Chris Riback: Dr. Austin, thank you for coming to the studio. Thank you for having us at this incredible conference.

Dr. Leah Austin: Awesome. Thank you for inviting me to the studio and thank you all for being here.

Chris Riback: So give me the pitch, what is NBCDI and what do you hope for from a conference like this?

Dr. Leah Austin: NBCDI is a 52-year-old national organization focused on the healthy child development of black children. And our conference attracts over 500 educators. So in particular, we are providing educators with tools, with resources, with knowledge, anything they need so that they can be better in their roles as educators, improving the education and development of black children.

Chris Riback: And what are you hearing at the conference? What are the biggest concerns that people have?

Dr. Leah Austin: A couple of things we’re hearing. One, I would say that we’re hearing from educators that they need a space like this, that they actually need a place where they can go and they can focus on black children, especially in this time where we have a context where that’s not as easy as it one, should be and maybe used to be.

So that’s definitely feedback we’re hearing. And then some of the other challenges that we hear from educators are things around just materials and resources that they have available to them and just trying to be connected to partner organizations that can help them find the tools and resources that they need.

Something else we hear from our attendees is really around, they’re continuing to want to build a stronger relationship with parents, and it’s both a, I think a challenge and an opportunity that they’re seeking. And so they’re talking a lot about how can they partner with an organization like NBCDI so that they can actually engage and reach more parents as they’re fulfilling their mission to educate children.

Chris Riback: So the theme of this year’s conference is unleashing the promise and the genius of black children and families. What are some examples of genius that you are hearing about?

Dr. Leah Austin: So we’re really, really focused as an organization on ensuring that we talk about black children from a strengths-based, assets-based positive approach, and using positive and more accurate language, quite frankly. And we know that black children are often labeled in ways that aren’t really good for them and aren’t actually accurate to who they are in their development.

And so we’re heavily focused when we talk about black genius or the genius of black children, it’s really about understanding that we’re speaking about children that are between the ages of birth and eight years old. Right? So they’re young, early childhood. And so we’re really focused on just what does it mean to be a child during that stage of life. Right? There’s an innate joy, there’s a happiness, there’s a curiosity.

You want to know so much about the world. Their eyes are lit up, they’re so happy, so excited, and they just want to know and they’re hungry for more knowledge. And that’s a major factor in being a genius, right? Is really this curiosity to learn more. And we want to make sure that black children are not, that they don’t lose that.

And it often is lost because systems are not set up to support that joy and support that genius. So we see this kind of convening as an opportunity to really double down on the fact that that genius is there and it’s all of our jobs and our responsibilities to make sure that we preserve it and we promote it.

Chris Riback: And create the room and the space for it. You mentioned a moment ago a little bit, you kind of hinted at the political environment. What are the political realities that you’re seeing and what can you do to help contribute constructively to the political environment?

Dr. Leah Austin: Absolutely. So a major challenge, again, given our audience is really primarily educators, is that educators are very confused about what they can and cannot do, what they can and cannot say. And many are feeling powerless because they want to teach children about who they are. And it’s not just about black children seeing themselves in books, those resources. Those things absolutely matter because that’s the affirmation that helps them with their racial identity and their development.

But it’s also important for all children to see themselves and to see others so that we’re all expanded and so that when they grow up, they’re able to relate to different people because they’ve had this experience where they’ve both seen themselves and they’ve seen other people in their learning environments. And so that’s something that we hear from teachers, but they do. In this day and age, it’s very, very hard for them to figure out exactly how they do that.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Dr. Leah Austin: When they’re in a moment where they could literally lose their jobs if they say the wrong word or something that’s considered divisive. So what NBCDI has done is in addition to this convening and them being able to be here and share that and get resources, literally go to the vendors and buy books and get resources that they can use in their classrooms and at home with their families, we are also an advocacy organization.

And so we’ve done some work with our affiliate network around understanding the legislations that have passed and what the actual language means and where it does prohibit and where it actually doesn’t, things that they can do and say in Georgia. We hosted with our local affiliate, BCDI, Atlanta, a summit with GEEARS, our Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students organization, and just talked honestly about how these concepts even got to the place where we, the people believed that they are divisive and what we can actually do in classrooms with teachers to change that.

Chris Riback: Let’s turn slightly, and I want to ask you about climate.

Dr. Leah Austin: Okay.

Chris Riback: You are part of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force. What is that task force? What inspires you to focus on climate? I thought we were talking about early education.

Dr. Leah Austin: Right. That’s a good question. So the task force is focused on the impact of climate change on our youngest people, our little ones, and understand just from the data that just by way of their age, right? This group of children are vulnerable, they are because they’re developmentally completely dependent on adults. And so what adults have to understand is that everything we do or we do not do impacts them.

And because they are physically developing at a different pace and in a different way than we are as adults, things like living in a neighborhood where there’s a factory that’s next door. Or I’m in Atlanta, so living in a neighborhood where literally a highway has been built and cuts through your neighborhood.

Chris Riback: Yes, it does.

Dr. Leah Austin: And you’re outside playing. You’re not just outside playing and they’re cars going by, you’re outside playing and there are emissions and toxic air that you’re now breathing in. And for a little person, there’s a lot of air that’s going into their bodies and is literally physically changing them. And so the task force is focused on what climate change means for the early years and for our youngest people.

Chris Riback: And if I’m not mistaken, you have some recommendations?

Dr. Leah Austin: There are some recommendations in the plan, yes.

Chris Riback: Give me a couple of those.

Dr. Leah Austin: Yep.

Chris Riback: And is it too early for progress or are you seeing any progress against any of those recommendations?

Dr. Leah Austin: Yes, I would share. One, is around supporting early learning centers. So we know that centers and schools are actually a place where there’s a lot of pollution and toxic air because of things like school bus, just in the way centers are often and schools are often built. And so there’s some recommendations there around rethinking how we use green space and even rethinking just the building of schools and just really making sure that they’re actually more appropriate in terms of the build out. I would say in terms of progress, I feel like there’s always some progress happening, but it’s very slow.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Dr. Leah Austin: And so we want to be hopeful and keeps sort of that positive mind, but it’s a slow and steady pace. And I think the fact that we’ve even, the progress that we’re really seeing is that we’re having the conversation, even to your point around the conversation of linking climate change to little people, that’s progress within itself. And now we have to take that conversation and actually put it into some action.

Chris Riback: So coming out of this conference and the 500 people from across the country and the ideas and the inspiration that you’ve heard, and I’ve gotten to hear as well, what’s next for NBCDI and what’s next for you?

Dr. Leah Austin: Oh, absolutely. So we want to keep growing our network and really seeing affiliates in every single state because we know that for so much of this work, the power, the advocacy power is at the state level. And so we want to make sure that we have leaders that understand, that respect our, not only our organization, but the lived experience and expertise of black people.

And so that’s definitely a next step for us and a goal that we have. I think for myself, it’s just continuing to build the organization, continue to amplify who we are, our voices and the voices of the network, and just making sure I have this dream and goal, I guess, dream that one day every single person will know the National Black Child Development Institute and will respect and understand it and be a part of it given its importance to black children – and that importance then being to the entire country.

Chris Riback: And if you had a governor or a state education secretary in front of you, is there a single message that you would give?

Dr. Leah Austin: The single message I would give is that we need to invest more in the early years and we need to invest more in ways that we just talked about very comprehensively. So yes, we need to invest more in their schools and the early childhood education component. We need to make sure that we are paying the workforce, actually paying them well so that they are not struggling themselves, but that they can really thrive and they can focus on the learning that they actually want to provide young children.

Chris Riback: Yes. Well, that’s a message that I think will be very clear to understand and your efforts through NBCDI are impacting communities across the country. Thank you for your work. Thank you for coming by the studio.

Dr. Leah Austin: Thank you for having me. This is wonderful.

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: 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.