Producer: And welcome back to Full PreFrontal where are exposing the mysteries of executive functions. I am here with our host Sucheta Kamath.

Good morning, Sucheta, looking forward to your second conversation with Dr. Stephanie Carlson, but before we go there, today, we’re going to talk about George Washington’s stepchildren Jacky and Patsy. I guess you can be the founding father of our country and run the country but can you actually run your children’s lives? Explain, please.

Sucheta Kamath: Thank you for such a great introduction, Todd. Frederick Douglas once wrote: “Some men know the value of education by having it. I know its value by not having it.” We know every parents wants the best for their children and they recognize that being educated is the passport to open-minded view of the world. President George Washington was no exception, but he had to deal with many disappointments as a parent. He and his wife Martha Washington did not have any children. However, Martha had four children from her first marriage out of which two lived to survive. Historians describe that George Washington was a generous and attentive father who did not hesitate to indulge in buying expensive gifts from abroad for their kids Jacky and Patsy. Martha Washington was also highly indulgent towards their children as I read about this. Patsy who was an epileptic child who died at 16, but before she died, she had quite a bit of a collection of things such as countless clothes and she owned her own piano, she took dance lessons, she had a parrot. So parents did not spare anything to express their love and affection for the children but Jacky who was John Park Custis from Martha’s previous marriage turned out to be a disappointment. George Washington himself never was formally educated because his father died at a very young – when he was very young but he had keen, keen interest in learning, and so he was a lifelong learner and read a lot, and learned a lot, so he had a lot of hopes from Jacky, but he turned out to be, as described by historians, as soft and lazy. Professor Steven Knot talks about this that Jacky did very poorly throughout his schooling, eventually got married at a very young age. He was always interested in horses and dogs, and things that did not have anything to do with learning, and eventually, he kind of died at a very young age but one interesting thing that came while I was reading about this, that Jacky taught some obscene song to his two-year old and he would, in an attempt to entertain the guest, he would make his child sing that obscene song in front of a company, and of course, that sounds very abhorring and exactly opposite of what George Washington would have liked for his son, so to speak.

So Colin Cowie once said that, “My mother had a wonderful gift of looking at any situation and identifying five things that are beautiful before finding one fault,” and so parenting is hard, not everybody’s as lucky as Colin Cowie to have a lens on life and frame life’s experiences in a positive way for their children, and then there are people like George Washington who would do their best to raise their children with all opportunities along with pampering that makes you feel like an involved parent but navigating childhood imperfections with dark fear that it will cause any destruction of the child’s chance at life is a daunting process, but there is a way to influence child’s development and there are some tricks and some research that tells us what are some effective ways to guide our children.

So today, our very special guest who is coming on again is going to talk about how to teach self-reflection and help children become more independent. So Dr. Stephanie Carlson is a distinguished McKnight University professor and Director of Research at the Institute of Child Development University of Minnesota, the number one ranked department for developmental psychology. Dr. Carlson is an internationally-recognized leader in the study of executive function. She has developed innovative ways of measuring executive function in very young children and has made discoveries about the role of executive function in other important aspects of human development.

Dr. Carlson’s current research focuses on the ways to help promote executive function through physical health such as nutrition and sleep, caregiving practices, and preschool curricula. Her work has been supported by the National Institute of Health, Institute of Education Sciences, Robert Wood-Johnson Foundation, John Templeton Foundation, these are just a few institutions I can name here. She’s also conducted cross-cultural research in North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, and she has been a guest professor at two universities in China. Dr. Carlson is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association of Psychological Sciences and she serves on many editorial boards as the vice-president of the Jean Piaget society, and she’s a member of Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group.

As you can see, her accomplishments are numerous and incredible, and her work has also been featured in several media outlets including TIME, New York Times Magazine, and national public radio. It’s my honor to have her on the show today.

Producer: Yeah, I’m looking forward to yet another great conversation with her, Sucheta. It’s fascinating to think about George Washington. I mean, even a great man such as that struggles at parenting, so it’s almost encouraging to know that even the greats, this is a difficult road to host, so.

Alright, well, this promises as I said, to be another great conversation with Dr. Stephanie Carlson, very much looking forward to it. So let’s get right to it. Here is Sucheta’s second conversation with Dr. Stephanie Carlson.

Sucheta: Hello, Stephanie, thank you for being here today. Welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Stephanie Carlson: Thank you, thanks for having me.

Sucheta: So let’s talk about parenting and development of executive function. In order to successfully raise children, we need to manage, supervise, and redirect our children, and in order to do that, we need to have our own executive skills to manage ourselves, supervise ourselves, and redirect our own thoughts, behaviors, and actions, and it’s not that easy. So what is the relationship between parents’ executive function and child’s executive function?

Dr. Carlson: Right, so yeah, unfortunately, they don’t raise themselves. So we have to intervene somehow. This is actually a question that’s relatively new to come to light by investigators in any kind of formal way even though we’ve suspected it for a long time, that we’ve wondered when we have researched in my lab and we’ve been testing children’s executive function for many years, my students who are research assistants will often say, “Well, yeah, but did you notice that parents’ executive function seemed really awful? They were totally dysregulated when they got here,” and so we’ve kind of had anecdotes about it for a long time, and then more recently began formal investigation of this topic, and partly because we have the tools to be able to do that now too, to measure children’s and parents’ executive function kind of on the same scale with the Minnesota Executive Function Scale and other measures.

So we have looked at parents’ executive function and it’s relation to both their child’s executive function and to their parenting behaviors, parenting skills and quality. So we’ve looked at this both in mothers and fathers, importantly, fathers have tended to be neglected in most of the research on parenting in general, and one of my students Alyssa Mavison has really tried to really fill that gap by including fathers in this research as well, and my student Rebecca DiStefano has looked at this relation between parents’ executive function and their preschool children’s executive function and not surprisingly, when you use the same measure, put it on the same scale, they are significantly correlated, so some people might say –

Sucheta: That’s so fascinating.

Dr. Carlson: “Well, you know that’s just genetics, right?” So of course, you couldn’t rule that out but we also, because we’re developmental psychologists and believe in development and the ability to influence and influence the direction that development takes through environment, we have been looking at the parenting skill as well. So what Rebecca found recently – this is a study that we did with a low-income sample – was that the individual differences in parents’ executive function correlated with their kids’ executive function as I mentioned, but also and importantly, that relation was fully accounted for by the parenting quality, and so what we look at with parenting quality in particular is the way that parents interact, say in a ten-minute dyadic task where they’re solving a puzzle together and the puzzle’s just a little bit too hard for the child to solve on his or her own, so the parent has to help and what we will look at is how they help and how often, and how much they kind of try to take over or control the task, or interfere with what the child is doing, so there’s a pretty well-established coding scheme for measuring what we call autonomy supportive parenting using this task, so a parent who is supporting the child’s autonomy, that means kind of supporting their sense of self, and what this looks like in a dyadic task is to do things like ask open-ended questions like, “Where do you think this piece should go?” or giving them choices, so “Do you think this one would fit better over here or over here?” or following the child’s pace, so not rushing the child, giving them opportunities to reflect, saying things like, “Hmm, I’m not sure, what do you think?” when the child asks to them to kind of basically solve it for them, and that is contrasted with a more controlling style where the parent might be rushing the child, might just kind of like push the child’s hand out of the way, or swat their hand out of the way and say, “Let me do it,” or “I’ll show you,” and would be more just kind of more controlling of the whole situation. Those are kind of two extremes, but what we found is that parents who are more autonomy supportive have kids who are better at executive function, and as we’ve discussed before, in turn, we know that those stronger executive function skills at the school entry predicts better outcomes in school, so it’s really important to look at ways that parents and other caregivers can help to give kids a leg up on these executive function skills by the time they enter school.

So one thing we’ve been focused on that is this autonomy supportive style and how to even potentially coach parents in how to be more autonomy supportive.

Sucheta: I see, so can you elaborate on this a little bit? So when you say a parent who behaved in a more controlling way – they were rushing the child or not really giving any open-ended questions to guide the child’s choices or behaviors, is that because they themselves were being impulsive? Was that a personality difficulty? Or was that their true cognitive difficulty, or it’s hard to decipher the two?

Dr. Carlson: Yeah. Well, we do know that parents with higher executive function skills are way more likely, it’s a very robust correlation to be autonomy supportive with their kids. Parents with relatively low executive function skills are more likely to be more controlling in this setting. So I think, again, it’s partly as you described where for the lower executive function parent, they’re more likely to be frustrated by how long this is taking, if you’ve ever tried to leave the house in the morning to get somewhere with a young child who’s just learning how to tie their shoes, it can be really frustrating, right?

Sucheta: Yes.

Dr. Carlson: Or any child who’s insisting on buckling themselves into the car seat or things like that, that can be just really, really aggravating. If you’re feeling rushed yourself, more sort of stressed and frustrated and so forth, so I think, yeah, I think that the parents’ own capacity around executive function is more limited and that is leading them to be more in kind toward rushing the child and interfering, not being used to reflecting on things themselves very often, and so then not in turn encouraging your child to be reflective.

Sucheta: What’s interesting about what you just said is, I find in my practice that you need good executive functions to follow through with the punishment or reward that you promise your child, and particularly if it spans over time that’s more than minutes, we start getting into “If you do this, then I’ll let you watch a show,” or “If you do this, then I’ll buy you… whatever,” or “If you don’t do this, then you won’t get –“ parents, the poor executive function I find that they don’t remember the promise that they have made, second, they don’t follow through with punishments that they have threatened the child with, and so there’s quite a chaos in terms of that parenting process and definitely, that has an impact in child kind of perceiving that the parents are serious about their threat or reward.

Dr. Carlson: Yeah, and it’s interesting because if the promise is in  the direction of “If you do this, then you’ll get more, say video game time,” well, the child’s going to remind of you that, they’re not going to let you forget that you promised –

Sucheta: Doing what you promised.

Dr. Carlson: Right, but they’re happy to let you forget the punishment, and so I’ve had this in my own child-rearing where I’ll ask my kids to do a chore and then I’ll say, “You’re not leaving –“ they’re teenagers, so “You’re not leaving the house tonight until you’ve done that,” but if things get more busy for me or something I’m more likely to forget that I said that, and then before I know it, I’m waving goodbye to them and they’re off for the evening, and out for the night, and they haven’t done that chore, but I’ve forgotten and they’re happy to let me forget. So it’s just a cycle that can perpetuate itself and particularly in more chaotic households where it’s probably better to remember to do things to steer it in the other direction so that your child will remind you of the reward that you promised.

Sucheta: So how do you train executive function? What does your work and literature say about training these skills in children, as well as do we have a way to train parents to develop these skills for themselves so they can be effective parents?

Dr. Carlson: Yeah, I think – I mean, that’s obviously a really important question and next step in research, and what we are seeing, and there are a number of really excellent investigators doing interventions for executive function for young children – children at risk of school failure, low-income children, for example, and what that research is showing, and still early days, I would say, but we have been able to distill some best practices around how to improve executive function or sort of what works, and also kind of who benefits the most from such interventions. With respect to what works, we see that interventions – and there are a variety of them out there that are effective but the ones that work seem to have in common that they somehow promote reflection and I have been mentioning this word a lot because we do believe that fostering a sense and ability to reflect on your own thoughts, actions, and feelings is a key to improving executive function skills, and so some interventions will promote reflection in a variety of ways. Some of them are through pretend-play and especially in preschooling kindergarten, pretend-play can be a great way to promote reflection, some through mindfulness and similar practice, and circle time games where –

Sucheta: Taking turns?

Dr. Carlson: You have to take turns, yeah, I call it the circle time, it’s like in a preschool setting, you might have games that challenge children’s executive function skills but then it’s important to bring everyone back and kind of talk about it: why was that game hard? Or that game seems really hard, felt really hard for me but not as hard for you, and kind of like, could you feel your brain working? Those kind of things can be really helpful for young kids to be more reflective, and then you also have to keep the challenge level going, so you have to build in activities that continue to kind of meet kids where they are, so as I mentioned earlier, executive function is always effortful by definition, and so if you make a game easy enough now where it’s not challenging anymore, then you’re not taxing and exercising kids’ executive function skills to keep them growing and moving in that direction. And then, in terms of who benefits, another finding that we’re seeing and our colleagues are seeing again and again is that children who are starting the lowest in their executive function skills at the beginning of an intervention are the ones who benefit the most from it, so that’s encouraging, really. We’re in a society with limited resources and funding, and so forth, it is encouraging to know that in fact, the kids who need it most would benefit the most from these interventions.

Sucheta: So in those who are functioning at a lower level, the change is quite apparent, but you’re saying we don’t have a clear understanding those who need a slight improvement but they are functioning at a pretty decent level. Is it hard to capture it or is it hard to even make that shift of finessing that at a higher level?

Dr. Carlson: Yeah. Right, well, I think that – so it’s important to know that interventions don’t harm children who are already high in executive function, and so yeah, it’s not hurting any kids to expose them to some of these strategies and to being more reflective. In fact, I think it’s beneficial for everyone, but it’s possible that the kinds of problems and challenges that kids are facing are not – that you’re presenting kids within that say, kindergarten classroom, for kids who are already high in executive function, it’s possible that you’re just not challenging them enough, and that the same kinds of interventions or strategies would be just as effective for them but you have to kind of tailor it or personalize it more to whatever level of challenge or problem is going to be more challenging for them or where they’re at, so it’s hard to say why it’s not as effective for kids who are already high in executive function, but I do think everyone can benefit from – every student can benefit from a little more organizational skills and planning ability, these are all resting on those neurocognitive executive function skills.

Sucheta: And what my experience has been, that I see a – this is again, not scientifically proven – but I see a one-third, one-third, one-third distribution that there is one-third of the classroom population in every given day has great executive function skills and they just are waiting for an opportunity to go exercise those skills, then one-third are unaware of their full potential but they just need that exposure and practice and they can perform at a good level or can excel, and then there’s that one-third population who doesn’t know how to discover that set of skill to adapt and when their effort and their participation becomes effortful, they are not able to keep up with that, and so yes, I find that good practices that I employed in the classroom, every child can benefit, not just – should not be directed towards those are struggling, and I think that’s where I think teaching students to learn to learn can be very beneficial, I find.

Dr. Carlson: Yes, absolutely. I think a really exciting new direction in this research is to look more deeply at the relationship between executive function and learning, so we’ve talked about these sort of more long-term or distal relations between early executive function, later academic outcomes, but to date, no one’s really gotten a handle on exactly how that occurs, so we suspect that children with higher executive function skills are stronger learners, in a number of ways, being able to monitor their own learning or their own forgetting through metacognition, being able to be more reflective, to pay more attention, to benefit more from the same amount of instruction compared to a peer with a lower level of executive function, you would deliver the same sort of “dose,” if you will, of instruction and the same quality of instruction, or for better or worse, the same curriculum, same textbook and everything, but the child with higher executive function for some reason is going to absorb more of the information and be able to work with it, be able to transfer it, relate it to something else to maybe some other topics that they’re learning in some other class, and synthesize it.

So we’re really interested now in exploring more deeply the mechanisms that are involved in executive function and learning.

Sucheta: Oh, I’m so excited you will be taking this one. I really think that will shed a light onto these more hidden processes and kind of translate this research into practical application where instead of like many schools I find that are doing extra help or support and then those students who need the help, either are not showing up or they don’t know what to ask, or they show up, they ask, but they don’t understand but they don’t know how to tell them because they feel bad that they didn’t get the help, they didn’t benefit from the help that they are receiving.

So thank you so much, Stephanie, for your time. Before I let you go, many people would love to know more about your research and your work, what’s the best way you recommend for them to get in touch with you or find out more about your work?

Dr. Carlson: Well, thank you. I recommend they go to my website at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota. It’s the Carlson and Zelazo lab – I have a joint lab with Professor Phil Zelazo – or the company website that we formed, reflectionsciences.com where we provide assessment tools and professional development for educators and parents around the topic of executive function.

Sucheta: Terrific, thank you once again, and can’t wait to see this being received by many people. Thanks.

Dr. Carlson: Thank you.

Producer: Alright, that was Dr. Stephanie Carlson and as I suspected, Sucheta, another stellar conversation with her, great stuff. Any initial thoughts you want to share with us?

Sucheta: Yes, the first and most important golden truth here, Todd, is to help children develop strong executive function and form self-regulation is to teach them to reflect on their own thoughts and actions, and feelings. That’s the most important thing and parents need to really find out, how are they doing that? Are they doing that on a regular basis? They must keep on challenging their children and ask, “Can you feel your brain working?” In my field, we call this meta-awareness, which is awareness of awareness.

Dr. Carlson said that every child can benefit from tweaking and polishing these neurocognitive functions and her work, and many researchers are looking deeply at the reality of the connecting between executive function and learning, and they are coming to conclusion that the self-reflection can be the founding path to self-awareness which can be one of the ways and the only way you can direct your attention, direct your impulses, and direct your emotions in more healthy adjustment.

Secondly, I think the family culture that engages in games such as pretend games where you take a point of view of somebody else or engages in mindful discussion, or mindful slowing-down, and thirdly, playing challenging games that challenge the brain’s adaptive skills can really be helpful. So we want a self-reflection happening in the family and we want family to be playful, and when you do that together, you are, in a way, offering an intervention at home.

Producer: Alright, so autonomy supportive parenting, can you please summarize that one more time, please?

Sucheta: I would love to summarize autonomy supportive parenting one more time so parents can really inculcate the idea, but before I do that, I would love to do a quick survey and this doesn’t need to really apply exclusively to parents; anywhere I say child, you can substitute that by your employee or you can say people that you manage, but here are some questions:

Are you readily frustrated with your child’s approach or method which could certainly be improved? My second question is, do you find your child’s performance dissatisfying such that you’re too quick to judge or react? Third question, do you feel you’re impatient because the child is taking too long for something you deem that it shouldn’t? And next question, do you find yourself being impulsive in your own actions, answers, or behaviors, and not taking the time to reflect on these behaviors? And finally, do you like to take over?

So the pause here for you guys to reflect, so if you said yes to many of these questions, then you may be engaged in controlling parenting style, you might want to investigate your own executive function capacity before you start changing your control or rather, not focused too much on controlling aspect of it but kind of understand why are you not promoting the development of child’s capacity to change himself or herself rather than you being in charge of change, casting a changing. Failing to reflect and failing to encourage reflection can have destructive impact on the child’s self-regulation, but parents have an option to move towards a better way to parent. How about this autonomy supportive parenting that Dr. Carlson talked about?

So this particular style of parenting centers around supporting the child’s sense of self as she described. If kids are younger, then by slowing down and going at child’s pace can really be valuable to the child. If the kids are older – and this will work with younger kids as well – but by giving them an opportunity to reflect with things like, “I’m not sure if this will work,” you can just say that statement and invoke reflection. You can say, “Have you thought about it a little bit more?” and that can invoke some pause and reflection, and lastly, that sounds difficult, do you know why? So that can lead to more investigation of why certain aspects are challenging or difficult for the child.

So how often you help and how you help are the key components of autonomy supportive parenting. This as a style of parenting can give kids a leg up because now, the kids are equipped with an internal pause button which they can activate to self-reflect during which the magic of self-regulation can begin to happen.

Producer: Well, thank you for reviewing that with us, Sucheta. I appreciate that. Before we bring this episode to a close, any additional thoughts you’d like to share, please?

Sucheta: Yes, absolutely, Todd. Life demands that we plan ahead, anticipate roadblocks, circumvent problems without frustration or anger, with perseverance by devising new strategies not just to survive but to soar. Researchers suggest that self-regulation can be understood as a broader concept applied to guiding, redirecting, and controlling behaviors in complex real-life situations. So executive function in these circumstances are more foundational skills and self-regulation skills stand on top of them in a complex life situation scenario. The life demands either scale up or scale down based on age or socioeconomic background, or various other factors, but no one is spared from such adaptive adjustment.

Children need to be taught to anticipate roadblocks, manage emotions while responding to unfavorable circumstances, and they need to learn to engage with adaptive resilience, and I know I’m throwing these words out that sounds like resilience generally can be witnessed, I guess, and people always wonder, can it be taught? So resilience as I was mentioning earlier, and Dr. Carlson has gone over this as well, is a matter of a systematic way of teaching reflection and kind of detaching yourself from that situation where the discomfort or unfavorable outcomes are experienced.

Sooner we start teaching these skills related to executive function and self-regulation through self-reflection, the better it is for academic and general success, so in conclusion, this is what I will say:

To instill the ability to self-reflect can prove to be a simple and yet long-lasting solution for all individuals. Not just for children but anyone and everyone.

Producer: Alright, well, that’s all the time we have for today. On behalf of our host Sucheta Kamath and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for listening today and we look forward to seeing you next week on Full PreFrontal for yet another fascinating conversation. We’ll see you then.