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

Lawrence Aber: It’s a pleasure to be here, Chris.

Chris Riback: So throughout your career, you have focused much of your research, maybe all of your research, on the social, emotional, motivational and behavioral development of high-risk children in youth. What drew you there?

Lawrence Aber: Many researchers’ research is a little bit autobiography, so I grew up in tough neighborhoods. My family had some tough scrapes and things like that, so I probably came by it naturally in that way. I’m the oldest of six kids, and my youngest brother, who’s 15 years younger than me, I used to get up and give him his six o’clock in the morning feeding because my mom was pooped, and so I might have come by it that way. Almost everybody is fascinated by human development. For some reason I got lucky enough that I could make that my living.

Chris Riback: Is poverty the most confounding societal challenge for child development?

Lawrence Aber: I think it’s one of two. The elevator speech in my career is I’ve done two things my entire career. I’ve studied the effects of poverty and violence on children’s development, poverty and violence at different levels of what we call the human ecology. Poverty, family poverty, intimate family violence, community poverty, how poor your neighborhood is, community violence, state level poverty, state level violence, so at all those levels, it’s poverty and violence that are the two most toxic things in kids’ development.

Chris Riback: And is that because there is correlation between the two or because they’re so individually impactful?

Lawrence Aber: They’re modestly correlated, but it’s largely because they’re individually impactful. They can be in combination especially impactful. There are lots of kids who are exposed to poverty that are not exposed to violence, lots of kids exposed to violence and not poverty, and they actually affect two different parts of the developing organism. So poverty is associated with deprivation and violence is associated with threat, and so deprivation and threat are both bad for developing human beings, but they’re bad in different ways.

Chris Riback: Let’s talk about a little bit about your own evolution. It feels to me in looking at your career that you may have focused initially a little bit more on domestic issues, but lately much more in the international sphere.

Lawrence Aber: Absolutely. The first 30 years of my work life, I focused primarily and almost exclusively in the United States. I did a little work on kids in war. If you’re interested in the effects of poverty and violence on kids and you want to make a difference in that, in the United States there’s plenty of work, but there’s even more work overseas.

Chris Riback: In Ghana, in Syria, in Lebanon, and the places where you’ve been.

Lawrence Aber: In the Congo, in South Africa, in Niger and Sierra Leone, yes, so I work primarily now in sub-Saharan Africa and in the Middle East and North Africa.

Chris Riback: Is there a universality? I mean, you’re talking about places that feel worlds apart, or is it apples and oranges? It’s like you’re not even talking about the same inputs.

Lawrence Aber: The deep structure of development I think is very similar across human beings. The surface features of it, the specific instantiation or expression of it varies by culture, but the deep structure is quite similar across cultures.

Chris Riback: I spoke earlier with Sarah Smith from the International Rescue Committee. You’re involved in the program, the 100&Change, in bringing Sesame Street to the Middle East. How is that effort?

Lawrence Aber: Well, it’s a remarkable effort. I’ve been lucky enough to be working with IRC since about 2010, so they are the first group I worked seriously with after I made the turn from domestic to international work. The International Rescue Committee and Sesame Street combined to propose to create kind of an early childhood system in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon. There’s going to be home visiting programs on the ground and early childhood centers on the ground for young kids and preschool kids, and there’s going to be Sesame Street broadcasting educational television for kids, specifically targeted to Syrian refugee kids and families in the host communities, and we’re in the throes of getting it up and going.

Chris Riback: It’s got to be exciting work.

Lawrence Aber: Exciting, humbling, scary. With those kind of resources, you want to do the very best job you can.

Chris Riback: I’m sure you do. To close out, I was looking at the NYU Steinhardt website where you belong, and I was really taken by the mission, to prepare students to understand and intervene in human development across contexts and cultures. In listening to you today and in reading about you, that really seems to be what drives you.

Lawrence Aber: I think so. I just keep getting impressed by the varieties of human experience. I’m hungry to understand and experience new cultures and new ways, and I think as we become a more global world, we have to develop glocal, combined global and local solutions to the most important problems. I can’t think of a more important issue than how to prepare the next generation to cope with this crazy world.

Chris Riback: I couldn’t agree more, and it’s great that folks like you are doing it. Thank you.

Lawrence Aber: I’m lucky that I’m joined by many colleagues. It’s a team sport.

Chris Riback: Thank you for coming to the ELN Studio.

Lawrence Aber: My pleasure.

Chris Riback: Sarah, thank you for coming to the ELN studio.

Sarah Smith: Thanks so much for having me, Chris.

Chris Riback: The International Rescue Committee is an iconic centerpiece of global culture. What are you doing at a conference for early childhood development?

Sarah Smith: Well, I’m the head of education for the International Rescue Committee and I oversee IRC’s programs in 40 countries and 20 US cities that are serving children around the world. I’m here to learn from the amazing expertise and all of the researchers and students, everyone here-

Chris Riback: There’s a lot.

Sarah Smith: … and take it in and really try to apply it then to our programs.

Chris Riback: So let’s talk about your programs. What is the mission and what is the vision around education for IRC?

Sarah Smith: We focus primarily on refugees and displaced people living in conflicting crisis settings. We were founded in 1933 by Albert Einstein. At that time, our mission was primarily to help refugees in Europe seek safety throughout Europe and in the United States. Because many of the people who founded the IRC were academics themselves, education was central to everything we did from the moment we were founded.

Sarah Smith: Obviously the world has changed. There are a lot of similarities to that time, but primarily our vision to provide access to learning opportunities for children of all ages, from birth through adulthood. Most of our education programs are in the primary school range but we are doing a lot more early childhood development to improve those developmental and learning outcomes that we know are so important.

Chris Riback: So give me some examples of what are the tactics or programs or capabilities that help bring to them. A refugee in a camp someplace, what’s a tactical, practical thing that you do?

Sarah Smith: One of the more common things we’ll do and easy to envision is that we set up preschools or early learning centers. They look very different depending on the country. We help establish those centers. We hire facilitators. Sometimes they’re trained teachers. Sometimes they’re just community members. We provide them with support and training and then we go out in the community, talk to parents, and bring children into those centers.

Sarah Smith: But one of the things that’s I think most exciting about some of our early childhood work is how we leverage the other sectors and integrate early childhood into every sector, program that exists. So there will likely be a health facility, a community health clinic or community health workers that are meeting with families in a community. Oftentimes, they don’t have the training or information about what young children need. So we’ll equip them with understanding about young children. We’ll give them resources to use in their clinic or their home visits and we’ll blanket all of the social services with early childhood content.

Chris Riback: Interesting. So identify an existing distribution network-

Sarah Smith: Exactly.

Chris Riback: … and help them.

Sarah Smith: Yes.

Chris Riback: Is this statistic still accurate? Over 62 million children in countries affected by war remain out of school.

Sarah Smith: It is, for refugee children specifically, which is a smaller number of the overall population of displaced. It’s more than half of all refugee children have no access to any form of education. In early childhood, it’s far, far higher. The kids who have any access to early learning or the kind of care that we know will promote their development is tiny. It’s a sliver of the population.

Chris Riback: You can only imagine as migration and environment and other changes occur and force movement among people, that’s a humanitarian crisis.

Sarah Smith: It is. It is. It’s in many ways the biggest opportunity as well, because I think the system itself hasn’t been set up to serve these children and to provide these kinds of programs. 5, 10 years down the road, we know what’s going to happen to these children if they don’t get the support that they need.

Chris Riback:Well, you can’t do what you do for a living if you don’t see something like that as an opportunity and not a challenge. You’ve got to have that view.

To close out, the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change competition and the bringing of Sesame Street to Syria, tell me about that whole event.

Sarah Smith: It’s been really fun and remarkable working with Sesame Workshop. We’ve been testing our approaches in the Syria region, in Jordan and Lebanon, before MacArthur was launched. It’s going to be the largest scale early childhood program in a humanitarian setting. We’re hoping to reach a million and a half kids with the direct services of home visiting and center-based services.

There will also be a new Sesame Street for the Middle East with new Muppets who’ve just been created, and we are bringing not just the great Sesame characters and stories, but early learning and lessons about how to nurture and support the development of children into health facilities, into women’s centers, into even cash points where families go to get a stipend to help them stay afloat.

So if we can show that it is possible to integrate early childhood development into every service in the humanitarian sector, that will change the entire sector. It has really catalyzed others to pay attention to this population and to realize that there are solutions out there.

I have the good fortune of seeing people running programs in these very challenging circumstances and succeeding. And so, it’s easy for me to be an optimist.

Chris Riback: That’s terrific. Thank you for the work and thank you for stopping by the studio.

Sarah Smith: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Megan, thank you for coming by

Megan McClelland: Hi.

Chris Riback: Hi. Thanks for coming to the ELN studio.

Megan McClelland: Great. Thanks for having me.

Chris Riback: We appreciate your time.

Megan McClelland: It’s fun.

Chris Riback: What is self-regulation? And, how important is it with preschool children, particularly in determining their ability to move into and succeed in kindergarten?

Megan McClelland: Self-regulation is a set of foundational skills that are your self-control, how well you can pay attention and focus, remember instructions, to do well working with others. It’s this ability to focus your attention and pay attention and do well, persist on tasks.

Kids, when they’re three, don’t have this very well. But when they get into kindergarten, it’s increasingly important for them to have those skills because it helps them do better.

Chris Riback: Is this something learned or does a child have it?

Megan McClelland: Sure. Some kids are born a lot more easy to sooth, they are not very reactive, and they’re more calm, cautious children, and they have self-regulation more easily than other kids. They don’t get upset easily by new things.

Other kids may take a while to adjust to new things. They may be more reactive. They may be more active. Some kids have more activity, so they may need a little bit of help learning how to harness their activity in positive ways, in ways that will help them do better.

Chris Riback: One of the areas of research for you has been the social and emotional learning, the SEL interventions.

Megan McClelland: Yes.

Chris Riback: What do they actually look like?

Megan McClelland: A lot of those interventions help build these foundational skills for kids. Like helping parents scaffold those skills for young kids. Can they help them listen and focus their attention? Can they help them work well with other kids?

We have been working on a set of intervention games that are based in music and movement, but they’re cognitively complex and so they’re fun for kids to do. Like red light, green light kinds of games, but they’re actually pretty challenging. They’re cognitively complex, so they get harder over time. Kids have to stop and think about what they have to do, and then they might have to do the opposite.

We might ask the kids to dance when the music is going and stop when it stops. Then we might say, okay, now I want you to dance fast to fast music and slow to slow music. Then we might say, okay, now I want you to reverse.

Megan McClelland: We’re just adding in new rules to help them pay attention, focus, maybe do the opposite, which is actually quite important for self-control.

Chris Riback: What’s your point of entry with the teachers and into the schools?

Megan McClelland: We go directly and in just a few hours, actually, we can work with teachers directly.

Chris Riback: Wow.

Megan McClelland: We just were training some teachers in New Zealand and we did that remotely. We actually also have an online course and they can get trained on these games. There’s lots of different ways to try and get this information out there.

Chris Riback: Is that the app that’s available to parents and teachers, or is that something else?

Megan McClelland: That’s different.

Chris Riback: Tell me the app because I read about that.

Megan McClelland: But we also have-

Chris Riback: Yes.

Megan McClelland: Yes, is a way to … One of the real goals for me, as a researcher and parent is, how do we get science and science based information that is grounded in evidence out there in ways that people can use, that is easy for them to do.

Megan McClelland: We have received funding to develop an app of these games and try them with parents. How do we make this scalable in the sense that we can get this information out there and the kids like doing it so they’re more motivated, they ask their parents for these games. There’s music cues in there, so if you don’t sing very well you’re going to play the music. But it’s still a way for you to engage with your kids.

Chris Riback: Does it provide you back measurable data or anything that you can integrate into your own research?

Megan McClelland: Yes. Absolutely. That’s part of some work that we’ve been doing for the last year and a half, couple of years, where we are working with parents directly, and teachers, to give us some feedback about, is this working? Is it not working? Is this way to continue to improve things.

Chris Riback: Preparing for this conversation, I saw a piece, I think it was from 2016 that began, “Adding a daily 20- to 30-minute self-regulation intervention to a kindergarten readiness program significantly boosted children’s self-regulation and early academic skills, Megan McClelland has found.”

Megan McClelland: We know that these interventions can be effective. We know that we have been specific and targeted in the skills that we’re trying to improve. I think that we’re trying to make it fun and engaging for kids so that they’re doing it well and they’re continuing to improve on them over time. And we do find some significant impacts in terms of their improved, not just self-regulation, but also improved math, especially, math skills, that you wouldn’t necessarily expect because our intervention hasn’t focused directly on math. But those same skills are quite important for you to do well in math.

Chris Riback: Perhaps opens up a whole new vein of research for you.

Megan McClelland: It is. It is. Actually, it has been.

Chris Riback: I imagine so. Megan, thank you. Thank you for your work. Thank you for coming by the studio.

Megan McClelland: Thanks. It’s been great.

Chris Riback: Kathy, Roberta, I want to talk to you about the QUILS Language Screener, and other things, we’ll get to those. But first tell me about the Quills Language Screener. What is it? Why is it needed?

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Well, there are very few measures of early language development, and most of those early measures of language development take a professional to come in, to take a fair amount of time, and then to assess the young child. Now, language is the single best predictor of how young kids are going to do, both at entry to school and in their trajectories through school.

Chris Riback: And what do you mean by that? Language is the capability, the depth of language?

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: If we assessed your language in kindergarten, it would help us account for how you did in math, social studies, reading and science.

Chris Riback: And what do you look at in language? And maybe this gets to the screener itself.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: What the screener is. So, we desperately need this screener, because if children know the names of the letters, that’s nice. But that’s not enough for learning to read. So what the Quills enables us to do is to assess children’s language in the most fun and entertaining way. Kids love this and ask to do it again. It takes 15 minutes. It’s on a tablet. It’s entirely based in the research literature.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: And it doesn’t require having a skilled examiner.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: That’s huge. It should be done in schools by teachers, by aides. They don’t even have to do anything. They just have to sit with the kid. The questions come out of the tablet and the tablet scores the child’s scores. And then the child can be compared to others in his grade or to a national sample. The norms that we have assembled.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: So the question becomes what does it do? How many words do you know? Do you know? Do you know the kinds of words that kids your age generally know? How about your ability to put those words together in sentences? And we call that grammar or syntax. Are you where you need to be in syntax? How about in your learning to learn skills? Can you take a nonsense word and know to extend it to another thing that looks just like it, but it’s a different color? All of those skills are really critically important.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: Everything is dependent on language.

Chris Riback: And what feedback are you getting on the screener itself?

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: Getting great feedback.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Yes, fabulous.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: Somebody gave a talk at the Boston Child Language meeting, and they actually wrote in their slides, we were not paid to put this in.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: And it’s also that we have this, Quills now is coming out in a bilingual version that will be Spanish and English.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: We should give the ages.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: That’s the ages are three through six, and we’re currently working on a two year old version. And there’s even less out there for measuring early language with two year olds.

Chris Riback: And I can only imagine that on the negative side, identifying potential concerns or issues, even more important at two.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Absolutely.

Chris Riback: Than at three, than at six. Catch it early.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: We know for a thousand years that the earlier you get in with any kind of developmental problem and tried to ameliorate it, the better.

Chris Riback: Finally, I can’t have a conversation with New York Times best selling authors without asking them about the book. So “Becoming Brilliant, What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children.“ What does science tell us about-

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: The kinds of skills that Kathy and I have incorporated in this book based on psychological research are just the skills that children need to succeed, not just in school but in the world, in the job market and for health. Content, the three Rs are crucially important, but there’s so much more. Would you have your job if you couldn’t collaborate and communicate with the people who are helping you here? I don’t think so. So those are two of the skills-

Chris Riback: Those are two.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: … plus content.

Chris Riback: So there are three Rs but there are six, Cs if I’m not mistaken.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: That’s right.

Chris Riback: What are the six Cs?

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: We did communication, content, and collaboration.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Critical thinking, which is dependent on content, which is dependent on communication, which is dependent on collaboration. They’re all interrelated. Creative innovation, very important in the 21st century. And then finally we added confidence. That ability to take an intellectual risk, that ability to learn from failure and to keep on going. Persistence and grit. These six Cs as an integrative model, were derived from thousands and thousands of papers in the science of learning, and now are being translated into schools around the country. And we’re actually doing model schools that have become six C schools.

Chris Riback: It’s easy to understand why it’s a New York Times bestselling book. Congratulations to both of you, and thank you for continuing the conversation.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Thank you.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: Thank you for continuing it with us.

Chris Riback: Kathy, Roberta, thank you for coming to the studio.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: Our pleasure.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Thank you.

Chris Riback:  Kathy, why is “play” a four-letter word?

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Well, it shouldn’t be a four-letter word.

Chris Riback: It shouldn’t be a four-letter word. So what happened? What’d we get wrong?

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: I think it became “just” play when people got worried…

Chris Riback: Modified with “just.”

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Yes, modified with the “just.” We became a more global society. People started to worry and have fear that, oh my gosh, if my kids are playing rather than working, they’re going to fall behind every other kid on the block.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: They didn’t want that, because all of us want our kids to go to MIT, and Harvard, and start now in the proper pre-school.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Then the toy companies caught on, and they thought, well, this is a great opportunity. Let’s monopolize on the fear. Let’s market that we can help these kids get ahead. And all of a sudden, toys started to morph more into workstations than into toys themselves. Then you got the educational toy market.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: Might I react to what Kathy just said? I just attended James Heckman’s talk, he’s a Nobel prizewinner, economics, and he studies early childhood. One of the things that he emphasized in his talk was that, in our field, it used to be the case that IQ ruled.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: And now the findings are showing that it’s not about IQ, it’s about social/emotional development, it’s about perseverance, it’s about executive function. And these are all the things that develop in the context of play.

Chris Riback: What is play? What defines play?

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: It has to have an imaginary component. It’s done voluntarily. And it doesn’t have any kind of a specific goal.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: There’s also a more niche definition that we put out last year. That you’re active, not passive, when you play. You’re engaged in something that’s focusing in, you’re in your flow.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: We can have free play at one end of that spectrum. And then you can have what we call guided play, that actually has a learning goal in mind, but allows the child to be the director of the learning.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: And then you go to games, well, the games are well thought out, these board games, and things.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: Right.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: But the kids are also having fun while they’re doing it. And you can go all the way up to non-play, or direct instruction.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: We’re not Luddites.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: We are not Luddites.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: We are firmly in favor of, where’s my cell phone, and, you know. But doing puzzles is great for kids, especially if they do them with adults. Because the adults casually impart important information, like, “Is that an edge piece?”

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: Playing with blocks is a wonderful thing for children to do. And when parents do it with them, they naturally talk to their kids. Kids pick up all kinds of concepts.

Chris Riback: With that context, what are Learning Landscapes?

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: Oh, Playful Learning Landscapes is where smart cities and human development meet. What we’re about is changing the landscape of cities so that there are places that children and families can go, and without being teachy-preachy, can engage in activities that will feed right into their learning and conversation.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Let me build on that. What if you could move the learning outside? That stimulation that would occur in so many places, out into public spaces.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: They don’t have to be destinations. They have to be invitations from public spaces to engage with the very puzzles, with the very blocks, with the very … impulse control … hopscotches, that we can create right there at a bus stop, right there in a library, right there in a park.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: So the big virtue of Playful Learning Landscapes is, it’s free and it’s in kids’ neighborhoods.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: And it’s not a destination.

Chris Riback: So give me an example. West Philadelphia?

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: So, in West Philadelphia, we had an idea. And that idea was, if you have to use the bus stops, why are bus stops just benches where people sit?

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: And if you watch what goes on at a bus stop…

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: Wait, I’ll demonstrate. [Acts like playing with smart phone]

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: It’s like this. Two people, like this.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: And the kid is wandering around.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Or looking at another cell phone.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: If they’re old enough, yes.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Yes. Okay, so that’s what’s going on in our environment right now.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: So we re-imagined it. And we asked if you could build a puzzle wall at a bus stop. Could you put something down in the ground where the kids were getting active and playing a game like hopscotch?

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: And could that hopscotch be designed so that you could ask the kids, where you see two feet, use one. Where you see one, use two. So if they’re cleverly designed with the learning science embedded in the architecture itself. It invites conversations between parents and children.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: One more piece:  The community has to be involved. And it has to be culturally relevant.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: So at this bus stop, over 100 community children helped us to build it. Community members picked the spot that was important to them. A spot where Martin Luther King had given one of the first freedom march speeches. And so our puzzles are Martin Luther King.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: But it gets better. We took findings from the science of learning and turned those into things that kids and families can play at.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: And, secondly, we actually did an experiment. We compared the amount of talk that children and parents did in our Playful Learning Landscape’s installation compared to a playground that was also right in the neighborhood. And that attracted people from the same demographic.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: And we know from that how much … For example, STEMs: science, technology, engineering, and math language … comes out in the context of our Learning Landscape installations, compared to the playground.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: So these come out of, eventually, metro budgets. But what do they do? Well, our hope and prayer is that we’re going to be able to lift up a neighborhood so that these homes will then allow their kids to get that stimulation in the public spaces.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: And we’ll begin to narrow the very, very long held, since the 1970s, achievement gap. And narrow it. At the core of everything we know in the science, it’s that we learn through a brain that has been evolutionarily prepared to interact with human beings.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: So the more we can stimulate that interaction, and the more we can direct it, or target it towards certain outcomes, the better off our children will be. And the more opportunities to thrive. Dream about what cities can be, and that’s where we take Playful Learning Landscapes.

Chris Riback: Thank you both. Thank you for your work. Thank you for stopping by the studio.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: Sure, thank you.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff: Oh, it was fun. Thank you, thank you.

Chris Riback: Phil, thanks for coming by to the ELN studio.

Phil Fisher: My pleasure.

Chris Riback: We appreciate your time.

Phil Fisher: Glad to be here.

Chris Riback: Much of your work focuses on stress that can occur in infancy and childhood.

Phil Fisher: Correct.

Chris Riback: Now I am a practicing parent, and I’ve gone through three of those situations.

Phil Fisher: So you’re an expert.

Chris Riback: No, I’m failing! This is why I want to talk with you. I need the help, but I’m assuming it’s not my stress that you’re focused on, it’s the events around the kids. So talk to me about that. How do you define stressful experiences for children and infants?

Phil Fisher: I think one of the most useful ways to define stress in children has to do with the extent to which people talk about it getting under the skin. That is, there are lots of things in the environment or in the world of the child that can affect the child’s wellbeing. Some of them are things that are outside of the family. Things like poverty and lack of access to resources and neighborhood violence and crime.

Phil Fisher: So we think about stress as the chronic activation of these systems in the absence of the kind of supportive relationships that I’m sure you provide to your children, and that others … It doesn’t have to just be parents, but that meaningful adults in children’s lives can provide. Because especially very early in life, children don’t have the capacity to bring those systems back into line themselves.

Chris Riback: That’s what I was going to ask, “Are children’s and infants’ brains able to adapt to stress? Are there changes that occur in the brain when they experience persistent stress? What’s the biology?” You just mentioned it.

Phil Fisher: One way to think about it is that the systems that exist, and they’re not just in the brain, they’re also bodily systems that have to do with immune system functioning and metabolizing energy in order to help mobilize responses to stress, that those things are all very effective at dealing with short term kinds of situations in which those kinds of responses are necessary.

Phil Fisher: The challenge becomes when those systems are activated really on a continuous basis. We’re not very well set up by evolution to be able to deal with very long term, chronic stress.

Chris Riback: I assume you talk as well with parents and teachers?

Phil Fisher: Of course. Yes.

Chris Riback: What do you talk with parents about? Is there anything practical-

Phil Fisher: Absolutely.

Chris Riback: … so tell me.

Phil Fisher: Again, the activation of these systems is one piece of the puzzle, right? And certainly under conditions where stress is ongoing, which occurs in many people’s lives, and is certainly distributed across the economic spectrum. It’s not just in economic conditions of poverty. Lots of people have stress in their lives.

Phil Fisher: But the other side of the equation is the extent to which adults in the child’s life by being supportive and responsive and available for the child in nurturing, really do help to buffer the child against those kinds of experiences. And what the research is showing consistently is that where you see elevations in things like stress hormones, where you see brain changes that are the result of chronic stress, the presence of supportive, responsive caregiving is the single biggest thing that brings those bodily systems back more into balance.

Chris Riback: Tell me about the FIND video coaching intervention.

Phil Fisher: I would love to. We spend a lot of time developing programs to support adults including parents, but also other caregivers in children’s lives. People don’t love to be told what they’re doing wrong, and new skills are hard to lay out in terms of, “This is what you should be doing.”

Phil Fisher: What we found when we started videotaping families … We’re doing this now for many years and with thousands of families … is that the seeds of this kind of supportive buffering interaction are present almost in all situations including what would be traditionally considered very concerning contacts. Like parents who have significant substance abuse problems and addictions, parents who’ve had their children removed and placed in foster care. Even when we videotape those families we see that there are many instances in which parents are actually engaged in this kind of buffering care.

Phil Fisher: So the video coaching films adults and children interacting in real world settings like home or childcare, and then extracts out these brief moments where magical things are happening that naturally occur. And we have great results from some of the research we’ve done on this including that it does actually increase this kind of responsive parenting.

Phil Fisher: But we’ve also done some really interesting work looking at parental brain activity before and after the coaching. And we find that parents get better at just general self control on tasks that are kind of these button pushing tasks where they have to withhold responses, and that after the coaching we also see changes in the areas of the brain involved in self control. Just from showing them things that they’re doing with their children and encouraging them to wait to see what the child does and respond.

Chris Riback: Are these video interactions, are they accessible at scale for people? How do people get to them?

Phil Fisher: Yes. One of the main goals in engineering this particular approach was to make it readily available in community settings. For instance, we have a statewide implementation of this program in Washington State in the Childcare Improvement System there.

Phil Fisher: And we have a number of other really large scale projects including right now we’re just getting started in New York City’s Homeless Shelter System. Part of the idea is that showing people instances in which they’re doing supportive things is fairly straightforward which means that community members are able to deliver the coaching once the information has been extracted and put into these specially edited films. It’s really easily available.

Chris Riback: Are these local and state policymakers who are working with you to bring the capabilities into the centers and into the New York centers?

Phil Fisher: That’s right. It’s a combination of private philanthropy that’s paying for some of the initial implementation, and then state agencies that are really interested in providing supports in these contacts.

Phil Fisher: I should point out though, one of the things that I think is really exciting about this work is we started this as a parent support program, and it was people who work in childcare who said, “This would be as useful for coaching childcare providers as it is for parents.” So it’s something that goes across these different contexts, but is the same content in all of those contexts which means it’s getting at really these kind of core processes that are most important for reducing stress and supporting families.

Chris Riback: It’s terrific work. Thank you for doing it, and thank you for stopping by the studio to talk to us about it.

Phil Fisher: My pleasure. Thanks for asking.

Chris Riback: Geetha, thank you for stopping by our ELN studio.

Geetha Ramani: Thank you for inviting me.

Chris Riback: In an email exchange with me before this conversation, you described yourself: “Most of my research focuses on play, games, and shared activities on children’s mathematical development.” Play, games, and shared activities, I assume this makes you the fun scientist?

Geetha Ramani: That’s right. Oftentimes when we go to schools, we’re known as the game people. A lot of the research we do involves bringing games into classrooms, and trying to promote children’s number skills. Our goal is to really have children and teachers understand, promoting math skills involves fun activities, playing games that are focused on numbers, and not necessarily worksheets and flashcards.

Chris Riback: Why math? I mean, there are folks who specialize in play generally, and they’re folks who specialize in math generally; you’ve really hit the intersection of the two. What connected those two for you?

Geetha Ramani: A plethora of research has shown now, that early math skills lay the groundwork for later math skills. There’s research that shows that skills developed before children even get to kindergarten can predict their math achievement in later elementary school and even beyond. Having a solid foundation in math is really important.

Geetha Ramani: Our goal with play, is trying to really promote these skills in an engaging way that’s sustainable, and have children really love math.

Chris Riback: Are these interactions and games that only work or are meant primarily for practitioners, and in school or organized environments? Or are these things that parents can do, caregivers can do with kids at home?

Geetha Ramani: There are things that parents can do at home. Recently we’ve been doing research that’s involved sending math games home to families, especially families from lower income backgrounds. Just to give them some practice and materials, that they can engage in with their child, and other members of the family as well.

Chris Riback: Is part of the role, maybe the challenge, helping parents feel confident in that capability as well?

Geetha Ramani: That’s exactly right. We don’t want to add another thing for families to do. The idea is to show that math is in everything that they are already doing. So, providing games that they can play, before they go to bed or during downtime is something fun and engaging, and not necessarily something that they have to add another thing to their list.

Chris Riback: What is the Early Childhood Interaction Lab, and how does it work?

Geetha Ramani: That’s the lab that I direct, and it involves graduate students and undergraduate students at the University of Maryland in College Park. The goal of our research is just what you described, and engaging families, and teachers and students in early activities, to help them promote their early math and problem-solving skills.

Chris Riback: Let’s talk about some of your current research, because we all want to know what you’re doing now.

Geetha Ramani: Sure.

Chris Riback: I understand you have a project funded by NSF, investigating the benefits of tablet games on children’s math, and working memory development. Tell me about that.

Geetha Ramani: So we know that tablets are everywhere now. I think a recent survey found that, for children under eight, 80% of children have access to their own tablet, computer or a smartphone; there’s 100,000 apps that you can download for education purposes. The problem is, we just don’t know if they actually help any kind of skills.

Geetha Ramani: Our goal is to develop games, based on theory and empirical work. To try to develop games that actually can help children’s math and cognitive skills. That’s what we’re doing in this research. We find if you played the games that we’ve designed for about 10 minutes over two weeks, it can have lasting effects for at least a month on their math and working memory skills.

Chris Riback: Now, you also have a project with family engagement in with card games and family. You’re not just all digital.

Geetha Ramani: No, that’s right.

Chris Riback: You’re analog, too.

Geetha Ramani: That’s right. Especially with games for sending home, we want families to be interacting. We find card games are something that’s already really popular, and something that lots of people can get involved in; just not one parent and one child. It’s a really a nice activity to bring folks together.

Chris Riback: And just to close out Geetha, tell me about you. What brought you to this area of research? Was it the math, or was it the games?

Geetha Ramani: It’s really the play part. That’s what brought me. I mean, my doctoral work, years ago, was on play. We talk about it promoting cognitive skills, but I didn’t think there was a lot of great research really showing that. Math seemed to be a good intersection to show that play. Games can be a really nice way to promote a really important cognitive skill, which is early math development.

Chris Riback: OK. Math equals play. Maybe we’ll do a bumper sticker.

Geetha Ramani: OK. That sounds great.

Chris Riback: Thank you for coming by the studio.

Geetha Ramani: Thank you for having me.

Chris Riback: Ken, welcome to the ELN studio.

Ken Dodge: Good morning.

Chris Riback: Thanks for coming by.

Ken Dodge: Yes, thank you.

Chris Riback: Congratulations on the biennial. How’s it going so far?

Ken Dodge: It’s going very well. We have over 6,000 people here and there’s a lot of sessions going on, so a lot of excitement.

Chris Riback: The theme this year is international, interdisciplinary and relevant. Connect that for me to early childhood development.

Ken Dodge: The Society’s very interested in child development and developmental science, and then science to action, how that could have an impact. Interdisciplinary is a natural because child development involved many disciplines. Psychology, sociology, psychiatry, pediatrics, economics, you name it. International because we’re in a global society, and then relevance because we’re trying to bring that basic scientific knowledge to bear on practice, policy and public attention.

Chris Riback: Isn’t that such an important component of the research, to make it practical and actionable, make it tangible for parents, for practitioners?

Ken Dodge: Absolutely important. One of the things we’ve learned, the hard way, but learned over time, is that it used to be that academic researchers thought that the direction of communication was one-way, where we academics would learn something and then we would lay it upon the public. We’ve learned that the public needs to be involved from the very beginning so they could tell us what to research, tell us what the problems are, tell us what the perspectives are. We’ve really established two-way partnerships.

Chris Riback: Also, I would assume the translational process for any researcher to see the research, see the insights, in action and have them applied in a house, in a school, in a community, has got to make a big difference.

Ken Dodge: It makes a big difference. Having that two-way communication right from the beginning will help the interventions that we develop be relevant, be able to be disseminated, be able to have an impact. In my own career, I’ve developed interventions early on that seemed wonderful but could never be implemented in a practical and a community setting. So I’ve learned right from the very beginning to be thinking about interventions that could be disseminated.

Chris Riback: Let’s talk about your research. First of all, I read 500 scientific articles, 90,000 or more than that citations. Do you charge royalties?

Ken Dodge: No.

Chris Riback: Because there’s a side business. Once-

Ken Dodge: Nobody’s getting wealthy here.

Chris Riback: Well, once we’re done with this, I think there’s a royalty business that you’re missing out on with 90,000 citations.

Ken Dodge: Yeah, yeah.

Chris Riback: The heart of your research, or at least one area, you’ve been instrumental in understanding the development and prevention of aggressive and violent behaviors.

Ken Dodge: Right.

Chris Riback: I mean, I know as a layperson what that means, but tell me kind of clinically, in language that I can understand, what that means and-

Ken Dodge: Yes. Very briefly, when I was young, growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I saw a lot of kids getting into trouble, and became interested in how to prevent them from becoming juvenile delinquents. So I did a lot of research on how it is that kids come to be aggressive, and did some interventions. But then over time I got frustrated that that was even too late. One of the early factors leading some children to come to be delinquents was their early-life experiences in disruptive homes, being the victims of child abuse, being the victims of a lot of stressful environments, so I became very interested in preventing child abuse as a way to prevent children from growing up to be aggressive and violent themselves. So for the last 15 years or so, my interests have really been on prevention of child abuse.

Chris Riback: You also developed a framework for intervening early to prevent the costly consequences of violence for children and their communities. Describe that framework.

Ken Dodge: One of the things that psychologists have done is to develop interventions, but if we apply them to only 50 children in a community, we’re not really having an impact on the community. So around 2000, I became very interested in public health, in approaches to having population impact. We searched for a while for the silver bullet intervention, and there is not one. One of the things we’ve learned is that children come to be aggressive, and parents come to be abusive, in many different ways.

Chris Riback: So much can go into.

Ken Dodge: So much.

Chris Riback: Talk about interdisciplinary. So many impacts.

Ken Dodge: That’s right.

Chris Riback: What is Durham Connects, and how important is that to you?

Ken Dodge: It’s very important to me right now. Durham Connects started in Durham, North Carolina, with this idea of, how could we have a public health impact? We learned and noticed around the year 2000 that Durham, North Carolina, had a very high child abuse rate, especially in the first couple of years of life. It was higher than the state of North Carolina average, which was higher than the national average. Had to do with poverty, had to do with a lot of drug use and a lot of violence in the community.

Ken Dodge: So we embarked on a 20-year period to try to figure out want to do about it. We made a lot of attempts, a lot of failures I could tell you about, but that’s the way things go. We were very fortunate to have long-term financial funding from the Duke Endowment, a fabulous organization, and they invested in us.

Ken Dodge: Ultimately, we arrived on this idea of reaching every family at birth, in the hospital where they give birth, and then in their homes several weeks after. Reach out to them, congratulate them on the birth, but then try to understand what their needs are. We use nurses. They’re wonderful. What we learned is that every mother and father loves a nurse coming into their home to help them. So the nurse does that in several hours, gets to know the family, and tries to understand what their needs are. Then we try to bring community resources to meet their needs.

Chris Riback: Ken, to close out, because I want to let you get back to this show you’re running-

Ken Dodge: Sure.

Chris Riback: There’s 6,000 people waiting for you, you know. Big picture, I looked at the Center for Child and Family Policy, which you helped start. One part of it that caught my eye is the focus the Center puts on engaging with policymakers.

Ken Dodge: Yes.

Chris Riback: What’s your view of where our policymakers are in terms of understanding and supporting the important ideals behind early childhood development?

Ken Dodge: Surveys show that overwhelmingly, more than three quarters of American public favors greater investments in early childhood. They get the message. So if we’re scientifically evidence-based and thinking about economic efficiency, I have found policymakers really to be embracing what we’re doing. Durham Connects program, we now call Family Connects as we disseminate it nationally, and we’re in three dozen communities across the country that are interested, so policymakers are right on board.

Chris Riback: That’s great to hear. Well, thank you. Thank you for your work, and thank you for stopping by the ELN studio.

Ken Dodge: Thank you for doing this. Appreciate you being here.