Fresh Take: Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Dr. Roberta Golinkoff

0:01At DSW, we ask the important questions like, what shoes are you going to wear? Whether you're prepping for wedding season, festival season, or just planning the ultimate vacay, the right shoes can make or break an RSVP. So own the moment. You've got big plans and we've got just the shoes. At the perfect price, of course. Get ready to get ready with Designer Shoe Warehouse. Head to your DSW store or DSW.com today and let us surprise you. Hey, everybody. Welcome to What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Amy. Today we have two guests. I'm talking to Dr. Kathy Hirsch-Pasek. She is a professor in the psychology department at Temple University.

0:44She directs the Temple Infant and Child Laboratory, where she studies how children learn and flourish. We also have Dr. Roberta Michnik-Golinkoff, who directs the Child's Play, Learning, and Development Lab at the University of Delaware. They are co-authors of a parenting classic that is now out in a newly revised version. Einstein never used flashcards, how our children really learn, and why they need to play more and memorize less. Welcome, Kathy and Roberta. Thank you so much. So great to be here. Thank you. So let's start in 2003, which is the year that this book first came out, and it was the year my first child was born at the end of 2002.

1:25So this is my year of becoming a parent really was 2003. I remember it being in a pretty intense moment. So and not much has changed. So I'm curious, what made you write the book back then? And what made you say, oh, we need to re-up this message? I think it's the same message, don't you think, Kathy? Only worse. Oh, my God. You only need us more. You talk about the hell that faces parents every single day. Yeah. And I think around that time, as I recall, is when we had the tsunami of pamphlets. Everybody was going to tell parents what to do. Now, as a parent, I was just trying to survive each day.

2:08The last thing I had time for with three kids was sitting around and reading your pamphlets. So what happened, though, was amazing. Robert and I realized we wrote this book. It was a really successful book. And then they asked us to rewrite it because it was so successful. So that's great. Yeah. But wait, 2003 was four years before the iPhone came out. Wow. I mean, it was eight years before the iPad came out. So now, if parenting was crazy then, it's insane now. And it has totally turned our lives upside down, Amy. I don't have to tell you. We spend more time, and I include myself on that. I'm addicted to this little box, but I have to control it.

2:59It takes away from our parenting. Of course, not when they listen to your podcast. Other than that, though. It takes away from our time with our kids, with our spouses. You know, we're very tempted when we walk around and we're using our phone and our spouse says something to us and we, what, what? You know, because we're so into something else. We want to help parents enjoy parenting. And when you say how to laugh in the face of motherhood, laughing in the face of motherhood. I don't want them to laugh ruefully. I want them to laugh with glee because they're witnessing an amazing thing that just happened with their kid.

3:43And I do remember being a parent back then when I wrote about it, this sort of intensity, the messages that came at you unbidden. but it was different when there wasn't a phone. When I was nursing my babies, I'd have music playing. Maybe I'd have the TV on, but that was it. I wasn't looking at my phone, finding out 10 new ways I was messing up. It wasn't as constant. It is constant. My son and daughter-in-law just had a baby. I am astounded at what is facing parents today, I found out that there's almost 100 apps out there that you can use to measure every ounce of food your baby's getting and then how much tummy time they're having.

4:26Oh my gosh, I feel overwhelmed listening to the numbers game of what they have to fill into the app. Yeah, right. Those are supposed to bring reassurance, I would say, that people create that. It's like, you'll see, you'll see right here how much your baby's sleeping or not sleeping. But instead, it's then you have a new job to keep up with them. Right, right, right. I was telling them, you know, you'll probably know without a monitor that your baby just woke up. But seriously, they are great parents. And I can imagine that this whole scene is just scaring the heck out of parents. And what we're learning, In fact, there was a new paper literally just came out this week that starting early with all this stuff so they're going to be great professionals later, whether it's piano or soccer, doesn't work.

5:17You had a study. I wanted to ask you about that, a study that you did, Kathy, on academic preschools versus more traditional play-based preschools. So tell us about that. Well, the study was really to compare what was going on. This is the 90s as we're approaching the 2000s. thousands. And I thought, whoa, something's going on here. Like school has become this bastion of academic learning and we have to see whether this is really working for kids. And the answer was, it wasn't. Isn't that amazing? The kids in the play-based environment, and we call it playful learning. You can still have a learning goal, but the kids in the play-based learning goal environments were happier, had more social emotional control, that's right, less impulse to do stuff.

6:02And guess what? They equaled or did better than the kids in the academic environment with math and reading. Duh. Right. And were you surprised by that? Or were you hoping to see that in the results? Were you not sure? Well, you know, you always hope to see, but as a scientist, you have to see what you get. Right, right, right. But I think Robert and I expected it because really play is learning. If there was one great epiphany that I want to throw to Roberta, the very characteristics of how the human brain learns are exactly the characteristics of how kids play. Isn't that incredible? Wow. It's true.

6:40One of the reasons too, that we started out in 2003 was that there were myths being pushed by the marketplace. Now it's a combination of the marketplace and media, which makes everything worse. Because as you pointed out, Amy, in the past, when you nursed your kid, it was a quiet time. You might have had music. Now everybody is using their phone while they're nursing at the same time. So what are the risks that are being pushed on parents? First, faster is better. Right. If you can do it faster, if you can get your kid to walk faster. Oh, what a heartache that is. It doesn't know which way is up and they'll fall off the bed and the floor.

7:24You know, faster is better. Make every moment count because you are the sculptor of your child's brain. False. Full stop. False. Parents are omnipotent. And what you do is going to determine your child's success in life. Not so. You want to have loving, nurturing conversations and take your kids to exotic places like the supermarket. No entry thing. You can talk with your kid there. Your kid can learn tons. You don't have to do the extra classes if you don't want to. And finally, that our kids are empty vessels. It's almost like you could open up the top and pour knowledge in and your kid will be ready for Yale.

8:10Right. You have to fight this so that the title of your podcast can be a little bit different. It's what fresh hell could there be, but not fresh heaven, fresh heaven. But Amy, you asked about the characteristics. Let me just go back to them for a moment. So human brains actually learn by being active, not passive. Okay. So it's kind of like when you're drilling a kid and the kid's just a lump on the couch, that's not going to work unless they're engaged in it. So active, engaged. It has to be meaningful to them. If you're trying to read them something they don't understand or teach them something that makes no sense, they won't learn it.

8:48Okay? Here's the biggie. This is such a biggie. It has to be socially interactive. It turns out the human brain is a social brain. That's how our species was made. So we learn better when we're back and forth in conversation with adults than we do when somebody who's just dumping stuff into an empty brain that doesn't exist. And finally, it should be joyful. And human brains love it when they're having fun. You remember those moments. Yep. Yeah. Well, it makes me think about, say, like, story time at the library. My dad used to take my niece to story time at the library. It was their time together.

9:27And was he doing that to get her into Johns Hopkins? No, he was doing it because it was fun and she could see other little kids and they play with some scarves and they'd listen to a story and sometimes she'd wander off and you know that it was not I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say like never take your kid anywhere it's like no I think it's okay to go to story time at the library right but it's also okay to take them to the supermarket and what you're saying is both can be equally interesting learning environments remember everything that your kid sees is new you know like to us.

9:59Another trip to the supermarket. Not to the kid. Everything is new. Imagine you're in the vegetables and you say, you know that there's one purple vegetable? And the kid says, what? And you show them an eggplant and you have them feel it and you talk about the texture. It's the only shiny and purple vegetable we got. You make it fun for the kid and for you. How long does that take? About 30 seconds. I know everybody is rushed. I know sometimes when you go to the supermarket, that's when you see parents at their worst, their most stressed. 30 seconds to calm down for both of you and show them an eggplant.

10:41What a difference that could make. And you also talk about how learning can be iterative. And you gave the example of when you're putting napkins on the table for dinner, that there's one napkin per person. I forget what that's called, but it's a mathematical concepts. One-to-one correspondence. Well, there you go. Who would guess, by the way, that setting the table is teaching your four-year-old basic math skills, right? We never think about that. But the things we engage in, I used to have so much fun. We would take a walk and I would have this game, don't step on a crack. Two steps forward and one step back, If you ever step on a crack, but the kids get into it, we start counting how far they could go without stepping on a crack.

11:27And voila, they're counting and using the number line, which turns out to be really, really important for later math learning. And what I love about this approach, too, is that it's available to us, but it's also easier. The goal for the parent is to observe and to introduce it isn't, but don't take them to bassoon lessons. You have to do it yourself in the home. Like, no, you have to let them use a Tupperware as a drum. Like that's the assignment to make it all. No, that's exactly right. And let us take your pots and pans as a drum. Now, I grant you, it sounds awful, but you can have some real fun.

12:06So I had, this was during COVID. It was one of my activities with my grandkids. So we had a green bowl and we had a white bowl and we had a red bowl and I turned them upside down. Okay. Then I gave the kids two forks and they had to knock out a pattern, two green, one red, one white. Okay. Or two white, two green, three red. And the kids were playing music. But what were they really learning? Patterns. What do patterns have to do with? They predict out to formal education. So if we gamify this stuff, look what they can learn. I'm talking to Dr. Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and Dr. Roberta Golinkoff about their book, Einstein Never Used Flashcards.

12:49And we'll be right back. You know, every parent can relate to being out of some crucial item and facing the horrible prospect of getting all the kids into the car to the grocery store to pick up more. and it's like, how badly, Amy, do I actually really need or want that milk? That's when it's time to think DoorDash, which I've always thought of as just for takeout, which takeout is also the savior of many a night for parents. But DoorDash can also save you when your kid has a school project due tomorrow that they haven't started yet and you're out of glue sticks. Ah, a familiar scenario, to say the least.

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16:09As you know, my husband and I are preparing to send, yes, three kids off to college. And I cannot tell you how helpful Monarch has been in showing us our full financial picture, helping us to track our spending and reach important savings milestones. Our weekly meeting, Amy, it's now run by Monarch. Love it. Achieve your financial goals for good with Monarch, the all-in-one tool that makes money management simple. Use code FRESH at Monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50 % off at monarch.com, code FRESH. So, Kathy, you were saying before the break that you're teaching your kids pattern recognition, and I'm hearing the anxious parents who might be thinking, yeah, but how do I know what the games are and what the things are they're supposed to be learning?

17:00That's actually what this book is for. So tell us about the things in the book that you walk them towards that very cool, oh, this is that thing I read about, and now it's happening. So after we tell them how different kinds of things develop, and we really talk about all different kinds of development. We talk about how to bring the lessons home and how to try them with your own kid. We were talking about story time before. One of the things that we ask parents to do starting when their kid is little is hand your kid a book. See what the kid does. Does the kid know to turn it around? Does the kid know where the words are and which way the page is turned?

17:37And you can get a lot of idea of the exposure that your kid has had to books, hopefully a lot with you, by seeing how they handle a brand new book that you hand to them. And you can try it like every six months and you'll see amazing learning. Now, this sounds like not a big deal, but I hate to tell you, there are kids, probably not among your listeners, who get to school and don't know anything about books and how they're read and where the words are. So it's pretty significant for kids to learn that. They learn it incidentally having fun with you during story time, which can be any time. Yeah, so let me give you a couple more examples again.

18:21And so one of the examples to build on story time is how do you learn the structure of a story? So we had a game in our house where you had to pick a character. I just took whatever popular characters were in magazines and stuff I got, or I printed them out from the computer. By the way, all this is in the book. And then what's the context? You get to pick your context. You could be in a forest. You could be at the swimming pool. And so you have now a character and a context. You have a conflict. and then you get to pick a resolution. Then you get to tell your story. Well, what are you really learning?

18:56You're learning how to tell a story in a narrative structure that helps reading development. But let me go to one social one that was so much fun. So I don't know about your moms, but my kids seem to love picking their nose and I could not figure out how to get around this nose picking stuff. So I decided that we would make a game out of it. At 7.15 in the morning and in the evening, we had nose picking time. Okay. Now you had or got to pick your nose for an entire minute. Do you know how tough that is? Okay. So the kids would start, It was 7.15. And I said, come on, guys, you have 45 seconds left.

19:43Well, what are we going to do? Just pick your nose. They never picked their nose outside the time window. It was over. They knew there was a special time for it. If we want to make it that it's not fresh hell every time you engage in the parenting exchange, you want your kids to develop the fancy name as executive function. And everybody knows what it is, but I'll just say real quickly, it's being able to control your impulses. So if the kid next to you is using a pen, you like, you don't just grab it. And it's being able to shift rapidly between tasks. That's really important for school, as you might imagine.

20:22And to hold things in working memory, like what do I have to do? I have a problem. So executive function games, we talk about this in the book too, are the kinds of things we played when we were kids, but they make a difference because they help kids learn to control themselves. Amy, did you play Red Light, Green Light? Sure. Or Red Rover, Red Rover. Red Rover, Red Rover. How about Simon Says? Right. Okay. These are all executive function games. You just didn't know it. Mother May I, did you play that? Yes, I did. It's occurring to me now these are all kind of the same game, but yes, you have to wait your turn.

21:01You're right. You're Chairs. Musical chairs, a good one, is how to control yourself, how to stop yourself from doing something and how to start up when you need to. So one thing you can do, even if you have grandkids you're talking to from afar, you can play freeze dance. You can put on music and tell them they can jump up and around and dance. But when you turn the music off, they got to stop. And you can make that so fun for them. Let's talk about that because I heard you on another interview, I believe it was Kathy, talking about kids aren't supposed to have screen time before too. Okay, that's a good idea.

21:36Don't stick a screen in front of your baby all the time. But the idea that they're not allowed to FaceTime with their grandparents because that screen time is an over-application. It's crazy. Tell us a little bit about how that connection with the grandparents is, one, positive, and two, how it can become even more fun with these games. Oh, absolutely. We do these kinds of things with our own grandkids over Zoom. We want our grandkids to know us. Mine are in California. Kathy's got them in Chicago and in Michigan, and it's rough. So if you want your grandkids to know you, come up with fun stuff that you can do with them.

22:13And when you're lucky enough to be led into their lives while they're doing something else, treat it as if you were there. Here's a case in point. You're seeing I'm in a Zoom. I have these at my ready when I'm talking to my grandkids. We play games, we write stories, and we write the stories together. That's one of our games. One game we had is that I had my kids, they're into Legos. So I got the same Legos they got. So they build something with their Legos, I copy theirs, and then I make something and see if they can copy me. Wow. And it'll keep it on the phone with grandma a little longer, right?

22:52Oh, it does. It does. Or your aunt, right? There you go. Kathy and I actually found these in Argentina. I use them with my grandkids and they love them because I can give the person a name. So I have to describe what we're doing because people aren't on video. I am holding up a puppet with a weird face in which you put your hand so that you can And even move the puppet's mouth from the inside and show it smiling, etc. You know, this is Esmeralda. And she wants to know, what did you do today that you had a good time at? Can you tell her? That's so interesting. And why are kids more engaged with a puppet or more willing to talk sometimes?

23:36What is it about child development that makes that so? There's a lot to be said for fantasy. Kids love fantasy. Like a lot of kids are still into Santa Claus and they're into the tooth fairy. I hear about that a lot. So kids just love it and they can transfer a lot without any threat to a puppet. It's a great way for them to get their feelings out. And there you are as the grandparent kind of listening in and helping your kids. By the way, you can also read over Zoom. And the kids love it when you read a book, especially a book that they have too. and they can just turn the pages with you. Yes.

24:15These are great ideas. And again, this is not make sure whenever you talk to your grandchildren or your nieces and nephews, it's enriching or else it's not that. Right, right, right. But this is a way to deepen connection. That's right. The kid is engaged. Amy, imagine what we typically say. You know, the kid gets on and say, Hi, what did you do today? Kid went to school. What happened in school? Nothing. Nothing ever happens at school. Yeah. So strange. You could think of fun things. I have all these little things I was given traveling around the world and speaking. And I will often show them to the kids, especially when they're little and we'll make up a story and talk about them.

24:54And it's such a richer interaction than the kid feeling like they don't want to be there. Right. Or getting the third degree. What happened? Nothing. How was lunch? Good. So I want to give you the cure to nothing. Okay. Because I think your parents might really like this. So when my kids were preschool and now for my grandkids, I ask for the class list. Okay. That means I have the name of every kid in their class. Now, instead of asking general questions where we'll always get nothing or they won't answer, I say, oh, was Johnny playing at the water table today? The answer I get is, no, he doesn't like the water table.

25:35He was painting. Oh, that's right. He was using the blue paint, wasn't he, to paint the sky? No, I don't think you really saw his painting. It was the red one that he did of the fire truck. I am telling you, I knew more about my kid's environment than most of the parents in the school. And they would call me and they would say, can you tell me what's really going on in that school? So what's Johnny doing? Right, at the easel, right? Why isn't he at the water table? Doing nothing. And I had, man, I had the scoop. And the other thing about it that I really want to stress is that in something like FaceTime, they get to know you.

26:12And maybe there is nothing, no, I'll say it firmly. There is nothing, nothing, nothing more important than human to human relationships. Nothing. And when our kids form them, they feel safe. They learn a lot from us. They have someone who's trusted. And believe it or not, because our brain is a social brain, when they learn the social skills and know who you are, that's helping them be prepared for learning. We're talking to Dr. Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and Dr. Roberta Golinkoff. Their book is called Einstein Never Used Flashcards, and we'll be right back. Fun fact, everyone, tea is the oldest drink in the world, I mean, besides water.

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