much from a single book. The way that you share — your writing was just so eloquent. So thank you for that.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Well, thank you. I mean I appreciate it, for sure. I’m just so happy that it resonated with you.

Janet Lansbury:  It certainly did. For listeners, I think it would be great to start out with talking about the basics: how bias is formed, what its purpose is for us as humans, and how it works.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Sure. So maybe it would be easiest to start with a discussion of categories. Our brains, we create categories to make sense of the world. And those categories allow us to assert some kind of coherence and control of the stimuli that we’re bombarded with on a daily basis. So we have categories for everything, for cars and for furniture and for anything that you can think about. We also have categories for people. So our brains are kind of grouping like things together, basically. We do this instinctively by relying on patterns that seem predictable.

But just as the categories that we create can serve as the shorthand and can allow us to make these split second decisions about things, they also reinforce bias. So the very abilities that help us to see the world are the same things that blind us to it.

I study racial bias in particular, and racial bias is a force that’s so powerful that it can influence everything from who teachers discipline in school to who’s hired and promoted in the workplace. In the criminal justice system, it can affect everything from who cops see as suspicious on the streets to who jurors are going to sentence to die in prison.

So I’m looking at, in my book and in my work, I look at how bias works and how racial disparities can create bias as well. So bias can lead to disparities, like in the criminal justice system, in our schools, in our workplaces. But simply witnessing those disparities, taking in those disparities in those spaces, can reinforce bias. So there’s a two-way or bi-directional relationship here.

Janet Lansbury:  So it’s like a cycle that-

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  It is.

Janet Lansbury:  … one creates the other and then that reinforces the other.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Yeah.

Janet Lansbury:  So what can we do to disrupt this? Are there things that we can do to help ourselves to recognize our own biases, be more aware of them, and change them?

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  I can give you examples of ways in which people have disrupted bias in their own spaces. One example would be with teachers. I’ve done work showing that teachers will discipline Black middle school students much more harshly than white students for the same repeated infractions. That’s because teachers are thinking about those repeated infractions for Black students as being: one is tied to the other. They see it as a pattern of misbehavior that needs to be shut down. They see it as indicative of that child, when that child is Black, being a troublemaker.

But for white students, they don’t see one instance of misbehavior as connected to the other. So they don’t make the overarching judgment about a white child who misbehaves, or at least not to the same degree or in the same way. So we see this. Even we see this for Black children who are different children. One Black child misbehaves, for example, and then a different Black child misbehaves. A teacher might respond to that second Black student as though he’s misbehaved twice. So it’s almost like the sins of one child can get piled onto the other.

But we don’t see teachers doing that so much for white students. They think about white students as being individuals. So what one white child does has absolutely nothing to do with what another white child does.

We’ve done this work. So we were thinking about, well, what could disrupt that? How could we arm teachers in a way where it doesn’t trigger bias and where they’re not contributing to these racial disparities in terms of discipline? One of the co-authors on the paper in the research I just described, his name is Jason Okonofua. He was looking at empathy as a way for disrupting this.

What he did was help teachers to reframe why it is that they were disciplining students, and then also what it was that caused children to misbehave, so to kind of broaden their focus to think about not just the misbehavior in the moment, but to think about what was producing that misbehavior. The teachers learned about the whole issue of mistrust in school settings. They learned about what that child’s worries were: their worries of being treated unfairly or treated differently because of their race and all of that. And then those teachers were taught how to think about discipline in a way that would draw the child into the classroom, rather than pushing them further away.

So they thought about when they needed to discipline a child, to do that in a way that kind of showed care for the child rather than, again, pushing him out of the classroom. They found that by just using that simple technique and kind of changing the mindset of teachers, they were able to cut the suspension rate in half.

Janet Lansbury:  Wow. Part of that is that you gave them a way to see children that they were lumping into a group in their minds as more likely to have problems and to misbehave… you helped them to see them as individuals that each have their own issues and own reasons for behaving the way that they do, and their own sensitivities. You allowed them to poke holes in the group mentality.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  And then also poke holes in the narrative about that group. Because there’s a way in which people … So say that Black children in that context are disproportionately misbehaving, but even in that case, you can think about, well, why is that the case? What is it about this context that’s producing that? Rather than simply looking at the children as troublemakers or looking at the children as the source of the problem. So I think that’s how we need to think about bias as well, more generally. It’s just not that people are biased or not. There’s something about the context that we’re in that could trigger a bias.

As that bias gets triggered, it can influence the decisions we make and it can influence the actions that we take.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. In your book you talked about that one was speed — that when we don’t have a lot of time to make a decision, that’s when we tend to fall back on bias. Also, stress level, right?

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Yeah. Both of those. I’ve looked at this, actually, in the policing context along with some colleagues at Stanford. We went in and we worked with the police department on how to reduce the number of stops they were making of people who were not committing any serious crimes. We did that by slowing officers down. So before each and every stop they made, we had them ask themselves a question and that was, “Is this stop intelligence-led? Yes or no.” By that, they meant just do I have credible evidence to tie this particular person to a specific crime? So just asking themselves that question, just pausing, add that friction there changed their mindset.

It also changed what they did. So we found that with the addition of this simple question at the time they were making the decision whether to stop someone or not, we found that it reduced the number of African American stops by over 43%.

Janet Lansbury: Wow.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Simply adding that pause.

Janet Lansbury:  And giving them some specifics to slow down their process.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Exactly. So, to slow down, but you’re also encouraging them to use objective standards rather than subjective standards to make a decision. You’re not going on intuition, which would be subjective. But we’re forcing them to think about using evidence of criminal wrongdoing to make the decision. So you’re pushing them to be more objective.

Janet Lansbury:  That’s so wonderful.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  You could think, “Well, what does that mean for me? I’m not a police officer and stopping people and making these decisions.” But I think the take-home point is that you can disrupt your own bias by slowing down, by calming down, by asking yourselves the right question, and then by holding yourselves accountable. So it’s the same principles involved, whether you’re a police officer or whether you’re a parent.

Janet Lansbury:  What would that look like for a parent, do you think? Are there any examples you could think of to help parents understand that?

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Yeah. Well, one of the examples I start the book out with is when I was on an airplane with my son who was just five years old at the time. He was just really excited about being on this plane with Mommy. He’s looking all around and he’s checking everybody out. He sees this man and he points at him and he says, “Hey. That guy looks like Daddy.” And then I look at the guy and he doesn’t look anything at all like my husband, nothing at all. Then at that point, I realized that this man was the only Black man on the plane. So I used that to have this discussion with my son about how not all Black people look alike.

But before I could have that discussion, my son he looks up at me and he says, “I hope that man doesn’t rob the plane.”

I said, “What? What did you say?”

He said that again. He said, “Well, I hope he doesn’t rob the plane.”

I said, “Well, why would you say that? You know Daddy wouldn’t rob a plane.”

He says, “Yeah, yeah. I know.”

I said, “Well, why would you say that?”

He looked at me with this really sad face and he said, “I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know why I was thinking that.”

So this is an example of how we’re living with such severe racial stratification that even a five-year-old can tell us what’s supposed to happen next. Even with no evil doer, even with no explicit hatred, this association between Blackness and crime had entered the mind of my five-year-old. And it enters the minds of all of our children and into all of us.

So the issue there in how to disrupt that is talking to our children, asking, “How did you get that thought? Why are you thinking that? Why did you come to that conclusion?” And helping them to interrogate their own mind so that you can make the unconscious associations, these implicit associations that they’re developing even as children. You can make those more explicit so that they can question them.

And then you help them to practice this to the point where they can do that on their own without your assistance. They can think, “Why did I have that thought at this moment?”

I think that’s the first step we have to take towards reducing and mitigating bias. It’s adding friction. It’s slowing down. It’s reflecting on how we got to this decision or that decision, how we decided to take this action and not that action.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. That makes sense. And then also making sure that we’re coming from a place of calm in ourselves when we’re having those discussions with children so that it doesn’t become: You shouldn’t say these things and now I’m judging you. You should be afraid to talk about these things or say what’s on your mind. So that tightrope walk as well.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Yeah, it’s difficult. It’s difficult. I think sometimes parents just decide not to walk that tightrope. They decide it’s better not to even bring up race. There are a lot of parents who have been taught to be colorblind and that that is the way to raise a child. Because the idea is that if you can’t see color, how could you be biased? But the research shows us that when you’re teaching children not to see color, you’re also teaching them not to see the bias that can come from it. You’re teaching them to close their eyes to the discrimination that can come from it. So that’s a real problem.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. You actually did a study on that.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Yeah. They did a study on that where they took fourth and fifth graders. They exposed them to this blatant discrimination. So they exposed them to this situation where a child knocks down another child and punches him on the soccer field. They asked, “Well, why did you do that?” And the child says, “I did it because he’s Black and I don’t like Black people or Black people are aggressive or violent. So I hit him before he could hit me,” something like that. For the children who were taught to be colorblind and that that was the way to be a good person, only half of them saw that as an instance of discrimination.

Whereas, when you teach children to actually notice color and to be comfortable in talking about that, the vast majority of them were also able to see that push and that knock-down on the soccer field as an act of racial discrimination. So their eyes were open to that. Whereas, when the child were taught to be colorblind, their eyes were closed to it.

Janet Lansbury:  So we want to teach children that there are different races and people look different. Do we want to teach them that minority populations, that there is historical prejudice against them? At what age do we want children to know that?

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Yeah. I mean I think that’s a great question. I mean sometimes the intuition is to not have those discussions too soon because you want to preserve the innocence of kids. But I think there’s a way when we don’t have those discussions that we’re sort of exposing them to a lot that they don’t understand and we’re leaving them on their own to grapple with it. I think that Black parents tend to talk to their children earlier about race than white parents.

But even in 2014 when we were having protests across the country about Michael Brown’s death at the hands of police, you might remember this was in Ferguson, Missouri, there was a lot of discussion then around race and policing. So I didn’t necessarily want to expose my children to this. They were still in elementary school at the time. The elementary school principal actually asked me to come in to talk to the school about race and policing. I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” That was the last thing I wanted to do. It was a mostly white school. So I knew that a lot of the parents were focused on being colorblind as a way to kind of shield their children from bias. So I was thinking the last thing they wanted was for me to come in and talk about such a heavy and difficult topic with kindergartners even, because it was going to be a whole-school assembly.

What got me to feel okay about going in was that I was taking my kids to school one day and on NPR, they were talking about Baltimore. There were protests going on and there were fires. People were protesting the death of Freddie Gray there. I was listening to it and my kids were in the back seat. I hear this voice from the back seat and it was, “Mommy, Mommy. Why is Baltimore on fire?”

When I heard my child’s voice I thought, “Wow, they’re listening to this story too. They’re hearing the same thing I’m hearing.” It was at that moment I realized when we don’t talk to our children about what’s going on, we do leave them to fend for themselves. They’re having to make sense of all this stuff all on their own. We’re not protecting them by not talking to them. We’re making them more vulnerable, in a way.

So that was the moment that I decided I wanted to go in to the school and talk to kids about race and policing and I was eager to do it. So I went in and I talked to them. I cannot tell you, they were so engaged. Even the kindergartners were raising their hands when I asked questions. Everybody had thoughts on this and they were eager to just get those thoughts out and to have this real discussion about what was going on in our nation right then.

Here we are again as a nation going through the same thing. How many of us are having these discussions with our children about what’s happening right now?

Janet Lansbury:  This is a heavy, heavy time and children are so aware. They don’t understand the specifics. They need help framing this so that they can understand. But they’re totally aware that people are upset, that there’s really scary things going on. It’s even worse, as you said, if we don’t put words to it.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  It is, for sure. I mean it leaves them bewildered. It leaves them confused. It leaves them scared actually.

Janet Lansbury:  Yes. Why is this so terrible that no one can even tell me what’s going on?

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Yeah.

Janet Lansbury:  Well, your book is so timely. One thing that you say is, “The mistake we all keep making is in thinking that our work is done, that whatever heroic effort we’ve made will keep moving us forward, that whatever progress we’ve seen will keep us from sliding back to burning crosses and hiding Torah scrolls.”

And then you say, “Moving forward requires continued vigilance. It requires us to constantly attend to who we are, how we got that way, and all the selves we have the capacity to be.”

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  That’s right. That’s true, now more than ever, right?

Janet Lansbury:  Now more than ever.

The way that you write the book, you’re sharing your journey of discovery. As I recall, your interest is sort of piqued when you were in middle school, in a mostly white middle school. You had difficulty distinguishing the different girls that were making friends with you. I found that fascinating because I’d really never thought of that happening. But I’ve never been myself in a situation where everyone was of a different race or most people were of a different race than me. So I’ve never had that experience. But I thought it was fascinating and really telling as to the power of the categorization that we do.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Yeah, for sure. I mean up until I was 12 years old I was in an all Black world. This was in Cleveland, Ohio. Everybody was African American in my neighborhood, my school, my teachers, whatever stores I visited. It was just anybody that I had any meaningful relationship with was Black. And then my parents decide we’re going to move to this white suburb when I was going into middle school. I was nervous about moving there because I didn’t know much about the place, but I knew that Black people did not live there. So somehow we were going to live there and so I was nervous about how I would be treated and received and so forth.

I get there and the students were super nice and they were welcoming and all of that. But I still had problems making friends because I could not tell their faces apart initially. I was confused by that and it was like, “What’s going on with my brain? How come I can’t tell one person from the other?” It was really because I had not been exposed to white people, white faces, on a daily basis. So my brain didn’t have practice at learning how to sort those faces and individuate those faces. So it took me some time.

Over time, obviously I was able to tell one white face from another, but at that time my brain had no practice at it. So I had a tough time doing it, which means I had a tough time making friends because I couldn’t tell who I had talked to the day before. I couldn’t tell who was my friend and who wasn’t almost. So it was a difficult period. But it did wake me up to race and just really deepened my interest in racial issues, everything from how my brain was working at the time to looking at the difference in resources in that community versus my old one. It was just a really wealthy community and all of that. It seemed to be very much aligned with race, how much resources one neighborhood had versus another. So that experience piqued my interest in race and inequality.

Janet Lansbury:  But then later when you were in college… or was it in graduate school when you really started to focus your studies and research on bias?

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Yeah. I actually did neuroimaging studies on this whole idea we’re talking about, what’s called actually the other-race effect. It’s just the fact that people are better at recognizing faces of their own race than they are faces of other races. With a number of colleagues at Stanford, we conducted the first neuroimaging study looking at this in the brain and we found evidence for this that the area of the brain called the fusiform face area is implicated in face processing. We found that that area was activated less for faces of races other than our own.

So the thing that I experienced at 12, we were seeing evidence at this neural level for how it plays out in our heads.

Janet Lansbury:  Is that because we just decide I’m not going to put more energy into this other because I feel like, I don’t know, I already have an understanding of it. Or I don’t need to have an understanding of it or what is that?

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Some of it is just sheer exposure, but then you also realize that, okay, if you’re seeing faces of other races, maybe you won’t even feel the need to practice, to really try to sort through those faces because they mean less to you, maybe because you’re interacting with them less. So it’s both the exposure and then it’s also what our own experience requires of us and then even our attitudes about people who are outside of the group that we’re mostly attending to.

It’s interesting, too, because I think a lot of times people think about something like racial segregation that, okay, people are segregated in these different neighborhoods. There’s a whole history to that. Our government actually played a big role in enforcing that racial segregation. So sometimes people will think about segregation just in terms of policy or sometimes they think about segregation just in terms of preferences and things. But what we’re seeing is that segregation, actually, it’s more than policy and preference. It’s actually something that shapes how our brains function.

So you could take a policy or a practice or whatever it is, a preference, and then it actually can influence how your neurons fire in your brain.  So it shapes us. Our environment, our social environment, it sort of shapes us in a very deep way, in a way that oftentimes we don’t appreciate.

Janet Lansbury:  So that’s why in the early years, hopefully, we can influence preschools or communities to create more diversity for that reason alone, that in these formative years, if we want to try to disrupt bias in its most formative time, then having preschool experiences… If the parent doesn’t have friends or people in their community, at least making that a priority for preschool, if possible.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  And even preschoolers can pick up our own bias as parents. So that’s another issue. They’ve done research on this as well where you have preschoolers watching an adult being treated badly by another adult. That adult is scowling and they’re leaning away from this person. They’re talking to that person in a cold tone. You ask children whether they want to be around this adult and whether they like this adult and they take on the bias that they see by the adult.

So in this case, one adult who was being treated negatively and another adult who was being treated positively. So they were leaning into that adult and talking in a warm tone of voice and sharing toys with the adult and so forth.

They found that 75% of the children when asked who they preferred, they preferred that adult who was being treated well. This was just a 30-second video clip of watching this treatment and already preschoolers had seen enough to know that it was the target of bias that was responsible for the bias rather than the holder of bias. So they took on the same kind of attitude and stance towards the one who was treated poorly.

Janet Lansbury:  Wow.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  It happens so early. I mean, think about this. Preschoolers are picking this up and determining who’s a good person, who’s a bad person. I have another son who, when he was a first grader he came to me and he asked me if I thought that Black people and white people were seen differently and kind of treated differently.

I said, “Well, I don’t know what you mean.”

He says, “I don’t know.” He said, “I just feel like there’s something different.”

I asked him. I said, “Well, why don’t you think about it and think about when you last felt that way?”

So he was thinking and thinking.

And then he says, “Hey, we were in the grocery store the other day and remember there was a Black guy that came in?” This was in a mostly white neighborhood and so there weren’t a lot of Black men who went in that store. So he was saying, “Yeah, remember he came in and it was like people kind of stayed away from him a little bit. It was like he had a giant force field around him.”

My son was really into Star Wars then as a first grader and so he was describing this in this way.

And then he says, “Yeah. When the guy got in line, I noticed that his was the shortest line because people didn’t want to get near him.”

And then I said, “Well, what do you think it is?”

He says, “I don’t know.” He was thinking about it and thinking about it. Then he looked at me and he said, “I think it’s fear.”

I thought, “Wow.” It’s a first grader picking up on this feeling, this sentiment, not from anything I said, nothing that the people said in the store. It was all about how they were moving through space.

That’s what kids do. They attend to those kinds of things and they’re trying to figure out what correlates with what. Who is regarded in what way? He was able to pick up on this idea of fear simply from watching how we are moving through this space.

So as a parent, it was just astonishing how he could come to that as a child and with such clarity about it.

Janet: Wow.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  People oftentimes will say, “It’s from the media. Kids pick up on bias.” But it’s also from us. We are transmitting that kind of sentiment and those signals to our children even when we’re not aware of it.

Janet Lansbury:  You’re right. I mean, sure, media has effects, but nothing like the effect of the parents that they’re in relationship with and the parents that they look to for: Am I safe? Am I comfortable? Or the other people around them.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Yeah. The parents help them to interpret what they see. They can put a frame on it. I think that framing is really important for children. They need that. Otherwise, especially how we’re raised in American culture to think that people get what they get and they make their choices and all of that. The structural forces that kind of keep people where they are, children are completely blind to that. So they need help. If they see that there’s certain people who occupy the lower rungs of society, I mean children will just look at that and think, “Well, okay. That’s who those people are or that’s where they belong.” I’m saying they need our help in comprehending what’s going on around them and helping them to make sense of it, right?

Janet Lansbury:  Right. They come from this open place of trust. Like you said, it’s if these people are being treated this way, they must deserve it because my parent wouldn’t do anything bad or wouldn’t be wrong. So there must be a reason.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Right. It’s like that study we were talking about with the preschoolers. If you’re treated bad, you are bad. That’s the conclusion that would be drawn there.

Janet Lansbury:  It’s a powerful enemy, this bias thing. As you’ve said, it’s so unconscious.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Yeah. It’s like how do we fight an enemy that we can’t see? It’s hard, but it’s not something that we’re incapable of. I think that means talking to our children, rather than shielding them from issues of race. It means helping them to be racially literate, rather than not talking about it, because then they don’t have the language. So then they grow up in these situations where it’s hard to even have a conversation about race and you’re even more terrified to have that conversation because you’re so ill-equipped to do it. So we want to, I think, equip our children early.

It’s not like when you don’t talk about it, they’re not seeing it. It’s not like when you don’t talk about it, you really are shielding them from it.

Janet Lansbury:  Yes, that’s a really, really good point.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  I’m working now with some people at Stanford where we’re actually conducting a study looking at how often Black and white parents talk to their children about race and inequality. We’re also looking at what those conversations sound like. We’re looking at when those conversations begin. So yeah, I think this is something that people are hungry for now, especially now given all of the polarization and the racial strife that we’re facing now.

Janet Lansbury:  They definitely are. There are wonderful resources coming out in children’s books and wonderful ways to make these conversations come up easier for parents that aren’t sure. But as you said, more than exposing them to books, it’s those experiences. It’s what they’re feeling that’s most important to help them learn and process. Because what can happen is, and I can relate to this myself from being a child, is that you’re sensing something’s going on. The adults that you look to to help you process the world, they’re not talking about it.

So you feel alone. You feel maybe scared, maybe ashamed that you are seeing things that you’re not supposed to see or sensing things you’re not supposed to sense. So this whole process that could be so healthy is getting repressed. I feel like, as a white person, I could say that’s something that we really need help with. You also said in your book how white people get fight-or-flight when talking about race when they’re in mixed race company. I think that’s where it stems from.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Yeah. You don’t have the words to talk about it. And then when you don’t have the words, you worry that a word that you use could be taken in the wrong way and you could be labeled a racist. So you feel like it’s better not to have the conversation.

So it just kind of leaves us in a difficult spot where we’re not equipped almost to address the things that are tearing us apart. I’ve been talking to you more as a researcher, but I’m also a parent myself. I’m a Black parent. I have three boys and the youngest now is 16 and witnessing them move from being seen as children to being treated as the objects of fear has been really difficult for me.

I think it’s difficult for a lot of Black mothers. When one of my sons when he was just 16 years old he had already discovered that when many people looked at him that they felt fear. I just remember having a conversation about it. He would say, “Elevators are the worst.” That was because when the doors closed, people are trapped in this tiny space with someone that they have been taught to associate with danger. My son would sort of sense their discomfort and he would smile and he would talk to them to try to put them at ease. I just remember hearing this and thinking my child was a natural extrovert just like his father.

But in that moment, I realized that his smile was not an invitation to would-be friends. It really was a survival skill. It was the skill that he had honed under these conditions. He had honed this skill over thousands of elevator rides.

The irony of all that was that nearly 100 years ago, the Tulsa race massacre began with a Black teenager accidentally stepping on the foot of a white woman as he entered the elevator. So she screamed and rumors spread that there was a Black teenage boy who had sexually assaulted her. This is in Tulsa, so the area known as Black Wall Street was destroyed. Over 1000 Black homes were burned to the ground. And then they rounded up thousands of Black people and placed them under armed guard.

All of this was just with one misstep. So this is our history, my sons, and there are people in this country who are still struggling with that history.

Janet Lansbury:  That reminds me of what I was feeling when I was reading your book. You share this really fascinating story about how you’ve delved deeper and deeper into the roots of the dehumanization of Black people. And all the mixed feelings that this must have brought up for you. The whole time I’m feeling, oh my goodness, your bravery, your courage.

And then you shared how you were a teacher at San Quentin with inmates. And that was a very, very moving story, all that you shared about that. When this student in San Quentin commented to you, he said, “I appreciate you, I really do. But I don’t know how you do it. We need this work, but how are you able to carry those facts? That’s some heavy stuff you just shared.”

So I just, as a mother, as a person, that’s why I told you when I wrote to you that you are a hero to me.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Wow. I don’t know if I deserve that kind of honor. It’s people like you and lots of people now in this moment that gives me hope. It’s easier to do work on this as well when you feel like it’s work that can be heard and it’s work that will resonate and it’s work that will make a difference in the world. So I get my courage and I get my strength from meeting people like you and talking to people like you who really care and who want to make a difference and people who want to use their platform, or whatever it is that they have, to actually help people to grapple with these issues and to help make this a better society. So my hat is off to you.

Janet Lansbury:  Thank you. Well, I hope that everybody reads your book. You delve into a lot of darkness. It’s very depressing in parts, I’ve got to say, and sad and just devastating really. But then you bring this hope and you bring these solutions and ideas. It is very hopeful and it is, I dare to say, exciting, and much needed.

I’m just going to share one other little quote here from you where you say that, “Bias is operating on a kind of cosmic level, connecting factors and conditions that we must individually make an effort to comprehend and control and it deserves a cosmic response with everyone onboard.”

That’s my hope, too, that we can make change together. I mean, that’s the only way it’s going to happen.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  You’re right. We all have agency here. There’s something every person can do in this fight. So thank you for being in the fight.

Janet Lansbury:  Thank you so much, Jennifer.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt:  Thank you.

Jennifer’s book Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do is available HERE.

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

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

The post The Power of Bias and How to Disrupt It in Our Children (with Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

On this week’s episode: Dan, Jamilah, and guest host Katherine Goldstein answer listener questions from a parent looking for ways to enjoy family visits and a neighbor who is worried for the kids next door who were left behind. For Slate Plus, what should you NOT say to someone expecting twins. Sign up for Slate Plus here.

Recommendations:

Jamilah recommends matching outfits with your kid.

Katherine recommends Shrinky Dinks as a creative way to pass a few hours.

Dan recommends That Was Awkward: The Art and Etiquette of the Awkward Hug from Emily Flake.

Join us on Facebook and email us at momanddad@slate.com to tell us what you thought of today’s show and give us ideas for what we should talk about in future episodes. Got questions that you’d like us to answer? Call and leave us a message at 424-255-7833.

Podcast produced by Rosemary Belson.

Hosts

Jamilah Lemieux is a writer, cultural critic, and communications strategist based in California.

Dan Kois is an editor and writer at Slate. He’s the author of How to Be a Family and the co-author of The World Only Spins Forward.

Katherine Goldstein is a journalist as well as the creator and host of The Double Shift, a reported, narrative podcast about a new generation of working mothers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tween friendships are tricky, inevitably hitting snags. Use these insights and approaches to safeguard your tweens’ peer relationships during the pandemic and long after.

A frustrated parent writes that her almost 7-year-old will not accept no for an answer. When she wants something, she will whine and ask repeatedly to get her way. Her daughter is so relentless that this mom eventually loses her patience. She ends up screaming, and her daughter ends up crying. “I must be addressing the situation wrong at the first ask,” she admits. “I just don’t understand how she doesn’t get no means no.” This mom is hoping Janet can help her end this constant battle with her daughter.

Transcript of “How to Make No Mean No”

Hi. This is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I have a question from a parent who is wondering what she might be doing wrong because her child does not seem to give up and accept no for an answer, ever. This parent is losing her patience. She’s ending up yelling at her child, understandably, because her daughter is asking the same question, 25 or more times — to do something that the parent has already said no to. She hopes to get some help with communicating to her daughter that no means no.

Here’s the note I received:

Hello, Janet. I was wondering if you have an article about no means no. My almost seven-year-old is a pusher, constantly whining and asking, in hopes she’ll get her way, until my patience is lost and I end up screaming and her crying. I don’t understand how she doesn’t get no means no until I pop. It’s so frustrating and I hate yelling, but it’s a constant battle about everything. She’ll ask and ask over and over, 25 or more times. “Can my cousins come over?” “Can we get ice cream now?” “Why?” “Why?” “Please. This isn’t fair.” I must be addressing the situation wrong at the first ask. Please help.

Okay, so I thought this would be a good one to respond to because it applies to many situations, all ages. The fact that this is happening with her seven-year-old shows that, yes, the dynamic has gotten a little entrenched. This daughter seems to be getting some traction with her repeated questions and pushing and pushing her parent, holding on instead of letting go to the “no” answer.

Why does a child do this? Because they see that they can impact their parent with their feelings, and it becomes a compulsive thing to repeat.

I always have the fantasy myself, because it’s very hard for me to say no, I don’t like setting limits myself, I’m not good at having boundaries, I want to hope that when I do, that the person isn’t going to give me any trouble about it. Because it was hard enough for me to say no in the first place a lot of the time. I just want you, the other person, to let me off the hook.

That is my issue, not my child’s. Because where a child is coming from is they use these boundaries from us to release a lot of feelings that often have little to do with the specifics. It’s a tendency children have. It’s actually very healthy. They have these cathartic stress release experiences because they can’t have ice cream right now. Yes, they are disappointed about the ice cream, I’m sure. But it touches off more feelings that a child has.

It’s important for us to perceive these experiences that way so that we can understand that my child is having a kind of a tantrum here. This is a seven-year-old version of a tantrum, for sure, and can even be the way that a younger child gets stuck, repeating, repeatedly whining: Let me keep asking. and I’m not happy about this.

What they also tend to be feeling is that the parent doesn’t have complete conviction in their choice. That the parent is, like I’m saying about myself, a little unsure setting limits, that maybe we’re not in the groove of it yet. We haven’t realized that this is one of the most important, loving things we can do for a child. It still feels a little mean. Maybe our child’s not going to like us. We want to please them. Maybe our child’s going to reject us. We could be tapping into old attachment feelings that we have from our own childhood.

But for whatever reason, we’re not coming down on the note. And then doing the other part that we have to do to be our child’s leader with conviction — that’s welcome them to share whatever they need to share about that. Welcome them to keep persisting, welcome them to keep asking.

We are so centered and sure of our decisions (and we need to find this in every decision, even the small ones like ice cream). We need to find this in the moment. We need to get into the habit of, ideally, coming down on those notes, a period at the end of our sentence, sure of ourselves.

Or even if we’re not sure, we can be assured about not being sure by saying, “Huh. Let me think.” It’s not because you are pestering me and repeating this, that I’m getting worn down. It’s just me actually taking a moment from a platform of strength. Because we have so much power as the parents, as the adults in the room, we have all the power here. I can take a moment. “Hmm. Let me think. I’m not sure.” Meanwhile, our child is saying, “Oh, please, please, please.”

We have to let that go. We have to hold our own with our children, with every limit that we set, ideally. We’re not going to be perfect. We’re going to have days where we’re exhausted and we can’t, but if we can at least do it half the time or a little more than half the time, we’ll start to feel that groove. We’ll start to see how it helps our child to let go when we do that.

I was doing a Zoom consultation with this group of parents. We were in a class together for a couple of years with their children, who are now mostly turning three. We are trying to get together once a month to check in and we’re having great discussions. It’s interesting how every time it seems like a theme sort of emerges. And I remember the last time before this, it was about our power as parents and what we’re giving power to in our children — how to not give power to behaviors that we don’t want them to continue. And then this week it really became about conviction.

This one father who really has this down, he’s really gotten the tone and the feeling that he needs to have… First he called it being a brick wall, which it really isn’t at all, but it has the firmness of a brick wall. But then he said something to the effect of: “But no, it’s actually, I have empathy, too, for my child. I can welcome them to feel whatever they feel about it from a place of strength, from a place of, ‘You can’t knock me down here with this repeated whatever, but I’m not this uncaring wall that’s just tuning you out and ignoring you at all.’”

It’s wonderful when we get the taste of this, because we see how it works and how it helps our child not to be stuck asking. That’s not really comfortable for our children either, actually. Yes, it drives us crazy, but it’s not comfortable for our children either.

Oh, and then another parent took from that call… We were having sleep conversations about parents having conviction around ending the day with their child and that they were giving their child this wonderful gift of sleep, seeing it positively. This parent was saying how her child, she felt, was having difficulty because of the light in the summer. It wasn’t dark enough, even with the blinds drawn, so her child couldn’t fall asleep. And she was telling him it’s going to be dark later.

I said, “Don’t even tell him that. Just say, ‘You’re going to go to sleep when it’s light, and then when you wake up, it’ll be light again. But because it’s summer, you’re not even going to see the dark.’” So he’s not waiting and waiting for it, in other words.

Anyway, she’s been having to stay with him for an hour to go to sleep and just having all these difficulties. She wrote back to me after our call together with everyone, and she said, “Oh, man. Conviction.” She got into the conviction. She said, yeah, when she first left, he cried. She went back one more time. That was it. She said it wasn’t about the brightness outside at all. It was her conviction.

Let’s talk about how that looks and feels in action when our child is doing what this little girl is doing, constantly whining and asking in hopes she’ll get her way. Now, I’m going to receive this question from a place of believing in myself as a leader, believing that a leader is actually what my child wants in her heart of hearts and needs and hopes for. It’s fine for her to ask for whatever, but as the adult, I have to make these decisions. What’s going to work for me? What’s going to work for her? What’s the best thing for her? This parent uses the example, can my cousins come over? So let’s say the parents says, “Oh, no. Not today. They’re not going to come over today.” Now she says, “Why? Why? Oh, please. This isn’t fair.”

I’m letting those feelings just happen. I’m letting those feelings be. I’m staying comfortable, expecting that my child will be doing this sometimes. And maybe a lot, if this has become a dynamic between us. I’m not surprised. I’m not thrown off. Oh, gosh. Now what do I say? I’m actually going to be expecting it. Then, I don’t feel like I have to say anything right away. I’m just maybe nodding my head. If I was doing something, I’m carrying on. But I’m looking at her empathetically, if possible, like, “Oh, it’s really hard to hear no to that.” Meaning it. We can’t just be saying words. “Oh, you’re upset that I said no.” That comes from a more defensive, less comfortable place in us, and children know that.

Our goal, and again, we’re not going to get there all the time, but this is what to go for, is to get to that place where you can say anything. You can ask me 50,000 times and I’m decided. But I welcome you to keep going, as long as you need to.

Also, in my mind, I’m realizing, oh, she’s letting go of all this stress of all these things that have been going on and all her disappointments about everything. This is very healthy for her to be doing this. It’s not something that is going to sting me every time she has another question. Then I feel: Oh, I got to answer it. No. I’m that brick wall with empathy (to use my friend’s analogy), and nothing can budge me. In fact, I’m so comfortable that I can nod my head, I can be empathetic. “Yeah. It’s tough. Yeah, you love those cousins.” Maybe I’ll say a few more things. I don’t have to feel that I need to respond to every word she says, but I’m not trying to tune her out either.

I’m just letting it roll off me, letting it bounce off me. Maybe every once in a while, I’m acknowledging from a genuine place. “Oh, it feels like if you keep asking me, I’m going to say yes,” whatever the specifics are. The words will come when we practice this attitude. For people that are still practicing and want a script, I would say, “It’s so hard to hear no. Yeah. I know. It’s hard for me, too, when I want things.”

Let’s say, she says, “Can we get ice cream now?”

“Oh, shoot. We can’t. Darn it. We can’t get ice cream now. You want it right now. Ah, you’re so in the mood for it right now.”

But again, I’m not feeling pressured to come up with responses. I can let there be repeated questions without a response because I have responded the first time. I’ve told her the answer and set the limit there. The rest is up to her. It’s not my responsibility. This is important: It’s not my responsibility to get her to be okay with my decisions and agree with me. That’s integral to being this kind of leader. I don’t take that on as my job.

In fact, if she needs to go on and on about this, I know that that’s healthy for her to feel the depths of her disappointment. I try to remember that these reactions tend to be thematic, that they’re weighted with other feelings that need to happen, especially when our child seems to overreact.

Let’s say she keeps asking and asking. I’m carrying on with life. I’m not stopping and waiting for her to be okay. I’m carrying on. But every once in a while, I might look, if she’s still going, and go, “This is hard to let go of. You’re really having a hard time with that. So disappointing.” Meaning it, because I actually want to encourage her to share the feelings. They’re not wearing on me. They’re not stinging me. They’re not making me feel more doubt about my decisions, because I’m not opening the door for that to happen.

If I want to change my mind, I’ll change it later when I feel centered in myself. Then maybe I think about it and I realize, “So you know what? We can do that,” and I’ll come and tell her. But it can’t be a worn down response. Because what happens when we do that is we let her know quite clearly, without meaning to, that this is what you’ve got to keep doing, pushing me until I finally say yes.

In this case, the parent has gotten in this dynamic where she gets to the place of exploding because she’s letting it in, letting it in, letting it in, feeling doubt, trying to respond. “Oh, well, this is why. Because we can’t. Get it?” I’m really wanting my daughter to let go, instead of knowing she can’t let go until she’s done. That’s not my job. My job is to have conviction and be the leader and comfortably hold my own. I can do it without being forceful or pushing or stern. That’s where we want to get.

It’s very freeing when we get that. It actually affects other areas of our lives. It has for me. I’ve also seen that children end up kind of melting comfortably into that kind of parenting, melting into: Oh, I’m the child here. I don’t have to control the adults. They’re my leaders, and they’ve got this down. Then I’m free to be a kid and do all the things that kids need to do.

This advice also holds true for children who are interrupting repeatedly or doing anything repeatedly. Same advice. See it as a positive exchange. Hold your own. Let the feelings be. Be decisive. Have conviction.

I hope some of that helps.

For more, 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 also get them in ebook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble, 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.

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

 

The post How to Make No Mean No appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

There are surprising differences in how disasters like hurricanes and terrorist attacks affect families. Here’s what could happen in yours after the coronavirus pandemic.

On this week’s episode: Dan and Jamilah are live from the Miami Book Fair where they are joined by Pamela Paul, author of How to Raise a Reader and Adam Mansbach, author of Fuck, Now There Are Two of You. This week the hosts discuss scaring their kids with inappropriate books and making the most out of children with different schedules.

For Slate Plus, the hosts discuss if parenting really is harder nowadays—or do we just hear more about the trials and tribulations in books, blogs or even, ahem, podcasts… Sign up for Slate Plus here. 

Recommendations:

Jamilah recommends non-traditional Thanksgiving dinner. 

Dan recommends game-ifying Christmas stockings. 

Pamela recommends Lucy Knisley’s book You Are New. 

Adam recommends the book Laugh Lines: Forty Years Trying to Make Funny People Funnier.

Join us on Facebook and email us at momanddad@slate.com to tell us what you thought of today’s show and give us ideas for what we should talk about in future episodes. Got questions that you’d like us to answer? Call and leave us a message at 424-255-7833. 

Podcast produced by Rosemary Belson. 

Hosts 

Dan Kois is an editor and writer at Slate. He’s the author of How to Be a Family and the co-author of The World Only Spins Forward.

Jamilah Lemieux is a writer, cultural critic, and communications strategist based in Brooklyn, New York.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shared beliefs about boys’ and girls’ reading abilities are gendered, and, in fact, stereotypes. A new study reveals how they affect children’s reading and academic outcomes.

A parent describes the stress her family has been experiencing over the past several months and believes her 4.5 year old son has been particularly affected. “He was in Montessori and becoming very independent. Little by little, we’ve seen a huge regression in his behavior.” She describes a number of issues where she sees her son regressing, including hitting, kicking and throwing things; disrespecting her body with unwanted touching; and an unwillingness to wipe himself after using the toilet. This last issue recently caused a physical altercation which this mom truly regrets. She wants to know how to encourage her son’s developing independence “without resorting to negative and hurtful parenting tactics.” Janet offers her advice.

Transcript of “It’s Not Regression”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They haven’t lost their skill.

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

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

She can totally do this.

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

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

I really hope some of that helps.

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

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

Thanks again for listening. We can do this.

 

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