Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Dr. Erin Clabough. Erin Clabough is a mother of four who teaches biology and neuroscience at Hampden-Sydney College. Her research focuses on understanding neuro-development across the lifespan by examining changes and neuronal anatomy and physiology, and by exploring new ways to cultivate empathy and creativity in children. Erin writes for the popular media and her scientific research has resulted in many peer-reviewed journal articles. Erin Clabough is the author of a new book with Sounds True called Second Nature: How Parents Can Use Neuroscience to Help Kids Develop Empathy, Creativity and Self Control. It’s a true guidebook—a neuroscientifically informed guidebook—for parenting. I know you’ll enjoy it. Here’s my conversation with Erin Clabough.
Erin, I think of you as such an all-accomplishing person. You’re the mother of four children and you have a PhD in neuroscience. So, to begin with, tell me a little bit about your four kids—how old they are. Introduce them to me and to our listeners.
Erin Clabough: Sure. I have two boys and two girls, which was no fault of mine. And then they’re 8 and 10 and 12 and 14 right now.
TS: And you got your PhD in neuroscience, and at a certain point the light went on for you that what you were learning—the science of the brain—could be applied for parenting. How did that connection emerge for you?
EC: Well, I had my first son when I was about halfway through my PhD program. And then I defended my dissertation when I was pregnant with my second child, a girl. And then I took a year or so off and did science writing from home, trying to reassess what we were going to do as a family because I knew I really love neuroscience, but I didn’t know if I wanted to be in the lab all the time and I really liked being with the kids—being home. So, I was trying to figure out how I could do both and do them both well, which is a hard thing for moms, especially in this day and age where you’re supposed to be excellent 100 percent at two things at the same time.
And we started thinking about how best to raise our kids. And I think I read every parenting book that was out there. And some of them seemed very rigid and very parent-focused and put the child on a schedule and tried to mold the child to the environment. Then some were more very child-centered and let the child dictate the rhythm of the household. I felt like both didn’t really work for me.
So, I started trying to find one that was in the middle and that was more evidence-based than some of these other ones, and I didn’t find anything. And so that was where this book came from—or grew out of—is this desire to know what really works. Not just on a psychological level, but I’m a molecular biologist and so I’m very interested in what’s going on at a DNA level and a protein level and neurons and how they connect.
I was keeping these two things very separate. And so I was looking at the behavior of my kids and wondering what to do and how to control it. Then I was doing in the lab these things about neurons and growing them in dishes and seeing if they connected and looking at how the genes were changing. And I was trying to put them together—both of them together.
So, this is the product of me understanding that actually all the behavior is rooted in what’s happening in the DNA and a protein level in the neurons, and trying to explore how to bring some of that basic science into our lives in a more meaningful way so that people understand it, aren’t put off by it, and can actually use it. I mean, you don’t have to be an amazing scientist to be able to use these discoveries that people have been working so hard [on] in the lab.
TS: Right. Good. I’m glad you don’t have to be an amazing scientist—because let’s go ahead and talk to the parents out there who are listening who are saying, “Look, I don’t know. I don’t have the time right now to study neuroanatomy and deep insights from molecular biology. Just tell me: what are the key takeaways from the science that I need to know?”
EC: It’s so easy because it’s literally just practice. And I think as parents we get very overwhelmed because we are feeling like we have to be on all the time and we always are being these guides and these mentors and these teachers and we care so much about our kids and how they turn out, but then we just get train-wrecked by the tantrum that they throw after school when they won’t put their lunchbox on the kitchen counter. We don’t know how to get from one to the other.
But, what I realized is when we put our kids in school for the first time, what they were teaching them all day long I felt like was not the skills that [were] going to get them to this amazing adult that I wanted to someday go and have a drink with or have lunch with one day. Someone I really like to be around. And they were teaching them things that they need to know—math, arithmetic, things like this; reading—but they were not doing any conflict resolution, and my kids were coming home just shattered at the end of the day.
So, I started thinking about, “OK, if my kids are getting taught this, they’re getting taught to this test . . .” the teachers in our public school system—they were definitely teaching to the assessments at the end of the year, to get them to pass it.
So, I started thinking about, “Well what is this test that I want my kids to be able to pass?” I came up with the answer I think most parents come up with—that you want your kids to be happy, you want them to be successful. And usually those two things will go hand in hand because you don’t really have a sense of peace unless you’re happy with where you are in your life and typically that means you’ve done what you’ve set out to do.
So, thinking about these skills in a really deliberate way—being intentional about the couple of things that I wanted to foster in them with these practices—is where I arrived at these three skills. So, I went and started looking in the literature and finding what the research says what successful kids have. And it came up with these three things: they’re creative, they’re empathetic, and they have self-control.
And so when I found study after study that showed that these things were in successful kids who became successful adults, then I also figured out that you can teach all these things—which I didn’t know. When I first started this journey, I felt that you could teach empathy—some parts of empathy—just because I’ve done some work with autistic kids before and I’d gotten in that literature. But, I didn’t really know that you could teach creativity. I thought that you were just born with a creative slant or not. But, it absolutely can be taught. And I know that we work all the time with kids on self-control, but I felt like it didn’t really work. Like people are always trying to teach kids self-control and they’re still not sitting in their seats—and they’re trying to teach them too young.
But they all come together in self-regulation. So, what I found is that if you teach two skills, it will strengthen the other skill and vice-versa. And so what I realized is because everything practice-based works the same way—whether you’re looking at a connection between two neurons that you’re electrically stimulating in a dish and it makes it stronger . . . a practice—like an experience that you place in the path of your child that they have to go through in order to get to the other side—does the same thing. So, you’re activating pathways that will get stronger.
So, if we know deliberately what experiences that we want them to have to culture certain skills, then you basically are just using practice to change their neural networks in a way that makes it so that the pathways that are most frequently activated will then be more likely to be activated the next time.
So, if you’re actively working on empathy with them by talking about feelings; talking through situations; saying, “What do you think that person feels right now?” if you’re using these things with conflict resolution with them; even when you’re parenting and have a conflict with them, then this is practice for them. And those pathways will then get stronger. Even if they’re not purposefully doing it, if the parent is purposefully doing it, it works the same. The neurons are still connecting together and getting stronger.
TS: Now, one thing I want to make sure is clear for our listeners is you take these three skills—creativity, empathy, and self-control—and you’re saying when you put them all together, if you have built the skill—the capacity of all three—that will give you this great Holy Grail of self-regulation. How do these three skills add up to self-regulation and why is it this Holy Grail of human capacity?
EC: Well, I think that one of these skills makes the other one more likely to happen. So, if you take for example a situation where you need a lot of self-control—so, you can even say it’s a kindergarten classroom where somebody has to sit in their seat. This happens every day. So, this child—if he has good self-control, he can sit there and he can not talk during the lesson.
But if he’s able to tap into some of these other things, he’s going to be way more likely to first be motivated to do it, and second, have the actual capacity to do it. So, if he in a creative way can come up with other things to occupy his time—if he really just has to sit there for some reason—he can come up with a game that he can play with himself.
If he thinks about how empathy can be rolled into that, he can think if he acts up what impact that will have on other people, how that might make other people feel. He can think about the situation. He can be creative about foresight—what will happen if he does X, Y, or Z. If he’s able to predict the future—if he acts up, he’s probably either going to get sent to the principal or he’s going to get a D on the assignment or he’s going to have to go sit at a different chair all by himself. So, they all play off of each other.
So, if he has no creativity, then he’s got no way to entertain himself. He’s got no way to think of all the possible solutions to his problem that he has, or the impact that he’ll have on other people. And if he’s got no empathy, then he probably would only sit there for himself but won’t think about the impact on other kids’ learning, or on how his mom’s going to feel when he comes home with another note from his teacher, or about the teacher and how she has to get through her lesson. So, they all build on each other.
TS: OK. Now, I know in your book, Second Nature, you talk about how within your own family of four kids—with your husband, et cetera—you’ve made it explicit: “This is what we’re doing in our family. We are creative, we’re empathic, and we exercise self-control.” And I was like, “How did you sell that to your family? How does anybody sell that to their family?” It seems a little abstract, complex, sophisticated—something like that. How did you get all four of your kids enrolled in this?
EC: Well, it’s funny because we never use those words.
TS: What words do you use?
EC: We do these things. But I think if I said “empathy,” my kids would kind of look at me. But we talk all the time about—OK, so there’s a conflict and they’ll come up and they know what the system is, and what they’re going to have to do and say in order to reenter the family nucleus. They need to go take some time for themselves after a conflict, and when they come back—if they’re the perpetrator—they need to say what they did because they need to own it. They need to say how they think it would make that person feel that they did it to them. And they have to say what they would do differently next time.
And those things together collectively are empathy. Right? And they’re also creativity because they have to come up with another way to fix the situation. It’s just what happens. That’s just our conflict resolution. And I don’t call it those things, but that is what it is.
TS: OK. Have you made any declaration in the family about what [your] value system is?
EC: I do these little sayings or mantras, but they don’t have those words in them. So, I’ll say, “The only person you can control is yourself.” Right? Or I’ll say things along those lines—like, “It’s bigger than just you; it’s not about you.” These kinds of things. I think a lot of parents say it. But when you put it with these nuggets of every day, these kids will be exposed to how somebody thinks, how somebody feels, or a creative thing that will then end up enhancing self-control.
I also do an awful lot with power shifts. So, like for example, one of my daughters this week—I was trying to write an article for an online outlet. And really, the article that I wanted to write was, “How can I get my daughter to stop hissing at me?” She was being disciplined and instead of just talking to me, she hissed at me.
TS: What does that mean—she hissed?
EC: Like “hss”—like a little animal.
TS: Like . . . oh wow. That would annoy me.
EC: Yes. So much!
And so the first time I was just like, “Did you just hiss at me?” But then it kept happening over a couple days. And there were, you know, “Go to your room,” there was some “This is how this makes me feel. This is what this looks like. You need to take some time, how could you handle it …” we did all these things and it was still happening. And then her little brother started hissing. I’m like, “OK, this can’t happen.” And I really gave a lot of thought to this because she’s having kind of a difficult time right now. And so I know that I can’t control if she hisses. You can’t control anybody—
TS: What about the “go to your room” strategy?
EC: So you definitely can say “Go take some time, and when you can respond appropriately we can talk it out, we can have this conversation.” We’ve done that. But then the next day, if I get another hiss, we’re there again.
TS: Right, OK.
EC: So I felt like she was doing this in some kind of—she had power in that hiss. And so what I ended up doing was just going over there and sitting down with her when we were not having conflict and I was just like, “I really want to learn how to hiss.” And she was like—looked at me like I was crazy. And I was like, “No, really. Do I do it like this?” And I started doing a hiss. And she’s like, “No, no, no. You don’t do it like that. You got to move your lips back and your teeth have to …” like she showed me how to do it. And I like, I nailed it. I could hiss like nobody. [Laughs] But she’s looking at me and you could see she was pleased and also kind of embarrassed at the same time.
And so then, now I kind of took it from her. So the hiss doesn’t have power anymore, right? Because now I can hiss. And with that, it gave her the power back in the situation, she was able to teach me something, I wasn’t against her, I was coming on her side. And this was maybe 10 days ago and we haven’t had another hiss since.
So I feel like there’s something behind everything that’s happening. I’m not condoning the hissing—she knows perfectly well it’s rude, it’s not OK. I started to get super annoyed. But I started trying to think about how we can shift this so that she feels heard. I don’t want to hear her hiss, but something is going on with her where she feels powerless, I know she’s having a hard time with a particular situation that she’s going through. And she doesn’t have the words to articulate it. So we do this and then we try to label the emotions. You know, “How are you feeling when you’re hissing?” Like we work through all these things. But I feel like parents really need to have a lot more creativity in the way that we parent as well. And I understand that these are little adults in some ways with skills that are not developed at all, and it’s up to us to do that.
TS: OK, but let’s take the parent who’s trying to complete a writing assignment of some kind who’s just unbelievably irritated, who says, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to take my kid, I’m going to lock them in their room.” Or some kind of other move. Like, “No, this is not my time to get creative about how to solve your problem, this is my time to finish my assignment.”
EC: Oh, I wasn’t creative when she was hissing at me. I was creative later. I don’t think there’s room for creativity when you’re reactive and you’re angry and you’re in a situation like that. The creativity in a lot of ways has to be these deliberate things that happen ahead of time. So it has to be, “How can I set up this situation to prevent this from happening again?” This is in the reflection in the space afterward. I don’t feel like anybody’s at their best when they’re in the middle of a conflict situation. But I also feel like parents need to put themselves in time out, too. If you’re having a reactive situation as a parent, you shouldn’t be actively parenting. You should take that break.
And it depends how old your child is. So if you are on a writing assignment and you’ve got a kid who’s doing that, I mean, it depends on how old they are. If they’re old enough you could lock yourself in a room and finish it and they could be out. You could also send them to their room and I certainly do that. And when we do time outs I use them pretty differently. I’ll have them go in time out without a designated time that they can come out, and I’ll say, “When you’re ready to talk about this,” and they know those are the things they’re going to have to say. Like, “This is what I did, I own it. This is how it made you feel and the impact, and this is what I’ll do next time.”
TS: Yes, let’s talk about that. Because you call it your OUT method. O-U-T. And I really like this. I thought it was a very brilliant part of the book. So ‘O’ stands for owning the action. ‘U’ is understanding how your action affects people. And then the ‘T’ is telling how you will do it differently next time. First of all, I thought here as an adult, I could use this in some of my exchanges with people. And one of the things I really liked is you say that just saying “I’m sorry” isn’t good enough. And you know often when I hear people, even just—this is just me in my workplace environment and somebody will come say, “I’m really sorry.” And I think to myself, “Is that it? That’s all I got? That’s all you got for me?” Like it’s not enough, it doesn’t feel complete. And I know you write about this. So unpack that a little bit for our listeners.
EC: Yes. I think one of the other things that I end up saying a lot as a parent is, “I don’t want your sorry, I want you not to do it again.” And I think that the OUT strategy helps that. It prevents it from happening in the same way. And it’s part of this scaffolding that parents can do where you want to show them the right way to do it and if you talk them through the right way to do it, it’s like this virtual behavior, where it’s like you’re imagining it. So it’s not as strong as actually doing it but it can still lay the groundwork for that behavior to happen in the future and those neurons to be strengthened. Because if you imagine, “OK I’m in this situation and I want to hiss or whatever next time,” and instead I say, “That makes me feel terrible and I’m going to my room for five minutes right now,” and you already envision yourself doing it, you’re way more likely to do that the next time if you’ve already thought it through in your head.
And I have a couple kids that are more [made for] the OUT, who we end up having to do this all the time, this come back. It’s basically like a honed apology that actually might be effective. And then I have one or two kids that are more on the receiving end of this a lot, and so we have another one for when you feel wounded or wronged by someone else.
TS: How does that go?
EC: That one, the acronym is STAFF and basically we’d came up with that one for my daughter who was being a little bit mean-girl bullied in third grade, and we didn’t really have any tools to help her through that. So we ended up doing a lot of this where it’s basically the opposite. So it’s tell them how it makes you feel, and then you’re ending up telling them that it’s not OK, and then telling them how you want it to be different. So it’s the inverse of it. And then the Fs were for Find someone else to play with, find another friend, or Find a teacher if it got really bad.
But I feel like you should be able to be on both sides. And for the one where you’re being bullied, it was important that it didn’t require participation by anyone but your child. Or even for me, I’ve actually used it in a situation where I’ve felt uncomfortable and didn’t know why. I’ve definitely said it’s not OK and said how I felt and said, “This is what would be OK.” So it’s helped me with conflict resolution as well.
TS: OK. I want to throw out for you what seemed to me to be some of the challenging aspects. You tell me how your method, the method you’ve learned as—can I call you a neuroparent?
EC: Sure.
TS: Is that—
EC: Sure. [Laughs]
TS: Your approach as a neuroparent, how you do it. So your kids are on their electronic devices and it’s time for a break. You actually want to have real conversations with them, maybe not have them bring their electronic devices to the dinner table or out with your or whatever. How do you handle all of that?
EC: Well there’s the good way to do it and then there’s the frustrated way to do it. I did my frustrated way yesterday, which was, I pulled the power cord on the router for the internet. [Laughs]
TS: Oh, OK.
EC: But that’s not the ideal way to do it. Usually these things work OK because we have really clear rules about them. They are posted and we came up with them as a family. So everybody basically had to agree to these rules, and we came up with them collectively so everyone was OK with them—
TS: But just that process even, tell me about that. I could imagine one could go, “No, I’m not going to agree to that. No way, absolutely not.”
EC: It kind of depends on age. So we’ve got a high schooler, a middle schooler and two [in] elementary school. And so the rules are different for the three kinds of brackets. And the young ones, they don’t really push back very much. But the older two definitely do. And what I’ve realized with them is that as they grow, you’ve got to adapt and change, and when they start breaking the rules a lot and giving a lot of pushback, sometimes it’s just time for the rules to change. Especially with my oldest, his electronic rules, I think, were not in line with what his friends were doing. And that caused a lot of resentment for him. And so we ended up coming up with different rules for him just this year which is more probably than I feel comfortable with, but what I’ve realized with him in particular is, those kids are connecting over these video games. They’re talking with each other, they’re in each other’s houses virtually. You can hear what’s going on in their friend’s houses in the background, which I didn’t really realize. I can definitely hear parents yelling at their children to get off in the other houses.
But we work and we work until we come up with something that everyone agrees with. It might not be the first choice for him, but he sees that we’re trying to meet him where he is. If it’s something that’s grade dependent, then we might say, “Oh, OK it’s going to be like this and if you have this GPA, then you can bump up.” Because if you’re getting your stuff done, I don’t really mind if you play a little more. I feel like coming with good faith on everybody’s part, including the parents, to making rules like a democracy even though it’s not a democracy—everyone just needs to be heard. So I try to get away from the numbers, or, “I want X amount of time or minutes,” or whatever, and say, “Why do you feel that way?” And once I’ve figured out that he wanted more because it literally was his social connection, I understood it more and I was a lot more open to it because there is that component there for him.
So they’re posted. And also, the rules are posted with the consequences. And he came up with the consequences. So right now, his consequences are if he breaks the rules he loses things for a day and then he loses things for a week and then he loses things for a month, in that order. And so it’s to the point now where I can just look at him and I can be like, “You know …” I mean, this happened actually yesterday, where I went up in his room and he had his computer up there and that is an automatic week without the computer. Because he’s not allowed to take them upstairs. So I just came down with the computer, I looked at him, I’m like, “Why?” He was like, “Agh.” And I was like, “A week!” And he’s like, “I know.” And so it’s terrible, but he knew ahead of time. And I mean, that’s what life is about is like you just have to be OK with the consequences. It doesn’t have to be angry.
TS: But you know, what’s interesting to me here is, when I think of a lot of parents I know—and as I’ve mentioned to you before this conversation, I’m not a parent myself so I’ve observed people and their kids in these places that seem like major hotspots of difficulty—the rules almost always seem to be coming from the parents. “We’ve decided that you have X number of hours and we’ve decided these are the consequences.” The idea of coming up with something like that as a family where you’re acting like it’s a somewhat democratic process, that in and of itself seems like a huge shift.
EC: Maybe. I mean, I do think that sometimes there’s a top-down approach, but there’s a lot of research out there that shows that kids have very strong ideas about places in their life where they need autonomy about their own decision making, and places where they don’t. So if you make a rule about what a kid can wear, there’s a lot of research that shows they are much more likely to violate that rule because they feel like they should be able to wear what they want. Whereas if it’s about being alone at home, under supervision or not, something where there might actually be a safety concern, they’ll adhere to those rules far better or far more frequently.
I feel like if you let kids make the rules, then they buy in. It’s a sense of responsibility or ownership, they did that to themselves. And it’s funny because a lot of times the consequences they come up with are worse than the consequences I would have come up with to begin with. They’re much harder on themselves when they feel like they were in control of the rules to begin with.
TS: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. We welcome you to learn more about our collection of more than a thousand learning programs, and receive three free gifts just for visiting us. Go to SoundsTrue.com/free. That’s SoundsTrue.com/free. And now, back to Insights at the Edge.
Let’s take another example, like household chores, keeping the house together. How do you handle that?
EC: We have a chore board. And we’ve done lots of different iterations of this. And I don’t know that I’ve found a perfect thing. I think what works for me the best is honestly to change it every couple years. So when they were little, we did this more rewards-based thing where they have magnets and they put them on their chores and if they did them all—I mean these are things like brushing their teeth, they’re little—then at the end of the week they could have a half hour date with a parent or they could have a movie, so little. And you know, now we’re where there’s probably like 16 chores that need to get done every week and we divide it up.
And right now we’re doing one where the older one has one more chore, then the next one down has one less, and then the next one less, so they have amounts of chores. But we’re flipping them all around. So it’s not like my oldest son always cuts the grass because I want them to be able to be proficient at these tasks. I look at the tasks as life-prep skills. I mean, they do help me, but honestly it’s harder for me to come after them and make sure they’ve done them well than to just do them myself. So I do look at that as part of parenting, not really them helping me out.
TS: OK. Take something though—once again, brushing your teeth. “Come on, it’s time, it’s time, it’s time. It’s time.” You have a board in your house and the kid just says, “I don’t care. I don’t care about spending a half hour doing whatever. I don’t care, I’m not going to brush my teeth.”
EC: What would I do? It probably depends on the kid and the situation. Probably what would most likely happen is I would just say, “OK, your day has ground to a halt right now. You’re up against this wall, you’re banging heads, something is wrong. You’re not coming here with your best self in any way.” And so I probably would just say, “You know what? We’re going to be in this situation until we’ve worked through it.” And I would probably go have them have some quiet time and I would not even deal with the situation. If it’s something where you have to get in a car because we’re leaving right then that’s a little harder. But I find that most things in parenting, if you take the time element out of it, it makes it so much easier. So much easier. Because a lot of the stuff and the processing and the decision making happens in this space that happens after the conflict. So I feel like being in that space and allowing them to take it, usually they’ll come and—I mean, depending on which kid it is; one kid would probably brush his teeth real quick after I went downstairs and then pretend like he didn’t do it. It just depends on who it is.
But I feel like you can’t force a kid to brush his teeth. You just can’t do it. And that’s the crazy thing about parenting, is you can’t force your kid to do anything. You can’t control their behavior. It’s more about buy-in than anybody ever knew. I mean, you have these things that you want for your kid, and if they don’t also want them for themselves, they won’t happen.
TS: That makes a lot of sense to me. I want to dig into each one of these three skills a little bit more and see if I could hear from you the basics of, here are the do’s and some examples. And here are the key “don’t do this.” So let’s say we want to build creativity in our family. We’re a creative family. What are some of the things you suggest, and what would you be sure not to do?
EC: Well it’s funny; in the book and in my life approach, I almost never think about the don’ts. It’s kind of interesting that you say that—what’s the do and what’s the don’t. I think mostly about what’s possible and what to do, so it’s actionable.
TS: OK, so we can focus on that?
EC: If I think of a don’t, I’ll say a don’t. But it’s mostly taking normal—all these things are just taking normal situations and as a parent, re-focusing on this little bit. And you can do it really easily just in day-to-day stuff. For creativity I think that’s the most fun one because it’s really just playing games. So if you’re in the car you can drive past and see someone at the stoplight next to you and you can be like, “Where did they just come from? How many brothers and sisters do they have? What’s their job? What was their pet’s name growing up?” Just start spinning. And it’s really fun, especially to do with your kids because they come up with really funny things. And I mean it’s bonding, it’s enjoyable. And you don’t need anything to be creative at all.
And I feel like just putting a little exercise like that, five minutes, less than five minutes—like we’ll go around at dinner time and we’ll do things that are like an alphabet game and everybody has to come up with something for a theme.
TS: Like what do you mean?
EC: Like, what does our dog do at home when you’re at school all day? And the first person will say you know, “Chases aardvarks.” And the second one will be, “Takes a bubble bath.” But it’s funny because then they think about these things in a different way. And if you do things like that a lot and not—like we did this the other day. So my daughter got—my two daughters got bunnies for Christmas. So we’re sitting in there trying to think of what to name them, and I start going through the spice drawer because literally I have come up with like 50 million names and she hates all of them.
So I’m going through the spice drawer I’m like, “Clove, cinnamon, ginger,” and she’s like, “Ew, no.” And finally I was like, “Look, if you want me to keep coming up with names you’ve got to stop saying terrible things about my names. The more ideas that you generate, the more likely it is that you’re going to get the best idea. If you have a thousand ideas to pick from, you’re going to do a better job than if you have two. And when you keep telling me my ideas are stupid I’m just going to shut down.” And she was like, “You’re right. Those spice names are really good. What other ones are in the drawer?” You could see her literally trying so hard to hear what I was saying and to do it. And then we ended up naming the stupid bunny Cocoa because it was in the spice drawer. And we never would have got there if she hadn’t had that pause and been like, “OK, keep going.”
Because there’s no bad idea. I think our kids are so worried about failing that they’re worried to embrace an idea that’s less than perfect. And I think as parents, the more creative spins we can put on things, the better. Things that are weird and outside the norm and obviously won’t work, they’re funny, you know? They’re valuable. And it doesn’t have to be functional and work to have value.
TS: Now, previously in our conversation, you used this interesting term, “scaffolding,” that a parent can help scaffold in order to develop these skills. So even here when we’re talking about creativity, scaffolding is—the way I understand your use of that term, it’s kind of giving people some stepping stones along the way so they don’t go from zero to 100, but you’ve built in—so even here with “Let’s open the spice drawer, let’s do it together.” So help me understand scaffolding. Is that a term from science that you’re bringing into parenting—
EC: I don’t think so—
TS: Or did you just use this term—this is your own creative word here?
EC: Yes, I think so. So I think I thought about—I got it, though, from science because in the cell if you’re a scaffolding protein, other things come and they dock on you and you are like this giant docking station for lots of different proteins and so you’re involved in lots of things in the cell. So I think I was thinking about that construct, probably even more so than the construction scaffolding that most people think of, but I was thinking about it from a more neuroscience perspective. But I think in its very simplest version it’s basically just giving a foothold.
So if you want your kid to go play for 10 minutes by themselves with a toy that doesn’t—you have to tell it what to do, like LEGOs or building blocks or trains or something like that, I think that it’s really hard for kids to get started. So the very most simple scaffolding would be, you go in there and you make a little world with them and say, “OK this is the store for the LEGO people, and over here these are the Skylanders or whatever, they’re coming in and they’re upset because their planet’s on fire and they need to buy a fire extinguisher.” You set it up and you play for five minutes and then you leave. You back up and you say, “Now you play and I need to go do—” whatever it is. Dinner prep or anything. And they can stay there and they can continue what you started.
But if you go put a six-year-old in there with LEGOS and you’re like, “Good luck! Make a play castle,” or whatever, and you leave, they’re going to spin. They’re not going to know how to dig in and get started. And it’s like the very basic idea about scaffolding is you’re basically giving them a leg up, you’re helping them get started.
When you get to things like empathy, it becomes much more complicated and complex if you think about you need to basically put a framework on emotional content, you need to put a framework on thought content, and then you also need to put a framework on what you can do about it. If you just throw a kid into those three realms with no guidance, they’re going to screw up every time. I mean, we screw up every time, no one taught us how to do that. I never got any kind of training in conflict resolution at all. Did you get any training growing up in conflict resolution?
TS: No, no. I’m developing it as an adult, as we speak.
EC: [Laughs] Yup. I think that’s pretty much where all parents are. And so it’s not surprising that as parents we don’t know how to scaffold these things because we never learned it.
TS: Sure. Which is a big point that I want to make. In reading your book I had the thought, “God there’s so many people I want to send this to.” But then I thought, “But they would have to be able to model these skills for their children, and what if they aren’t really at that level of personal development?” Like we’re talking about creativity, you’re a very creative woman, you’ve got tons of creative ideas. You know, “OK we can do that—”What if a parent’s like, “I don’t know how creative I am, how am I going to help my kid be creative?”
EC: Well I think there’s little things that you can do, like this idea of embracing a failure. I mean, this is a really simple things that all parents can do. If your child comes to you and won’t present to you anything less than their best, that’s a problem. Because it completely cuts you off from fostering anything underneath the absolute best, and no kid’s at their absolute best all the time—like it’s impossible. We were doing this the other day; it snowed and we were sledding, and they were trying to go as far as they could on their sleds, and finally I was like, “You know what? Let’s just celebrate failure.” And so it just became this huge thing where whoever was taking the worst falls, they were like, rejoicing and they were trying to get the worst falls.
But when they were doing that, by the end of this session they were literally snowboarding on their little saucer sleds in a way I never could have done, I don’t have that kind of balance. But I don’t think they would have tried it at all if I was like, “Who can go the farthest and stay on?” They would have clung to their little saucer in a little ball so that they could stay on. But just the shift in what’s important, I feel like anybody can do, even if they feel like they’re not creative at all. They can understand that there’s value in things that’s less than perfection.
TS: OK. In developing these three skills, I’m going to ask for a number. What percentage of impact do you think comes from modeling the skills?
EC: Oh. I wonder if that depends which skill you’re talking about. I would say probably the biggest percent of modeling would have to come from empathy. Because I feel like empathy is something that we need to have the minute our kids come home from the hospital or from home birth or wherever—the minute they’re in this world the way that we respond to them and if we’re attentive to their needs and we understand what their perspective is that sets the stage for everything. I feel like if you’re not a responsive parent and you don’t have your child’s perspective in your forefront all the time as equal to your own—that you guys are both coming to the table, and yes you’re in charge, and yes you have a plan and you’re bringing your kid along, but that this is … the impact that you have on them, this is … they’re an adult in a little body. I mean, their brains are very different, but they’re going to carry whatever this implication of the conversation that you have with them forever. They’re going to be 35 one day and they’re going to be thinking back to how you responded to them as a parent.
So that’s, I think, the most important percentage-wise. I feel like probably—I’m going to go make up a number, but I’m going to say 50 percent of empathy. I think teaching empathy has to be that you are able to understand where your child’s coming from. Because if you’re not able to do that, how can you be creative and come up with solutions to the problems? And how can you have self-control if you’re not being sensitive to the way that your kid feels, if you just explode?
TS: OK. So let’s just go into it a little bit. For someone who wasn’t raised by a mother and father who were particularly empathic, they haven’t developed that. How do they get on the empathy train here?
EC: You’re looking at one.
TS: Oh, really?
EC: Yes, that’s the book. This is the path. This is how you do it.
TS: [Yes.]
EC: I mean, you don’t have to have been raised by people who were in touch with themselves emotionally, who labeled emotions at all. You could be raised by two complete narcissists, and this road map will still work. It’s little, and it’s divided, I think, pretty well into feelings and thinking. So if you’re uncomfortable with one or the other, there’s still an avenue for you to be able to be empathetic.
TS: OK. We’ve talked about developing empathy in a family through conflict resolution techniques, and you shared, I thought, some really brilliant ones. How else do we do it in our family? How else do you take the position of your kids to understand—
EC: Of being empathic?
TS: Yes.
EC: I think every day I take a minute and I try to imagine what it’s like to be each one of my kids. And I don’t do that intentionally, I think it just happens. But I think doing it intentionally is probably important. And I think just checking in with them. I tend to do it—maybe it’s a little bit self-centered in the way that I approach it, but I usually take a minute first and I try to remember what third grade was like for me. Then after I ground myself there, then I think about my son who’s in third grade and I think, “OK, how is his experience different and what is hard for him?” But going back to the way that I felt when I was at that age and remembering what was important to me and what I could care less about, I think is a good way to start. You don’t want to stay there because that’s not being empathic at all, that’s thinking wholly about yourself.
I feel like when my kids are at such different ages—so if it’s 8 and it’s 10 and it’s 12 and it’s 14, it’s hard to parent them all four at the same time coming from the same place. So I always have to do an adjust and slide in where that kid is, and it takes a minute. I often feel like if I had four quadruplets that it would be easier in some ways because they’re all in the same stage of development. It gets a little harder when there are some that are still really children and some that are teenagers.
TS: One of the things you write about in Second Nature is that parents can’t go around screaming, spanking their children, et cetera and expect to be developing self-control in their kids. Parents screaming, blah, blah, blah, and then trying to get their kids … I mean, talk some about that.
EC: Yes. So I do think that that’s true because if you aren’t modeling good self-control it’s really hard to point a finger at someone and say, “Have good self-control.” I think that the child then will just shut down, as if it’s not a possible skill to have. If you’re an adult and you’ve been working on self-control for 30, 40 years and you still don’t have it, how can I at 8 have this skill? Or at 10. So I do feel like that’s where it’s really important to have these other two skills come into play. So if you’re having trouble with self-control, if you take a minute and you think about the impact—that’s empathy—and that can help you have better self-control. And the other one, to have creativity, and be like, “What other things could I do rather than screaming right now?” I think those two things together really bolster self-control. To give you the ability to not get in the way of yourself in some ways.
I feel like self-control is something we need to just step back from as parents. I feel like that happens when we’re reacting to situations. We don’t have a plan. We feel an emotion in our chest and we act on it. And so if that happens to me and I’m parenting and I feel angry, I’ve learned now to, “I need to back off.” And sometimes that’s hard for kids. I think if one of my children really wants to talk about it and keeps pushing and won’t stop, I’ve literally—I’ve definitely gone and locked myself in the bathroom. “I just need a minute because I’m not at my best right now.” And they’ve learned that I will always come and find them afterwards when I’m ready to talk about it.
But I think that that modeling’s important too because it gives them permission to take that time for themselves and know that they can always circle back to it. Which I think is healthier in relationships, long term. To be like, “You know what? We shouldn’t talk about this right now. We should take a break.” And my breaks usually are little. They’re like three, four minutes. But it makes a giant difference, I think, in our relationship. No one likes to scream. It feels bad during, it feels bad after, it makes your child feel bad. And it’s not like I’ve never done it. I mean, I think every parent screams sometimes.
TS: Even the neighbors worry.
EC: Yes. I mean, for sure. For sure. But I don’t think that it’s anybody’s go-to tool because it just doesn’t work. It’s not effective. And we want to be effective parents.
TS: And then in terms of scaffolding as a parent, to develop self-control in your kids, what have you found works?
EC: Self-control can be a hard one. What I’ve found through all the research that I’ve done on self-control is that you have to be properly motivated to have the self-control. So you can work a lot on goals and motivation, discipline where there’s buy-in. I think ownership’s really important, that you’re adhering to a set of rules that you think are important and not that somebody else thinks are important, particularly as they get older. So this whole idea of game theory and you’re both in it to win this thing but you as a parent have to win it, so in some ways there’s a little manipulation in some ways that goes into getting them to buy in where they don’t realize that they’re buying in to their own best interest.
So it can be complicated, I think. But it’s funny because there are these studies out there that say “self-control is the most important thing for success,” and that the amount of self-control that you have when you’re in preschool, whether you choose to grab this marshmallow or wait for two marshmallows, that’s so important. And that at age 32 or when you’re an adult, that the levels of self-control that you have are the same, and that the waiters or the delayers ended up being more successful than the preschoolers that didn’t wait, in terms of overall life success and incarceration rates and things like that.
But what I realize is that self-control actually isn’t what we should be cultivating. Instead it’s this idea of self-regulation. So, self-control by itself is just not doing things; “Don’t hit your sister.” “Don’t have eight pieces of chocolate cake.” This is just about don’t do X or don’t do Y. But self-regulation is this idea of a goal and that you’re working towards it. And instead of being a no, it’s a yes. So if you want to get somewhere, you have to have self-control because you realize that avenue won’t work. But it’s using the empathy and the creativity to make a different route to a yes that works for you and also works for everybody else, so that you can have healthy relationships and be successful for yourself.
So the shift away from self-control—self-control is important, but it’s temporary. And self-control is really just a tool on the way to self-regulation, where you don’t want to be a “no” about everything, that’s no way to live a life. “Don’t do this, don’t do that.” You want to not do that but also instead do this because it’s a better way. And you’ve got to be able to come up with lots of creative ways to get there and you’ve got to be able to do it in a way that’s not going to make you damage your relationships.
TS: As we come to a close in our conversation, Erin, I’d like to understand more how you see a family that inhabits and embodies these three skills, how that will help our culture evolve as a whole—the contribution that this type of parenting can make to our entire task we have as a human family right now.
EC: I mean, I think it would be amazing. The world—if everybody had been taught compassion from the very beginning as the most important thing, but in a way that actually lets you reach your own goals? I think people would be happier. I think conflicts would be resolved in a much cleaner way. And I think that … I mean, even down to leadership roles in the ways that countries interact with each other. I think the implications would be enormous. I think the medical profession would completely change. I think people would live longer. I think people would be able to have family lives that stick better.
TS: How would the medical profession change?
EC: Well if you have a group of—let’s say a whole generation that comes up and they hit medical school at the same time already trained in an empathetic response. Studies have shown that your patient outcomes are way better if you are more empathetic and they train in medical programs already for this. So if you have those skill sets coming in, you’re going to … I mean just overall, people will be healthier. Their stress response will be better, there will be lower disease rates, people will stay married, they will just be happier overall. I mean, you may go so far as to say people maybe would have less drug and alcohol abuse because these things are inherently rewarding. And so if you’re getting rewarding behavior, activating your dopamine pathways through compassionate acts, if you’re more satisfied socially, then you’re probably less likely to try to seek out that stimulation elsewhere. So addictive behavior may go down. I think the implications could be enormous.
TS: Your book is called Second Nature: How Parents Can Use Neuroscience to Help Kids Develop Empathy, Creativity, and Self-Control. Tell me about the title, Second Nature. How did that occur to you?
EC: Well, I think that the “second nature” part of it is to come down to that it’s all biological. So we think that some people maybe are born with creativity, born with self-control, or born with empathy. But this idea that you might not have been born with those skills completely intact, no one is born with those skills, great. But that as parents, we can place these experiences in our kids’ paths so that those pathways get strengthened. And once they’re strengthened, they’ll be more likely to be used, and what we want is for our kids to have habits of these things. We want to make neurological habits of these three skills so that this is our kids’ default way of approaching the world—of being, that it’s second nature to them. That it’s their first response to be empathetic, to rush in, to be a doer, to have these creative responses to problem solving.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Erin Clabough, and her new book Second Nature: How Parents Can Use Neuroscience to Help Kids Develop Empathy, Creativity, and Self-Control, I think, is one of the best handbooks for parenting I’ve ever read. Congratulations on writing it. Thank you for writing it. I think it’s going to help many, many, many families. Thank you so much.
EC: Thank you, Tami.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world. Thanks for listening.
