How to Raise Kids Who Are Not Dumb With Melinda Wenner Moyer
How do you raise children who are not racist or sexist? What if you find out that your child is bullying a classmate? When should you start worrying that your child’s selfishness has gone too far?
These and other tough parenting questions are answered this week in The Upgrade with the help of research writer Melinda Wenner Moyer. Melinda is an award-winning journalist writing about science, parenting and medicine, and is also an editor for Scientific American , The New York Times , Washington Post and other national publications. Her new book, How to Raise Kids Who Are Not Shit: Evidence-Based Strategies for Better Parenting – Toddler to Teenager , is full of fascinating research on how to raise kids so they hopefully don’t grow up and become what they are. then. Terrible.
Hear Melinda share some of the studies that have identified the best approaches to issues such as discussing race with your children, raising children to have less sexist views, and how to deal with it when your child hurts someone. then another.
Listen to The Upgrade above, or find us in all the usual podcast locations including Apple Podcasts , Google Play , Spotify , iHeartRadio, and Stitcher .
Highlights from this week’s series
From an interview with Melinda Wenner Moyer:
On the importance of talking to children about emotions:
What was really interesting about this study is that, overwhelmingly, it seems that one of the most important things we can do with children is to talk about our feelings and to like our own feelings, their feelings, to acknowledge them. confirm feelings. And at first I thought, what’s the link here? Why is it so important to talk about feelings? But if you think about it, in order for a child to be generous, attentive and selfless, he must be able to understand the emotions of another person, he must be able to recognize, for example, oh, my friend is sad, and why can he be my friend, be sad, but I can help? And so they have to be really fluid in the language of emotions and in the same way recognize what they look like and what they mean. And when parents talk a lot about them and educate them, when they read books and the like, it helps to cement that development. And I suppose that the ability to talk about feelings really helps to strengthen, called the theory of mind, which, in fact, is the ability to accept the points of view of other people.
On why it is so important for white parents to talk to their children about race and racism:
There is an idea that maybe if you are not talking about race, your children will not see it and will not make anything special out of it. And you know, therefore, your children will not grow up to be racists. But the research does indeed directly contradict this. And again it comes back to the idea that children are looking around the world and trying to figure out what matters. And they, as is the case with gender hierarchies, see highly visible racial hierarchies and power. And if they see this, and their parents or teachers do not tell them why this hierarchy exists and that it is because of racism and the way our society is built through politics, laws and other things, then they are going to draw the simplest conclusion: good maybe white people are just better [and] smarter. So, again, these are the conclusions that children draw, if we, as parents, do not oppose them, these conclusions can be really dangerous.
On how to approach a conversation with children when they have said something racist, sexist, or harmful:
When I spoke to the researchers about this, they stressed that, firstly, you don’t want to immediately shame your child and yell at him for saying something racist, because then they get so upset and ashamed. and they cannot really listen to you beyond this moment. They may also not understand what they are saying, and they may indeed not understand that what they say is as terrible as it is. So [the researchers] say to take a deep breath as a parent and say, “Oh my gosh, where did you hear that? What does this mean to you? “And” Why did you say that? “And try to figure out where they come from. And then on top of that, say,” Okay, actually what you said is really offensive, and let me explain , why. ”And then you, depending on their age, try to explain, for example, why what they said is a bad word or something really hurtful, and you try to explain the effect of those words on the other person. One of the things I found about discipline in general when I looked at research is that it is really helpful to always, for example, link what your child has done to how it affects other people.
For more research-based parenting advice, we recommend listening to the entire episode.