The focus on “toxic stress,” ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), and trauma-informed care have been game-changers in the field of early childhood development. They have helped us recognize the symptoms of trauma, provide appropriate assistance to children, and understand that prolonged adversity in the absence of nurturing relationships can derail a child’s healthy development. Just look at the media’s and the public’s reaction to the impact of separating families at our southern border or at Florida’s statewide trauma-informed initiative as compelling examples of how these concepts have led to change.

So, given these positive results, it may be a surprise that I propose expanding beyond these problem-focused, trauma-laced concepts to narratives and solutions that are rooted in children’s and families’ assets. Here’s my journey—why I have come to these conclusions—as well as examples of solutions.

KEY POINT I: ADVERSITY IS NOT DESTINY.

Not too long after the words “toxic stress” were introduced by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child in 2005, our team at Mind in the Making, now a program of the Bezos Family Foundation focused on the science of children’s learning, was conducting a training program for educators. One of the participants wanted to discuss what differentiates positive stress from tolerable stress from toxic stress.

We knew that these words make complex scientific concepts understandable—they enable policymakers and the public at large to grasp how early and ongoing adversity activates biological stress response systems of a child’s developing brain, immune system, metabolic regulatory systems, and cardiovascular system.

During this discussion, a well-known educator sounded an alarm. Toxic stress, she said, doesn’t just affect the children we work with. It affects their parents, their teachers, and many of the educators in this room, including herself. Her voice full of emotion, she said that she would never use the words “toxic stress” with parents or educators because “toxic stress—well, it sounds so fatal.”

To be clear, the Harvard Center continues to emphasize the “resilience” of the developing child—the brain’s and the body’s ability to manage and recover from severe stress, as well as how caring relationships can act as an antidote to stress. Nonetheless, I’ve found that I have to make this point repeatedly in discussions of adversity, because this language may imply that toxic stress could, in fact, be fatal. My mantra has become “adversity is not destiny.”

KEY POINT 2: STEREOTYPING CAN SERIOUSLY HARM CHILDREN.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines ACEs as “all types of abuse, neglect, and other potentially traumatic experiences that occur to people under the age of 18.” The concept originated from a large CDC-Kaiser Permanente study that took place from 1995-1997 in which participants received questions about exposure to forms of household dysfunction prior to turning 18.

In more recent replications of the original study, researchers found more than two-thirds of participants experienced at least one ACE and one in five experienced three or more. The more ACEs an individual experienced before 18, the more likely s/he were to suffer from substance abuse, depression, health problems, or attempt suicide. A 2018 Child Trends’ study found that 45 percent of children in the U.S. have experienced at least one ACE, and one in nine children nationally has experienced three or more ACEs.

Knowing that a child is in a family where there is divorce or a violent community often leads people to make negative assumptions about children. I have been in too many meetings where participants assumed that children with disruptive behavior or in low-income communities have high ACE scores—and maybe even small brains. These children are being stereotyped, and stereotypes can harm children, lead to discrimination, and even become self-fulfilling prophecies. Again, words and the assumptions they conjure matter. We should not make assumptions just because children live in poverty or have experienced adversity.

KEY POINT 3: PEOPLE WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED TRAUMA SHOULD NOT BE “DEFINED” BY THEIR TRAUMA.

The National Child Traumatic Stress Network has been a powerful and effective proponent of creating trauma-informed programs and systems that “infuse and sustain trauma awareness, knowledge, and skills into their organizational cultures, practices, and policies.” Their mission is to facilitate the safety and recovery of every child and family so they can thrive.

It was in a conducting a healing circle for African-American youth that led Shawn Ginwright of San Francisco State University to the conclusion that we need to move beyond trauma-informed care to healing-centered engagement. As he writes:

All of them had experienced some form of trauma ranging from sexual abuse, violence, homelessness, abandonment, or all of the above. During one of our sessions, I explained the impact of stress and trauma on brain development and how trauma can influence emotional health. As I was explaining, one of the young men in the group named Marcus abruptly stopped me and said, ‘I am more than what happened to me. I’m not just my trauma.’

KEY POINT 4: WE NEED TO BUILD ON CHILDREN’S AND FAMILIES’ ASSETS.

Without a doubt, the emphasis on toxic stress, ACEs, and trauma-informed care has been beneficial. Teachers who have received ACEs training are less likely to assume that children who act out are “willful” or “bad” and to expel children from school for poor behavior. School officials with similar training have begun listening to children more and helping them learn to manage their behavior through practices like mindfulness. These changes are worth their weight in gold.

But, it’s time to shift beyond a focus on these trauma-laced concepts. As child and adversity expert Philip Fisher of the University of Oregon said, “focusing on trauma is the starting line, not the finish line.” Successful interventions are asset-based, focusing and expanding on what children and adults are already doing that’s right. Here are two examples of this approach:

First, Alicia Lieberman of the University of California, San Francisco developed a program called Attachment Vitamins, a 10-week course helping parents and caregivers of children from birth through age 5 repair the impact of chronic stress and trauma by promoting emotional attunement, mindfulness, and executive and reflective functioning. Lieberman and her colleagues describe how they set the tone for the first session of this intervention.

The first question asked of parents is, “Tell me what you love most about your child.” By asking parents what they love most about their child, the facilitators tell parents that they assume they are, in fact, loving parents…It is a strength-based approach that places the focus on the parent’s primary motivation for the class—the relationship with the child.

Throughout the program, parents share “moments of connection” with their child. Parents are encouraged to choose specific moments so they know the strengths of their relationships and engage in more connection opportunities, even as they probe and address the impact of trauma on their family. Reprinted from The Brookings Institution

Co-authored by Philip David Zelazo, PhD, Stephanie M. Carlson, PhD, and Megan M. McClelland, PhD

Every year, millions of children across the United States will begin kindergarten. From public school to home school, and everything in between, parents, teachers and caregivers will do all they can to ensure that this transition into a formal school setting is as successful as possible. There are many factors that help determine this success, but one stands out as foundational to all the rest: executive function.

Imagine three kindergarten children working on a number activity. Mary is focusing and working through the activities together with Manuel, but the third child, Addy, is easily distracted, has a hard time remembering what to do, and keeps trying to interrupt Mary and Manuel. It is clear that Mary and Manuel will be more successful at learning from these activities than Addy, and the latest scientific research shows us that this can be directly tied to Addy’s “executive function” skills.

Executive function refers to the self-regulatory skills children need to manage attention, thought, emotion, and behavior in order to pursue goals. They are at the core of every child’s ability to do well in school, making it possible for a youngster to think flexibly and creatively, keep needed information in mind, and resist distractions.

As researchers who study children’s brain development, school readiness, and success in school, we are among many others who have demonstrated the importance of children’s executive function skills, particularly as they make the transition into more formal educational environments.

Our research indicates that children with better executive function skills are likely to learn more from the same amount of instruction, and to understand and get along better with other children and adults.

Among very low-income children at risk of school failure, it’s those with more developed executive function skills who are resilient and meet academic standards despite their disadvantaged circumstances.

Overall, children with stronger executive function skills are more likely to do well in school and even graduate from college compared to children who are weaker in these skills.

The scientific link between executive function and school success couldn’t be clearer, but the real opportunity lies in taking that science out of the lab and putting it into practice inside the homes and classrooms of our youngest learners.

While no child is born with executive function skills, all children have the potential to develop them. There is solid scientific evidence that executive function skills can be improved through practice, producing well-documented changes not only to children’s behavior but to their brains as well.

To aid parents and caregivers in supporting this healthy development, researchers who specialize in childhood brain development are working to bridge the gap between science and application. Books like “Einstein Never Used Flashcards” and initiatives like Vroom and Mind in the Making focus on helping parents and caregivers turn everyday moments like mealtime and bathtime into opportunities for strengthening executive function skills. By promoting supportive, reliable relationships between children and caring adults, communities can make a huge impact in preparing their early learners for success in school.

The importance of focusing on executive function is clear: these skills are the foundation for children to become effective, engaged, and self-directed learners. We now need to increase the scientific and practical efforts to develop evidence-based interventions targeting the executive function skills that underlie academic success. The sooner we agree to make executive function skills a priority, the better equipped we are to help the millions of kids going to school get the most out of their experience.

Philip David Zelazo, PhD, is the Nancy M. and John E. Lindahl Professor, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota.

Stephanie M. Carlson, PhD, is Professor and Director of Research, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota.

Megan M. McClelland, PhD, is the Katherine E. Smith Healthy Children and Families Professor, Hallie E. Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families, Oregon State University.

Reprinted from The Huffington Post

When Daniel Stern died, we lost one of the truly greats in child development research and theory.

Daniel Stern was a psychiatrist, an author and a researcher at what’s now the Weill Cornell Medical College and at the University of Geneva, however the key to his greatness was not in his credentials, but in his vision. He had an uncanny ability to detect when child development orthodoxy was off kilter and in need of revision, of seeking the truth and then of finding highly imaginative ways to investigate his theory. Impressively, he expressed his findings in words that often read like poetry.

An example of this was the accepted worldview in the 1970s—that infants were born without a sense of self—that their experiences at birth were “fused” with their mothers—and that their mission in growing up was to separate from their mothers, to become independent individuals.

That view didn’t seem right to Stern and he set out to test it. When I once asked him why he saw a different reality, he responded that he was a watcher of people, especially of babies. As is the case for many of us, this interest and passion had its roots in his childhood. He told me:

The real reason I got interested in children who can’t {yet} talk comes from when I was little. We had a Czech nursemaid and she spoke only Czech. I spent most of my time with her and I learned to understand Czech and much less English. When I was about 2, I got very sick and was in the hospital for five months or so. When I got to the hospital, people realized that I didn’t speak English. And in those days, the idea of having a nursemaid come to the hospital was out of the question.

Because he didn’t understand what was happening to him at the hospital, Stern became a watcher:

I became totally attuned to what people were doing, what happened to their faces. I would listen to them, but I would listen to the music and not the lyrics, because I didn’t understand the lyrics.

His interest in being a “watcher” affected his career path—from MD to neuroscience to child psychiatry—but ultimately, he found his way back to watching behavior by using a lightweight television camera (a microscope for looking at behavior, as he described it) to record the interaction between mothers and infants.

As you can imagine, it’s difficult to detect what is going on in infants, but Stern developed some ingenious methods. Using freeze frames and slow motion, he saw that these interactions were like natural choreography — a dance. The babies moved in striking synchrony with their mothers: the mother would move her arm, and the baby would move his or her arm to mirror the mother’s.

These split-second analyses seemed to contradict the “fusion model.” Stern began to suspect that if an infant “knows” that his arm is moving one way and his mother’s arm is not, then the infant’s experiences are not totally fused with those of the mother.

Stern also noticed infants reaching for things. The baby clearly wanted something, planned to get it, and then completed the action. If the baby missed the object, the baby would “correct” the action and reach for the object again. But if the mother went through the same process—reaching for something the baby wanted and missing it—the baby didn’t do anything to correct the situation. This was also a clue that infants “knew” in some fundamental way that they were different from their mothers.

The moment, years ago, when I viewed Stern’s films of that lyrical back-and-forth dance between mother and child, the way I literally saw adults and children connecting—in both my professional and my personal life—was transformed from black-and-white into brilliant color. To say that I was transformed is putting it mildly. These everyday moments between parent and child happen all around us all the time—from the playground to the park to the supermarket checkout line—but if you tune into them and realize how magical they are, I am sure that you will be transformed too: The child does something, the adult seemingly unconsciously mirrors the child’s action and vice versa. As the child grows, the dance becomes more and more elaborate. At first the adult more or less mimics the child, but over time, the interplay becomes complex: Movements and sounds become actions and words, then interactions and conversation. A relationship is born and nurtured. Parent and child are learning to be together.

Once Stern saw that babies seem to “know” they are different from others, he tested this idea in numerous ways, including with Siamese twins. They were five months old when Stern found out about them, and he had one week to observe them before the surgery to separate them:

I went there every day with my cameras. They didn’t look at each other, because their heads were too close.

They did, however, suck each other’s thumbs:

So I wondered, could they — being almost one organism — could they tell the difference as to whose thumb they were sucking?

And they could:

if the baby was sucking the other kid’s thumb and I took his hand away, the baby wouldn’t do anything with his arm, but he’d bring his head forward. So he already knew whose finger he was sucking. And that impressed me. I figured these guys are living together all the time, and already there’s a distinction between these two.

As I think back on the many contributions of Daniel Stern to child development research and practice, these words play over and over in my mind—we are born alone and an essential human task is learn to be with others. This is something we can help our children learn!

This blog is continues my series to share the research of child development researchers and neuroscientists who have genuinely inspired me in my journey to create Mind in the Making. Their work is truly “research to live by.”

I am sharing the story of Edward Tronick of the University of Massachusetts Boston because his studies illuminate the importance to trusting relationships to children’s development and learning.

It now may seem more obvious that trusting relationships enhance children’s learning, but it wasn’t obvious not so long ago when Tronick became interested in the subject. In the early 1970s, Tronick collaborated with the pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton at the time when Brazelton was creating the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale, a tool designed to interpret what newborns are communicating through their behavior. Tronick recalls those days:

On Saturday mornings, Berry {Brazelton} and Jerry Bruner {the psychologist, now at New York University} and I would go to the newborn nurseries and examine babies together. We did this for seven, eight months in a row. Berry would show us things about babies that we had no idea babies could possibly do, and then we would talk about it afterward. It was just the most exciting sort of thing! The social development in infants had never really been studied. Pretty much at that point in time I said, “This is what I’m going to do.”

Tronick’s goal has been to pursue how relationships affect children’s development:

I {wanted} to understand what’s going on in the exchange {between a parent and child} that allows a relationship to be “good” or “smooth.” What do these words mean? Can we describe them, and can we come to an understanding of that process?

Tronick began his studies with infants, using a new scientific procedure he developed called the Still-Face.

In Tronick’s lab, the baby is placed in an infant seat on a table across from his or her seated parent so that they’re literally face-to-face. The experimenter instructs the parent to play with the baby. One mother I observed played “This little piggy went to market” with her six-month-old daughter’s toes. The baby squealed with delight when her mother ran her fingers up to the baby’s nose as the “little piggy cried ‘Wee! Wee! Wee!’ all the way home.”

The experimenter then instructed the mother to turn away and then to return to the face-to-face position, but not to react to her baby in any way whatsoever—to keep a still (or frozen) face.

Tronick describes what usually happens in this experiment with babies. Even children as young as three months pick up on the fact that their mothers aren’t responding:

They greet the mother. You know how three-month-olds have a really big greeting and that wonderful smile. They give that big smile, and {then} many of them just sort of stop. They’re waiting for the mother to respond, and she’s not responding. They might look at her, then turn away, and then they’ll {turn} back typically and try to {get her to respond}. Then some of the babies kind of collapse {with a} sad, helpless look.

There are a number of things that are stunning to me about that experiment. First, Tronick has found a way to show how the everyday back-and-forth communication between babies and parents really works. Usually, we aren’t aware of how we connect and communicate, but when the interaction is stopped—frozen—it makes it visible. What’s also stunning is how early infants come to expect a response from their parents. And how powerful it is when the parent wears a “still-face,” devoid of feeling. Tronick says:

It speaks to the incredible emotional capacities {of} the infant—to pick up on the fact that the mother’s not reacting emotionally the way she normally does. The baby has not only this ability to process what’s {happening}, but {also} the capacity to respond in a really appropriate way—that is, they try to get the mother’s attention, and then when they fail, they give up, with a sense of their own helplessness. They may be angry and then they become sad.

Of course, the experimenter tells the parent to resume reacting normally and the child quickly recovers.

You can also try the same experiment with adults. Ask one person to share something important and the other adult NOT to respond. You will find the results are the same. When the connection between us and another person is broken, we wonder if there’s something wrong with us, we try to engage the other person, and then, if there is no response, we pull back—if not physically like the infant, at least emotionally.

Does this study mean we have to be constantly ‘in sync’ with children, responding to their every move? Tronick had the same question. When he and his colleagues began conducting the Still-Face experiment, they believed that the more the parent and child were in sync, the better. But they’ve since learned that this isn’t the case. He reports:

Only maybe twenty, thirty percent of the time is the interaction “perfectly” in sync. The rest of the time, you’re in sync, you’re out of sync, you’re getting back into sync.

In fact, Tronick has found that moving in and out of sync with others—repairing a mismatch with a match — is not only normal, it can be a positive learning experience for both parent and child:

This not being in sync frees up parents from that constant burden of being perfect—because you can’t be perfect. No matter how hard you try, you can’t be.

It is the reconnecting when you are out of sync that’s most important. Tronick says:

When you reconnect, one of the things that can happen—not always, but some of the time—is that you create something new. You figure out a new way to do something together that you have never done before. If you create something new, you grow. And babies are about growing.

Jack P. Shonkoff of Harvard University and co-chair of a committee convened by the National Academy of Sciences, to review what science has to say about early childhood development, puts it this way: “There is no development without relationships!”

Reprinted from The Huffington Post

Editor’s Note: The Early Learning Nation Studio recently attended the Society for Research and Development’s biennial meeting, where we spoke with early learning researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. The full collection of video conversations can be found here.

Transcript:

Chris Riback: Ellen, thank you for coming by the ELN Studio.

Ellen Galinsky: My pleasure.

Chris Riback: Let’s talk about autonomy support. What is it?

Ellen Galinsky: Autonomy support means that you help the child begin to solve problems on his or her own, rather than fixing things for children. There was an article in the New York Times last weekend on snow plowing, which is a little different than helicoptering. It’s removing all the obstacles out of the way of children so that they don’t learn how to take on challenges themselves. To me, what autonomy support is, you help them begin to learn to try hard things and solve the problems that they face and think of those as skills that you’re helping your child learn.

Chris Riback: I’m curious as to what brought you to this? Was it what you were kind of seeing as a researcher and scientist and having done this or was that where the science was going and you’re just helping to advance it?

Ellen Galinsky: I came to autonomy support probably through three converging roads. As a teacher, I used to use autonomy support in dealing with classroom behavioral issues. I found it was much more effective if the kids could learn the skills to solve the problems that they face in the classroom, than me saying, “Here are the rules.” Then, fast forward – I have two children whom I’m driving to school for about 45 minutes every day and they just would get in the most horrendous fights in the car. So, I decided to try at home what I knew to be a very successful strategy as a teacher, and I had a family meeting. Ultimately, we made a list and we wrote down their ideas of how they could solve it and it was in a moment when they weren’t angry at each other, because mostly they weren’t. By the time they grew up not to fight with each other, we had been through a lot of problem solving as a family, but it was amazingly effective because they had come up with the idea.

Ellen Galinsky: And the third reason I came to autonomy support was I know how important executive function skills are and there began to see research that autonomy support was important. I had been looking as a researcher for, what are the precursors of executive function skills? They don’t just pop, you know, there they are. And the precursor, one of the most important research findings about the precursors is that autonomy support really promotes executive function skills. So, that led to redesigning everything we were doing in order to more intentionally promote autonomy support. Giving teachers, giving parents real problems to solve and then looking to see, were they understanding the child’s point of view? Were they able to think of what is this child capable of or not? Were they using joint problem solving? Were they explaining the reasons why this behavior was acceptable or not acceptable and so now we intentionally teach that.

Chris Riback: Let me ask you about the tactical, practical interventions, maybe for three groups: Teachers, parents and children themselves. What are some things that teachers could be doing around their own activities to help increase autonomy support within children?

Ellen Galinsky: We have thought of teaching as giving children the content, the information that they need, numbers, letters, colors if you’re talking about little kids. Understanding the world, the history, the cultures of the world if we’re talking about bigger kids. We have not thought about the process of teaching and the different ways of interacting with children could make in their development, and we have not thought of teaching as imparting life skills. So, it means a real reframing. Instead of here are the rules and we’re nice to each other, we listen to each other, we raise our hands, whatever the rules are and you obey my rules, let’s come up with solutions and help children learn the skills that they need to solve conflicts with other kids because that’s a major part of all of our lives, marriage, divorce, whatever relationships.

Chris Riback: Yes, real life.

Ellen Galinsky: Yes. You’re taking the same situation, if you solve it a different way, you’re going to get more compliance, if you want to use that word.

Chris Riback: That’s terrific, everyone would want to be interested in what’s next. So, if you’re focusing on autonomy support, what does the next level of research look like?

Ellen Galinsky: Some experiments have found that people who are trying to help people move away from being either more controlling or not involved at all, find that it’s hard to find that middle ground, so I think the next level of research is how do you promote autonomy support in ways that find that middle ground, where you’re still the authority, you’re not giving up authority to your children, but you’re helping them gain the skills, the problem-solving skills they need to succeed in life. Some people say that if you live in a dangerous neighborhood and there are guns around, that you can’t use this kind of child-rearing process. Wendy Grolnick has done research that shows that if you combine structure, that is, clear expectations and a sense that there are rules and reasons for the rules with autonomy support, that it’s actually more effective in dangerous neighborhoods because you know when you have a choice and when you should not talk back to the cop.

Chris Riback: A fascinating, important and really current area, so we look forward to the continuing research. Thank you.

Ellen Galinsky: Thank you.

Reprinted with permission from Early Learning Nation

The full collection of video conversations can be found here.

One of the global pioneers behind the science of early childhood learning and development, Ellen Galinsky, chief science officer at the Bezos Family Foundation and executive director of Mind in the Making, discusses her landmark book, Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs, as well as her next project, which includes exploring the mind of the adolescent.

Transcript: Ellen Galinsky, Bezos Family Foundation and Mind in the Making

Early Learning Nation: Ellen, welcome to the Early Learning Nation studio.

Ellen Galinsky: It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Early Learning Nation: There’s so much that we could talk about with you on the topic of early childhood learning. But maybe let’s start with your book, Mind in the Making and The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs. It was a groundbreaking book. But let’s go even before that, what sparked your interest in the topic in the first place?

Ellen Galinsky: I didn’t start out to write a book, I really didn’t. I started out to make some videotapes for teachers to share the best research. I was doing a study of young people, kids from the sixth through the 12th grade and I was asking them about learning and I found, just in the preparation for that study that too many young people were turned off from learning. My question was what are we doing to turn kids off from learning? I went back to the best research actually doing focus groups listening to parents, they said, “I don’t want to hear research says, I want to know the researcher, I want to know how she or he knows what that researcher knows about my child.” That was a very big turning point for me, so I, with the camera crew, went out to ultimately about a hundred of the best researchers in the United States and abroad and looked at their research.

As I was doing it I began to see these patterns and began to see that the kids who were thriving were the kids who had these skills, I ended up calling them life skills, because they’re important to the young children, but they’re just as important to us as adults. The first skill is focus and self control. That means being able to pay attention to what’s important, to think flexibly, to use the information you have and to have the self control to be able to reach your goals. People who are most likely to succeeded have goals and reach them.

Perspective taking means to understand how I think and feel and how you think and feel and how that might be different. That is critical in understanding the world, the social world that exists, but it’s also critical in avoiding conflict. Communicating is being able to think about what it is you want to say, how it will be heard so you therefore communicate much more effectively.

The next skill is making connections. All knowledge is based on symbolic representations, that is five stands for this number of fingers. But making unusual connections is the basis of creativity, which is a very important again in a changing world. Critical thinking, the search for valid and accurate information, because we base our behavior on what it is we think and believe to be true. Taking on challenges is more than coping with stress, it’s trying something that’s hard. My mother would call it getting on a horse when you fall off. I don’t know that that many people do that anymore, but it’s maybe getting on the bike or trying that math problem-

Early Learning Nation: You get back on the bike. A lot of people get back in horses, but yes, the bike.

Ellen Galinsky: Finally, being a self directed, engaged learner. Because, I think, for all of us to thrive we need to be caring about something that we want to learn about. That’s the importance of Early Learning Nation.

Early Learning Nation: Who’s the audience for the insights that you found and the conclusions that you came to?

Ellen Galinsky: Well, it may sound obnoxious, but everyone. These are life skills, because they’re just as important to me. If I have a fight with someone, if I disagree with someone, understanding why they’re behaving, being able to take their perspectives is critical in being able to solve a problem. They’re very important for children to learn, because they are based on executive functions of the brain and the periods where those skills are developing most rapidly are the preschool years and then later on in adolescence.

Early Learning Nation: I could imagine this being very useful in an office, really any personal relationship. The Mind in the Making book, as it were, of course it has moved well beyond the printed page.

Ellen Galinsky: We are.

Early Learning Nation: There are some very exciting developments, particularly in the medical field. Can you tell me some of the work that’s going on and that you’re doing in the medical field?

Ellen Galinsky: I didn’t want this to be a book and just sit on the shelf, although it continues to jump of the shelf, for which I’m deeply grateful. I wanted the knowledge to be there and useful for people. One important thing was to have a common language that people could begin to understand behavior in systematic ways. Another thing was to make this knowledge into things that we could act on. Among the things that we’ve done is we’ve taken this child development knowledge at the Bezos Family Foundation and we’ve worked with Mount Zion Parenting Center and their 17 minutes and a Well-Child visit, and we have taken all of the Well-Child visits from birth through five and we’ve put child development information into every one of them.

Bringing science into action, most pediatricians get asked about behavior issues and they don’t really know, they’re not trained in their typical medical training, which is what Mount Zion is doing and will available free for doctors all over the country. We’ve also created what we call skill building opportunities, which take the challenges that teachers or parents or anyone involved in, grandparents, anybody involved in the life of a child. “My kid is addicted to screen time. I have a picky eater. My kids are fighting,” all those problems that are normal, and turn them instead of seeing them as managing bad behavior, you can see them as a way and opportunity to teach and promote a skill.

We’ve created a list of books, library of books and materials, and we talk about how to read these books in ways that promote the life skills. Room is another product that we’ve created at the Bezos Family Foundation, that have tips for the time you already have with children. They turn everyday moments into brain building moments. We have modules that help people learn the science and then infuse it in their practice or in their lives, whether they’re a parent or a professional.

Early Learning Nation: Ellen, the science that you have done and the science for Mind in the Making focused on the youngest among us, zero to eight, we’re all grateful for that. I’ve got adolescents, when are you going to turn the science and start to focus on adolescences? Any plans there?

Ellen Galinsky: Absolutely. I’ve been working on this for three to four years.

I’ve first looked at the literature very intensely. Then went out again through the foundation with a film crew and filmed about 35 of leading researchers on adolescents’ development around the world. Next, I’m going to be writing a book and at the foundation we’re going to be creating all kinds of materials for adolescents, including, what I hope we do is materials for adolescents to understand their own development, it’s really pretty interesting.

Early Learning Nation: I bet.

Ellen Galinsky: Adolescents are pretty misunderstood. Why they act the way they act is actually very positive, and what they need to learn in their life. If we can begin to meet those developmental needs of adolescents I think it will be much less conflict late in time.

Early Learning Nation: There would be lines of parents waiting to, not only get your book but probably just to say, “Thank you.”

Ellen Galinsky: Thank you.

Early Learning Nation: I should probably then let you go, because you need to go finish that work fast, people need it. People like me.

Ellen Galinsky: Thank you.

Early Learning Nation: Thank you, thank you so much.

Reprinted from Early Learning Nation