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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 581: The Surprising Ways We Snip Off Potential Growth | Dr. Bruce Perry, What Happened to You?
00:57:08
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- [00:01]
A
One of the reasons I started the 1000 Hours Outside podcast is to bring you conversations that can truly change the way we parent and live. Not in theory, but in practical ways. Today's guest, Dr. Bruce Perry, is one of the most renowned voices in child development. And in this conversation, Dr. Perry shares critical insights that aren't even in his books, like how dosing and spacing transform the way kids learn. These are tools every parent can, educator and caregiver should have in their hands. But here is the reality. I don't always have time to promote these episodes, especially since we have kicked off another homeschooling year. That's where you come in. If every listener shared this episode with a friend or two or left a quick review, it would completely change the reach of this show and help more families and kids thrive. This particular episode is one that every family in America and across the globe would benefit from hearing. So if this conversation means something to you, if you learn something new, I'd be grateful if you'd pass it along or any episode that you particularly enjoy. Thank you so much for being part of this journey with me and with all the other incredible listeners. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets. Mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Jenny Urch. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. And I'm so excited and unbelievably honored to to bring to you today. Dr. Bruce Perry.
- [01:53]
B
Welcome. Thank you, Ginny. I'm very happy to be here.
- [01:57]
A
Your books are phenomenal. You have changed the world with all of your research and the books that you've written and the things that you have let people know that surround childhood trauma. And you talk so much about how this is not a small problem. You're talking 40%, 50%. A lot of kids are dealing with different types of childhood traumas and you've written some phenomenal books, life changing books. The Boy who Was Raised as a Dog, what happened to you? This one you wrote with Oprah, Conversations on Trauma Healing and Resilience and Born for Love, which is a lot about empathy. And I have, I think I have 12 pages of notes. There are so many things to talk about, but I would love to start with this. It's so interesting when you can read someone's book and get a little bit of a historical perspective. You talk about how in all of the research that you've done that in the 1980s and like, the 1990s was sort of this decade of the brain, but that people weren't talking about these things at all. So in 1985, you know, PTSD is just preliminary, only introduced in 1980, in 1989. So you're talking about really this major awakening and understanding that's happened in just the past couple decades. Can you talk about what's changed in the last 30, 40 years?
- [03:11]
B
Sure. You know, and this is. This is kind of true of not just our field, but a lot of fields, that the rate of accumulation of knowledge about how the body works, how people function, all kinds of topic areas, things have changed a lot. And in my area, in my field, you know, understanding child development and human behavior, there were a lot of different kind of schools of thought. There were people that were trying to understand what they were seeing, and very few of them actually used the lens of neurobiology. They kind of use the lens of psychology or sociology or some other, you know, some other discipline, which is fine. But we have found that if you understand a little bit about what's under the hood, so to speak, you actually can better understand particularly complex problems that people have. And when I say under the hood, what I really mean is that, you know, if you kind of look at a human being and you look at how we function, our thinking, our language, our humor, our values, the way we fall in love, the way we create new things, just about everything we do that has to do with being a human being involves the brain. And when we try to teach children right from wrong, we're really not trying to change their pancreas. We're not trying to change their lungs. We're to trying. We're trying to change parts of their brain. And when we're teaching algebra and when we are coaching a child in sport or whatever we're doing, whether you're a teacher, a coach, parent, therapist, you're trying to influence systems in the brain. So we have always felt that the more you understand how the brain changes and understand what influences it during development, the more likely you are to be effective at getting what you are seeking. You know, if you want somebody to be a better basketball player, I think we've all pretty much learned that you can't just sit and watch basketball games. That's not enough. I mean, you can learn things, but you actually have to put a basketball in your hands and you have to dribble it and you have to learn how to pass, you have to learn how to be a teammate. You have to do the full body, full social, full motor experience in order to get the changes in your brain so that you can play basketball. And I have to say that's kind of one of the things that makes me interested in what you're doing, which is recognizing that learning or education really requires movement and smell and complexity and falling down and getting dirty and getting up and form, you know, all kinds of things that are much more, I would say, total brain experiences than just simply sitting still and passively absorbing something that somebody's lecturing you about. So that's a big part of what, what our work has been about. It's been trying to understand, number one, stay on top of the emerging knowledge about how the brain works. And then, number two, try to translate that into, if you will, language that's understandable so that everybody can learn from these key concepts and principles that are really important. And that's been, you know, it's actually kind of hard to do. There are so many complicated things about the brain. And the neurosciences, they have their own language, right? I mean, they have their own jargon that really in many ways separates the people that speak that neuroscience talk from other, even from other clinicians, let alone from parents or kids who you're trying to help understand what's going on inside them. So we've spent a lot of time trying to do that. And that's kind of why I wrote those three books. They're not really targeted at the science, my scientific peers, it's targeted at people that are, that really want to understand these things, but are not trained as neuroscientists or physicians or whatever.
- [07:30]
A
And you do a phenomenal job doing that. A phenomenal job. I came across your work through a man named Kim John Payne, who wrote a pretty formative parenting book that I read when my kids were younger called Simplicity Parenting. And he talks a lot about rhythm and he also talks about how he was seeing in his practice. He'd worked with kids that were in war torn countries and had gone through significant trauma. And then he started to see kids, he said, from kind of like your average everyday type family that were displaying some similar traits. Like they're really, they're not quite as extreme, but like really jumpy, really hyper vigilant. And he talks about pulling back, he talks about Rhythms like a lot of the things that you talk in this book about how the rhythm and the routine and the predictability are so needed. And what's interesting is I feel like you can easily come across someone's work too late. This is actually very important for the young years. And often, you know, because we're exhausted and you don't know what you don't know. You learn it when they're, you know, when they're six and you wish you would have known it really when they were born, or even the fetal development. You wish you would have known it even before then. And so the books do exactly what you just said. You talk about the four layers of the brain. You're learning which one develops first. You're learning when, when you're stressed out, that, you know, the ones at the top are kind of shutting off and you have these evocative clues and things that could set off a child. And so, I mean, I walked away learning a tremendous amount. And you even talk about the first two months of life. So if there's a mom listening, you're about to give birth to a baby, or you have a little one at home, it's easy to think, oh, that might not matter. They don't even really know what's going on. But you talk about how even in those early times, you say the basic. This is so remarkable to know, Dr. Perry. The basic finding is that the experiences of the first two months of life have a disproportionately important impact on the long term health and development of the baby. This has to do with the remarkable growth of the brain in early life. And I had read this book, but not for my first kids down the line, called the first 40 days. And how in some cultures the mom just stays with a baby and people bring her food. Can you talk about some of the misconceptions about how like, well, they don't remember it, so it must not matter, right?
- [09:43]
B
Well, you know, again, the good news is there, there are lots of people doing really good work on understanding how important the intrauterine period is, how important these first weeks of life are, how important later childhood can be in shaping us. The thing that I think we run into again and again and again is that even when we are able to demonstrate the importance of all of these phenomenon, it takes a long time for us to translate that so people kind of understand it and then disseminate it so that it's acted on in a way that there are program and policy and educational and mental health supports to Kind of back up that insight. And this is kind of where we are right now. You know, there's a. We know that the rate of growth in the brain in utero is explosive, and that a disruption of development during that time has the potential to have like a cascade of impact all the way through somebody's life. And I think that sort of the, the most clear example that a lot of people may be familiar with is, you know, the effects of alcohol, for example. So fetal alcohol syndrome. We all know that if someone is born after being exposed to too much alcohol in utero, they can have trouble with how they process information. They can have trouble with speech and language and memory and all kinds of things that would really are part of making somebody successful in the, in the world. So what we're learning now though, is that there are a lot of other things that have the same potential. So for example, an isolated, overwhelmed, distressed, pregnant mother will have impact on the development of that fetus's brain in ways that can really make that child more vulnerable to all kinds of problems. Now, it's not necessarily, you know, one to one correspondence that is 100% sure. You are rarely irreversible. In other words, even when you have, you know, issues that arise, if you understand what's going on and then you provide reparative opportunities, people can sort of recover and kind of get back on a normal trajectory. But that's another problem, is that there aren't a lot of. I hate to say this, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to throw my profession under the bus, but there are a lot of physicians and a lot of educators and a lot of professionals that work we turn to as parents who don't know anything about this. And so you might have it like a. A child who's struggling, who's very young, and if you take them to a pediatrician who doesn't understand early childhood issues and early brain development, you make it really terrible advice. And that's part of our problem. Our, our field's challenge is to make sure that our pediatricians and our general practitioners and our, know, nurses and our psychologists and psychiatrists, the people we turn to in society to get help, that they understand these things. And so that's been a big, big part of our work is to try to make sure that we're integrating this information into training programs for these different disciplines. And again, it's a very slow process, but it is happening.
- [13:12]
A
It is happening. I have a dear friend, her name is Nicole, and she's A nurse at the University of Michigan. And, and she's read your work and she deals with young children who need to have heart surgery. And so she helps with the ultrasound. So she's dealing with parents and children day in and day out. And she uses your work to help calm them and their fear. So, I mean, it is, I would imagine you can't ever even know the ripple effect from the work that you've done. And so it is, it's very important for parents to know these things and for caregivers to know these things. One of the things that really stuck out to me was the space. This, you know, you go into work with these kids who have had these really traumatic. And you give a lot of different examples of these different traumatic childhood things. But then Kim Jong Payne talks about how there's a lot of accumulated stressors these days and with the screens and the amount of pressure that kids are under for schoolwork and they're in all these adult directed activities that those can start to accumulate. So all of these things really could be helpful for all children.
- [14:14]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [14:16]
A
And you just really give such a good sense of, of space and time. And you go and you're working with these children and you'll sit there like, you know, and I would think sometimes, okay, if a parent is bringing their child to you, you know, and you'll be like, it's been three weeks and all you've done is colored some pages.
- [14:32]
B
You know, we get that quite a bit. Yeah.
- [14:36]
A
But you're giving all of this, this space for them. And you talk about this woman named Mama P, and you talk about her and both the boy who was raised as a dog and what happened to you, Mama P. And you know, she's fostering kids in her home and maybe they're eight years old and she's rocking with them. Like things that you would think of, that you would do with a really young child. But you just get such a sense of the amount of time that needs to go into it. Can you talk about why? You know, and you talk about technology and everything so fast, but we really, kids really need for us to slow down.
- [15:08]
B
Yeah, it's. You're sort of keying in on something that's very important and I think increasingly important in our current world where we're completely robbing children of the opportunity to have these very important reflective moments to consolidate what they're learning. You know, the process of learning something new involves exposure to the novelty. Right. But then this period of sort of consolidation, like where does that Fit in the way I understand the world. How can I revisit that? Is this a little bit like this? And these kids literally internally in their brain and then in their behaviors, whether it's drawing or playing, they practice kind of and try on what it is that they're learning about. And then that's how things really get stuck in your brain. Not by, you know, flashcards, but, you know, people love. It's. It's amazing that once people actually learn about the concept of dosing and then spacing, you recognize that you don't need to just hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer. You can just expose and then let them drift with the concept and then come back and revisit, brief, revisit. This is the interesting thing about the way the brain learns, is that you activate systems in the brain through some interaction, whether it's like, I'm going to challenge the math part of your brain by introducing a new concept and sort of you, you work through previously laid down concepts, right? So you've learned how to add. And so you've got that neurobiology. And now I'm going to teach you this concept of just turn the plus to the side. We call that an X. That's multiplying. Like what was multiplying? And then you just sort of. You're basically exposing these, literally these neural networks is something new. And so there'll be a little bit of stimulation as they're trying to go, does that work? Does this work? But then you got to go away because here's what happens. You only need just a tiny little bit of visiting to send the signal to the neuron. But the neuron has to make from the genes that are in the nucleus of that neuron. They have to be activated. There has to be production of protein. The protein has to be moved down the axon and get into the synaptic membrane. And that takes time. So you, if it won't help you to keep hammering away at the nucleus and going, make a gene, make a gene, gene, gene, gene, gene, gene, gene, gene. That's what we do. We should go, all right, here's a signal, here's a signal, here's a signal. That's enough to make the gene activate. Now let it do its thing. Do your thing. And so that's the beauty of sort of the kind of stuff that you see at play every day with your kids. They're out, they'll practice something and then they'll kind of go away from it. And then somebody, a younger kid will model after what they're doing, and they might actually teach some of what they had just learned. And there's this iterative process of activate, go away, activate, go away, dose and space. And the dose is really. Does not have to be that long. Doesn't have to be 45 minutes. You know, that's actually a very inefficient dosing schedule.
- [18:31]
A
We're doing it opposite, but it's convenient.
- [18:34]
B
For aggregate care intervention. Right. If you have 30 kids, let's do math. And, you know, it just. I know why we have set things up. There's a reason why we've set things up the way we have. But it's probably one of the most inefficient ways to actually teach kids that you can even come up with.
- [18:55]
A
Yeah, we're doing it backwards. Yeah, we have large dose and small space.
- [18:59]
B
Exactly right. And in fact, we're literally erasing the spaces. We're over scheduling kids. Right.
- [19:06]
A
Yeah.
- [19:07]
B
You don't even have time to think about what. What you were taught all day long because you got to go from math to geography to. To reading to violin practice to soccer and do your homework and then go to bed exhausted. And one of the places where that consolidation happens in the brain, where a new content, new experience is consolidated and actually literally woven into your current understanding of the world is during REM sleep. And so, because we're also depriving these kids of a whole REM cycle, you know, we get them up early to go learn, which is crazy. We should let them sleep in. And so we're. We give very little consolidation time. We give very little free play time. We give very little time in between these doses of cognitive content to sort of let it soak in that we're just being very inefficient. This is why homeschooling, actually, when you do a homeschooling kind of in what I would say the right way, you can get through a tremendous amount of content in a very short time. And, you know, you hear about these kids that have done, like, a whole. They've graduated from high school technically, and they're like in the eighth grade or, you know, you're like, wow. But that's because there have been these opportunities for more appropriate spacing and dosing, but you probably know more about that.
- [20:27]
A
Than I do, so I don't actually. And it's interesting that you brought that up, because it made me understand why piano practice works. And I grew up playing the piano. And I always would think, why is it that the next morning I can play this better.
- [20:40]
B
Exactly.
- [20:41]
A
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- [24:46]
B
Exactly. They'll tell you that's the key. Right, Jenny? That's, that's actually the key because. And it's in the book. I probably don't describe it that well in the book, but the dose of novelty that anybody can tolerate, like the amount of new stuff you can take, is related to how safe and regulated you Feel. So if you're with somebody and you're not hungry, you're not thirsty, you're not cold, you're not sleep deprived, you don't have a full bladder, you're not scared about saber tooth tigers or whatever, you can actually absorb kind of a big dose of new stuff. But the more you get worn out and tired out and overwhelmed, the more you get stressed, the smaller the dose can be, right? So just think about everybody. If you think about your day, right, you get up in the morning, you had sleep, you get something to eat, you kind of go to work or whatever you're doing, you can kind of look at what's on your plate and you can make a list and you start doing things and the. And you get a new assignment or whatever it is, you know, you don't have a meltdown. But at the end of the day, if you came home and then somebody gave you a list of five things that have to get done, you know, it's like, I'm not doing this. Don't talk to me about this now. And you just are in a state, an internal state, where you're not capable of really dealing with that much novelty. And that's kind of what, you know, a lot of these unfortunate kids, the kids that have sort of histories of developmental adversity, their stress response systems are kind of overactive and they're overly reactive, which means that when you introduce novelty to them, introduce new things to them, they're very easily overwhelmed. And this is one of the problems with their academic achievement in the classroom environment, right? If you were patient and if you recognize that there was going to be a different dosing and spacing schedule with them, they would learn, right? Because once you saw that they were like overwhelmed to give them space, they'd internalize it. Then you go back, but we have a one size fits all expectation, right? I don't care whether you have been exposed to this or not. I don't care whether you're lost. It doesn't matter. You're all getting the same curricular dose. And that's kind of what, you know, we put these teachers in a bind. You know, they're kind of forced, forced to do that because they've got to sort of teach the curriculum to 30 kids, which really is an unfair expectation. But it really, it leaves a bunch of kids behind and then it bores a bunch of kids. So one group of kids in your classroom get to the point where they hate school because it's so boring. Another group hates school because they feel shamed and humiliated and we end up with the teacher having to deal with those two emotional, you know, issues and behavioral manifestations of that. That takes away from the regular dosing and spacing you do for the kids that are sort of in the middle of that spectrum.
- [27:58]
A
So, and you talked about how there was a time like when the hunter and gather communities, it was like there would be four, maybe not adults, but four older inputs for humans, whether that's a cousin or an older cousin or an aunt or four to one, like four adults, four caregivers, four to love on this child, four to one. And now, you know, in the early childhood it's flip flopped. You know, it's like one adult to five kids. Really, there should be 25 adults in there or 25, you know, grandparents to love these children. And it's a really hard situation. Then you talk about how in the school setting maybe then it's leading to different diagnosis, but maybe that diagnosis wasn't needed. It's just this mismatch of the child's biology, how they're meant to learn and what's happening then in that classroom setting. And then additionally with the play, it's so, the whole, it's all fascinating. It's so fascinating. So you're talking about the play and spacing in a rhythm and even just the rhythm of like the bouncing, you know, it's like you don't, it's, it's miraculous, Dr. Perry, like that you're innate, you know, you bounce with the baby and that helps the mom and the baby and it's this rhythm and the heartbeat and the walking and nature has rhythms. But beyond all of that, then with the play, you're talking about how a lot about empathy. So as far as dosing, if a child has been through something traumatic or even if it's something like a new baby in the home, something that they're trying to grapple with, they'll work through a lot of that through their play. So you give different examples in these books about kids, like the kids that were in the David Koresh, you know, they're, they're playing, they're playing out different scenarios. They, they kind of know when it goes too far. And you can almost Trust these little 3 and 4 year olds to start to work through their different traumas. But then additionally, the play is helping with empathy. And so I would love to talk about, because you also talk about technology, you talk about in Born for Love, which is about empathy, children today spend half as much time. Children today spend Half as much time playing freely outdoors than they did in the early 1980s, and significantly more time and structured activities. Free time is necessary to social development. The social brain doesn't grow without practice. On average, children under six spend two hours a day in front of a computer screen. And you're even talking about the mom with the baby because, you know, when you're nursing or you're feeding the baby, there's all this eye contact, but then the mothers are on their phones a lot more now.
- [30:25]
B
Yep.
- [30:26]
A
So you talked about this one child that you are trying to teach. Teach social skills to, and how complicated, really, how nuanced you were like, well, you don't stare at him the whole time. You kind of look away, and the kid is like, well, how long do I look before I look away? And you're like, well, it's about three seconds. And then you said, well, he looked up. But really, you should be looking to the side. I mean, all the. If you were to try and explain it, it's too complicated.
- [30:51]
B
It's very hard. It's very hard.
- [30:54]
A
Yes. Can you talk about then how important. Important play is for these social skills? I mean, you talk about this still face paradigm and how kids need full engagement.
- [31:04]
B
Yeah. Well, as you were pointing out, and I think most people, if you sit down and think about it, you recognize that most of our language mediated communication. Most of the communication part doesn't involve words. Right, Right. It involves how you first, you know, first of all, the rhythm of the word. Right. And you can sort of tell from the somebody's voice whether or not they're really engaged and they want to be here, or whether they're like, oh, I'm so happy to be here. Thanks, Ginny. Love this opportunity. Right. So, you know, everybody goes, oh, he's. He's really happy to be here. Which is completely different than a real sincere, rhythmic response. Right. And then you move from sort of the prosody, the rhythm in the way the language is spoken, to even things like volume or the latency to respond. Right. When somebody goes, how you doing? And. And you're feeling good, you go, hey, good, I'm fine. And. And there's a. There's a. There's a period. There's a space. Right. Period of time. But then you go, how you doing? And somebody goes, fine. You're like, okay, what's going on? Right. And then, of course, you kind of get to sort of the body stuff. Like, wow. There are people who are like, I don't know if you got. I remember during some of these. In the history of, you know, I'm older than you, obviously, but there have been a number of presidential candidates who, when they were trying to be, you know, they. They were coached to try to be natural. It was ridiculous, you know, because somebody would say, like, you know, you know, use your hands. And they would go, I'm sorry, they have these weird robotic movements. Oh, yeah, use my hands. Tell a joke. And everybody who would watch, they go, what? Just be yourself. You know, even if you're boring, you're a boring old guy. Be yourself. That's better than being a fake. Trying to be fake John Kennedy. Warm, you know, you can't do it. You are not John Kennedy. You're Richard Nixon. Anyway, I think that the way you learn anything. And again, this people will recognize this, is through repetitions. And so where do you get social repetitions in a world where you're sitting with 30 kids and you're supposed to shut up and not move and not talk to your neighbor and listen to one adult and one adult not really communicating with you, but teaching some sort of dry cognitive content concept? You learn social stuff on the playground. That's where you figure out, you know, when to chime in, when to, like, how close do you stand? Even stuff like that. Kids. Some kids don't even learn that. But it takes repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, Practice, practice, practice. Those of you who have had a little child, think about how many times you said something like, no, right? Yeah. And. And you actually grab their hand and just put it back to their side. And. And. And it's. It's literally in the thousands. And so for a very concrete thing like touching something hot, which has a really immediate consequence, you learn pretty quick, right? Even with that, we have to say, no, no, no, a thousand times. Think about how many repetitions you have to learn about when do you actually sort of in a conversation, when is it your turn? Do you talk over somebody? Or do you keep talking, talking, talking, talking, and recognize that through the nonverbal cues that these people want a chance to talk to, we're losing the ability to have our kids learn how to have conversation, among other things. But again, it's so funny. Every time I say that, I hear my. My. My old self, my younger self, going, oh, kids these days don't know the value of a dollar. You know, I feel like I'm an old codger.
- [34:53]
A
But. But it is. I mean, it is apparent. It's everywhere. Everyone is talking about it. And you talk about how the schools are taking these things out schools tend to minimize the powerful healing and resilience sports, music, art and all of the play time. The average recess in America is 22 minutes. So we're just so focused on only one aspect of childhood to the detriment of all of these other aspects. And then also when you're talking about play, the self directed play that is slowly being sucked out of every child's life.
- [35:25]
B
I know, yeah.
- [35:26]
A
For all myriad of reasons. It's homework, it's, it's these.
- [35:29]
B
Yeah. When's the last time you saw pick up baseball game?
- [35:31]
A
Right, right.
- [35:32]
B
If you play baseball, it's adults telling kids, sit on the bench. Now you, now your turn, now your turn. And when they goof around, stop it. This is what, this is, you know, on the bench where they're goofing around and playing stuff. That's where they're developed. That's where the real play is. The play isn't the game part of it, it's the interacting part of it. This is something that we really are missing. And I honestly, you know what I know about what you guys have been doing, you're returning to that. I mean, you're allowing children to have more opportunity to independently create the form of play that in that moment engages them. And then they're more inventive, they're more creative. Sometimes they see that they've gone too far, maybe with a younger sib or whatever, and then they'll back off. But that's how you learn, right? You know, you need some coaching and supervision and monitoring. But by and large, if you let kids kind of go, there's a lot of amazing things that happen. Particularly, and I love to see this happen, is when older kids begin to be protective and supportive of younger kids who are struggling. Right. Instead of learning stuff where you have to assert yourself, which ends up a lot of times going the direction of bullying, they do the opposite. You know, they, they're protective, they're supportive, they teach these kids. And that's again, these are things that are learned. These are social capabilities that you don't get good at unless you practice. That's why I think we're really losing out, because we're taking away a lot of these things from kids. The interesting thing about some other countries, and I'm thinking in particular some of the Scandinavian countries, Finland in specific, Finland for a while was kind of in the middle or towards the bottom of the developed countries in terms of literacy and things like that. And so they sent a number of their academics over to the United States to Go to, you know, these eminent schools of, of education. And one of them went to Stanford School of Education. You know, it got a. I don't know if he actually got a PhD, but he studied there for a while and then went back to Finland and they changed their policies around education tremendously and now they're at the top of the heap. I remember reading a Stanford alumni thing about this and he said, you know what I did? We basically went and studied the research about learning and we went back and we implemented it. And almost all the research was done in the US but none of the research is acted on in the US and the research was about don't test as much, more time outdoors, more free time, professionalize and pay educators a lot more money. Focus on the relational part. All of this stuff that there's all kinds of evidence to show that that helps cognitive acquisition of information. But we're doing program and policy wise in the US we're kind of doing the opposite, which is unfortunate. Like you say, we just pay lip service to, to drama and music and sport and recess. We use recess as sort of a reward and we punish people.
- [38:51]
A
It's like, yeah, and we're seeing, we're seeing, we're seeing the outcomes of that. And the kids are really struggling. And it's interesting when you brought up the pickup sports because you talk about this in the book too. It's like the, I thought this was so interesting, like the interaction between a parent and a child, especially a baby. I mean, it's so much work, right? And you're like, what would possess anyone to get up in the night and all of this? And it's like, well, the baby is so cute. And they respond. And the same is true with toddlers and preschoolers. And so if you have opportunities for older kids to be around these younger kids, then they learn empathy. That's like that roots of empathy program that you talk about in this book, Born for Love. They're hiring out babies basically for these older kids to learn empathy being around younger kids. And so that's another thing that happens when we siphon kids off with just their own age group. They are being cut off from this variety of life and these opportunities to build empathy. And that's why kids should be out in the neighborhood. That probably mitigated it in decades past where kids were outside or go all in on fall with Abercrombie kids. Their newest drop of on trend outfits are ready for everything from the bus stop to family bonfires. And it wouldn't be fall without football. Gear up the kids with officially licensed NFL tees and sweatshirts. Shop Abercrombie kids this season in the app online and in store.
- [40:22]
B
Race the rudders. Raise the sails. Raise the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching.
- [40:27]
A
Over.
- [40:27]
B
Roger, wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Get started today@LinkedIn.com campaign terms and conditions apply.
- [40:51]
A
The Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from I know the way to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from make it happen to made it happen and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu Jack Welchmba to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chevin as many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia. I remember recess. We had recess or Dr. Peter Gray, who's one of my favorites, talks about how recess was two hours out of the sick hours when he was going to school in the 60s. So 33%, you know, a third of the day is recess. And you're out there with kindergarten to fifth grade. I mean, everybody out there together, that.
- [41:39]
B
Point is so important. And this is one of the reasons, I think, like the one room classroom, the old, that old model and then homeschooling, it's where there's a couple things happen when you put a bunch of people that are sort of the same age together. You increase the probability of competition for attention and increase the probability of, you know, the kids who will do well will feel great. The kids who don't do well feel kind of shamed. And so is that what you want to introduce into your educational environment necessarily? Probably not. But if you take individuals and there's always somebody who they're better than in terms of like reading or math, they can actually, instead of saying, you know, you're in a fourth grade and you really only read at a second grade level, you have a problem. You can take that kid and say, listen, why don't you go spend some time with this younger child who needs to learn how to read, and all of a sudden reading becomes their strength and instead of hating to read, they'll practice and all of a sudden they'll be reading at the third grade level and they'll get there without being shamed and humiliated and compared to everybody else. And that's, I think that that's the value of these heterogeneous learning environments is that you teach and you build self confidence and you further cement concepts because it's harder if you can't teach it, you don't really understand it. And so there's this tremendous multi directional stimulation of these key systems in the brain that are acquiring new information. And you are actually stimulating and creating activations in social learning at the same time that you're activating systems around cognitive learning, which, and when they go together, it's much more effective. And this is something that's just so interesting about the human brain, is that all cognitive content, the superhighway to the cognitive part of your brain is the social freeway, right? So think about the subjects that you like. Loved the teacher. Now in reality, did you, do you really like geology? Like, yes. You know, do you really like rocks? I mean, are rocks that interesting? No, but Mr. Hesford was awesome. He loved rocks and he used his enthusiasm for rocks to tell you stories about guys who discovered about igneous versus, you know, whatever it is. And you're like, wow, that's kind of interesting. And you remember those things because there's an emotional vehicle, there's a social emotional vehicle to the top part of the brain. So if you have a boring teacher and you love the subject, you still want to bang your head against the wall, you can barely handle it, you watch the clock, you go, oh my God. But if you have a really enthusiastic, relationally engaged teacher who sees you and wants you to, you know, have this information and there's a humorous or an exciting or a, you know, some kind of emotional vehicle, it'll go right through the middle of your brain right up to your cortex and it'll stick.
- [44:55]
A
Wow. That's what parents have to learn about the cake. The four. It's in the book the Four Layers of the Brain. And, and what was interesting to me was that they all have names that are easy to say except for one. It was the cortex. Limbic brainstem, no problem.
- [45:09]
B
And then the one, the diencephalon. I know, that's a killer.
- [45:14]
A
How do you say it?
- [45:15]
B
Diencephalon.
- [45:16]
A
Why do they do that?
- [45:18]
B
I do it. I, I actually, you know, we used to make it a lot simpler. And then I said, you know what, people can, they can understand this. They can, it's okay. There's no reason that people, you know, it used to be that, you know, we used to pretend like that's knowledge that we should have. And oh my God, you can handle that word. You can handle that word. You can learn.
- [45:40]
A
I love. All the other ones are two syllables and there's that one. But the whole premise, and this is extremely important is that the sensory information is coming in through the brainstem. You have these phenomenal situations about smell and how smell like a person can be in a coma and the smell of a certain thing is going to change their heart rate. Like they're responding to it because all the sensory things and this is happening out in nature. And you know, when we bring up these different memories, it's so important for parents to know about the vehicle to the brain and how when you're stressed out, the thinking part shuts off. I mean, everybody needs to know that you're not going to have a solid conversation with your 14 year old. And if they've just broken up with their boyfriend and they're sobbing, you know you're not going to get through. You really have to wait till things are calmed down.
- [46:22]
B
And the good plan you have. But it's good, this will make you feel better. Like they're not even going to hear that. They're going to think you don't care. You just gotta learn how to sit in their mess. Sit with them in their mess.
- [46:32]
A
Yeah, yeah. All parents have to know this stuff. So then. Okay, I want to hit one other topic before we run out of time because I think this one's really important as well. And it also kind of goes along with the play and it goes along with a lot of what we've been talking about. But play allows children to have control and it is a misconception, although I think it's understandable that I'm an adult so I should know what you need to do next. And I'm going to tell you all of these things to do and I'm going to put you in all these extracurricular things. But you talked about like in the situation where in the David Kresh, where these kids are in this cult, that every decision had been made for them and so they didn't even know what to do with the simplest of choices. You said when offered a plain peanut butter sandwich as opposed to one with jelly, they became confused or even angry. So you say to develop a sense of self, one must exercise choice and learn from the consequences of those choices. If the only thing you are taught is to comply, you have no way of knowing what you like and what you want. And so then you talk about teenagers. So what's phenomenal is the book you're going to learn about from fetal development all the way through. So you're talking about, you know, the small children, the first two years of life, then school age. We're talking about also teenagers. And you said this. We must remember that for most of human history, adolescents took on adult roles earlier and rose admirably to the challenge. Many of the problems we have with teenagers result from failing to adequately challenge their growing brains. They have to make decisions. You say this, okay, this is so amazing. We're like, okay, well, they're not, you know, they're starting to drive or. And everybody knows, like, their, their cortex isn't fully developed until age 25. So you're kind of nervous, right? You're thinking, well, gosh, they're not fully developed, and I don't know if I should let them do this or that or the other thing. And here's what you say. It is experience making decisions that wires the brain, and it cannot be done without taking some risks.
- [48:25]
B
It's true. Yeah. I mean, and I think that that's one of the wonderful things about doing things in the wild and outdoors is that there are many, many, many opportunities to practice decision making around potential risk. Right. So is that stream. How deep is that? You know, go ahead, try to walk across it. You know, can I climb up this thing? And you go, yeah, you can climb, but guess what? You can't climb down. And so you scaffold. This is. Now this is again, I'm not telling. You know, don't let kids go be feral kids out in the wild, but giving them opportunities to do these things where you go, don't climb up there because you're not going to be able to get down. You need to let them climb up there. And then they see I can't get down, they go, all right, well, how. What are we going to do? Let's. Let's problem solve around that. I'll help you get down. But next time you run into something like this, just remember it's a lot easier to climb up than it is to climb down. And this is how you learn. You learn by kind of making these little mistakes. You never learn by not making a mistake. You never learn anything new. And then again, how many mistakes? Thousands. I always remind people, like, remember how many times your little toddler stacked the blocks before he could get a tower? Like, it was like a billion times. And then he would want to make the tower even bigger and even bigger and they would all topple down. But you Cannot get good at, at building towers unless you have a lot of them topple down.
- [50:01]
A
So I love that you use the word scaffold because I feel like nature naturally scaffolds because the tree limbs are too high for a three year old to reach and it's just made that way. And I remember when our youngest, she was probably four, she wanted to learn to climb over the fence. And I took her about nine months, you know, where she would climb to the top, swing the one leg over and then not really know what to do or be too nervous to fully go over and then swing her leg to go down the other side. And so she would get up, she'd swing her leg over, she'd swing it back and come back down. And then actually what happened was her older brother did it right in front of her and it's like something clicked in her brain. She'd had that nine months of trying to work it out and then, then here's what we have seen time and time again. Then they do it 150 times.
- [50:47]
B
Yeah.
- [50:47]
A
You know, because they're trying to cement it in. It's like when you're master it, right?
- [50:50]
B
They're trying to master.
- [50:51]
A
Yeah, yeah. They learn for mastery and their body knows what to do and then they go to something harder.
- [50:56]
B
Yeah. And that's such a really important point because again if you think about the, you know, many, many people listening have kids and will have had similar experiences. But how many 15 year old kids do you see playing school? None. Right. But how many like four or five, six year old kids will play school? Because it's new, it's novelty. Right. Once you introduce, once you do something and you, it's kind of new and you're not quite fully on top of it, then play pulls you to repeat it, repeat it, repeat it, repeat it until there's mastery. And then after a while, once there's mastery, it's like this is like part of my inter. It's kind of boring. Let's move on to something different. And this is something that I think most of us, I, I think sometimes we misunderstand play. We get in the way of kids, like you mentioned earlier, Ginny, that they know for them what they need to work on mastery around what, what they need to focus on. They know what is a moderate and tolerable dose of novelty for them. So when we introduce, you know, without really doing it in a collaborative way with them, we introduce, produce new stuff because we want them to get better. A lot of times we're Kind of shooting ourselves in the foot. It's. They're going to sort of maybe not want to do it. It's not going to be as motivating. It might be a little bit beyond their capability and they don't want to fail for us, but they think that we know a lot, right? So, okay, if dad says I can do it well, I'm going to try it. And then if they don't do it well, then they hate it. And then later on when they get the capability and they're able to do this skill, let's say skateboarding, right? Let's say dad's a skateboard nut and you get, you get to point where you're just able to kind of stand and move a little bit and dad puts you on a skateboard. Come on. I've seen, you know, on TikTok there's little kids that can skateboard and the little kid gets on falls and falls and falls. They can't do it. And so the kid doesn't say, you know, my dad's developmentally really not very smart. You know, they don't say that. The kids go, I'm dumb, I'm bad, I'm uncoordinated. And then they get to be six years old and they could skateboard and they have the opportunity to do it. No way, I'm not going to do this. I hate this. We do this all the time. We end up setting up kids and we snip off potential directions of growth for them because we're over enthusiastic about something we want them to do instead of letting them drive.
- [53:26]
A
Well, in the other way too. Yeah, it goes the other way too, doesn't it?
- [53:29]
B
Absolutely.
- [53:29]
A
We actually, we just had this. Our oldest is 17 years old. 17, almost an adult. And we were up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and, and my husband and I were pretty, you know, we're just wired differently. I'm more. And also I've had a lot of time with our kids outside. So, you know, I'm like, well, I. You kind of just. They, they trust their bodies and I trust their bodies. It's been 17 years. We've spent all this time outside. And we were at this rope swing and the rope swing went out into this river and it didn't feel like it cleared the edge of this rock face very well. And my husband was pretty nervous about our 17 year old. He was like, I think I'll be fine. And he was like, but if you hit the rock face, I mean, this is. We don't know how you know, it's above water. And it was, we went back and forth about it for probably 10 minutes and our 17 year old was like, I'm fine, like I can do this rope swing. And he did do it and he was fine. And it was an interesting look at the other side of it where you talk about snipping off potential growth, right. Where either we push too far and too fast and.
- [54:26]
B
Or we inhibit. We inhibit. Yeah. Yeah.
- [54:29]
A
We don't trust their body, which is.
- [54:31]
B
Happens a lot, right?
- [54:32]
A
Yeah.
- [54:32]
B
And it's a weird irony that, you know, this, I mean, we could go on for hours about this, but this is one of the big challenges that we have with online, the online world. Right. This is also a world where we have to help kids learn how to modulate and manage and regulate that world. Right. We can sort of completely stop it, but you know, they'll get to a point where they'll sneak around, they'll hide something under their bed, they'll get, you know, when they finally get access, they'll kind of go crazy. It's much better to kind of little by little dose, you know, help them learn how to build their own self regulatory capabilities around, you know, doing online stuff, whether it's video games or exploring and stuff. And, and this is, it's a much scarier role than the natural world actually. You know.
- [55:23]
A
Wow.
- [55:24]
B
Because there's a lot of toxic stuff out there that's easily available and you can very quickly get into content that is way, way, way, way contextually out of sync with where you are developmentally and whether it's sexual or violence or whatever, it's just, it's way too available. And this is something I think many, many, many families are struggling with about how to manage this stuff.
- [55:48]
A
You go outside and then you just run out of time for it and.
- [55:51]
B
Exactly.
- [55:52]
A
It works pretty well. These books are phenomenal. There are three here. Born for Love, which is about empathy. The Boy who Was Raised. This is about traumatized children and what they can teach us about loss, love and healing. Just phenomenal things you'll learn. And then what happened to conversations on trauma, resilience and healing that you wrote with Oprah? And you also talk in these about, I just want people to know. Resilience, resiliency, Resilient children are made, not born. They're made, not born. And I do think all of that repetition for mastery, it helps you to learn, that you can learn and that you can try again and try again. You talk a lot about rhythm, the roots of health, our rhythm and regulation. Repetition leads to change. Patterns matter. So this is really applicable. You talk about how a lot of kids have experienced trauma. It's a high percentage. But if you have a child who hasn't experienced trauma, these are all things you need to know for in your home. It's like how to set your home up.
- [56:41]
B
Exactly.
- [56:42]
A
And how do you want these years to go? And, I mean, you will learn a tremendous amount. They're fabulously written. So I just, I'm so honored. I'm so honored that you said yes. I'm so grateful that you took the time with, with us. Like I said, I have 12 pages of notes just from two of the books, and there's all sorts of things to watch out for and to learn from. And you learn from this Mama P. That you kind of can, you know, if your child still needs to be rocked in their five or six, like, rock them, you know, and do those types of things. Maybe they missed a little bit of developmental spots or they're just phenomenal. I'm rambling. They're phenomenal. I mean, it's thing after thing after thing that you're going to learn. We always end our show with the same question. The question is, what's a favorite memory from your childhood that was outside?
- [57:26]
B
Oh, gosh. I have so many because I grew up in a family. We grew up in North Dakota, and we spent a lot of time outdoors, hunting, fishing, as in Scouts. I think one of my favorite memories was when I was really pretty young. And this sounds kind of weird, but I, I, we were, we lived right on the edge of a big, big prairie, and there was a, There was a prairie fire. And I, I must have been about three. I was really little. But I think one of my favorite memories was when my, my grandfather and my dad and I drove up to, like, a bluff on the Missouri river, and we were able to watch it. I mean, it was, you know, it's not a good thing, but it's majestic. It's just beautiful to see this crazy, crazy, wild thing happening. But I remember being held up by my dad, and so I could see, you know, some of the flames that were way below. And it was so. That was kind of cool. And then, and then after that, I think one of my really foundational memories outside was when we took a family trip up to Banff and. Which is a national park in Canada. And, you know, those of you who are from North Dakota will laugh when you hear this, but I was just amazed that there were so many trees. You know, you know, I had my first little camera, you know, and. And I literally, we would. We when we were driving along and it was just trees, right? But I was taking pictures of trees because, like, they're very rare where I came from. So anyway.
- [58:53]
A
And you talk about the somato. If I say this right, the somatosensory regulation, all of these sensory experiences. Maybe I'm saying this wrong, but you say somatosensory regulation opens up the core cortex, makes the reasoning parts of the brain more accessible for learning. And all of these different types of rhythmic activities help, like walking and rocking. And it is amazing then to have a nature experience that you remember from when you were three, because it's all coming in in the bottom part of the brain. I don't know, it's just fascinating. It's fascinating to learn it all. And I think there's so much more for us to still learn. Thank you so much for your time.
- [59:28]
B
Thank you for the opportunity to talk with Jenny. Keep up the good work.
- [59:32]
A
Thank you. And Doug Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. But now we want you to feel it. Cue the emu music, Limu. Save yourself money today. Increase your wealth. Customize and save. We save.
- [59:56]
B
That may have been too much feeling. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty.
- [60:02]
A
Liberty Savings Ferry Unwritten by Liberty Mutual.
- [60:04]
B
Insurance company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.