Dr. Koraly (00:00:00):

As a parent trying to find that really tricky balance between honoring who they are as an individual and yet at the same time trying to equip them with the skills they need to succeed or achieve in the society we live in, even when their core traits don’t necessarily match.

Dr. Sarah (00:00:30):

Whether you have a child who is more reserved or one who is bursting with energy, understanding their temperament and working with their natural makeup can make parenting feel so much easier. Joining me this week is McCourtney Professor of Child Studies and a Professor of Psychology at Penn State, Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar. Dr. Pérez-Edgar has done so much research on temperament and in this episode she’s going to explain in very simple terms how temperament influences the way that children regulate their emotions, how they respond to their environment, and why certain temperaments might clash with the way we parent and how we can modify what we’re already doing to better suit both their needs and our own. By the end of this conversation, you will not only have a clear understanding of your child’s unique temperament, but you’ll also walk away with practical strategies to support them in ways that foster self-actualization, emotional regulation and success on their own terms.

(00:01:37):

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights so you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(00:02:06):

Hello. Today we are sitting down with Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar. Thank you for coming on the show. I’m really excited to talk with you today.

Dr. Koraly (00:02:19):

Well, thank you for inviting me. This should be fun.

Dr. Sarah (00:02:22):

Yeah. Just to start out, could you maybe let the people who are listening in on sort of your work, you are a very prominent researcher in the field of temperament, and can you talk a little bit about what you do, how you got into this particular line of research?

Dr. Koraly (00:02:43):

Sure. So I started working in temperament research. Oh, I sound like a dinosaur now. Back in the mid nineties as a graduate student with Jerome Kagan, he was one of the leaders in developmental psych of the 20th century in general, but really pushed forward the notion of temperament as an important early appearing, lifelong contributor to social and emotional development. I joke with colleagues that I drank the Kool-Aid twice because after getting my PhD with Dr. Kagan, I then went to work with Nathan Fox at Maryland who was one of Dr. Kagan’s former students who also works in temperament. And so I tell people that Jerry Kagan defined our study of temperament and Nathan Fox refined our study of temperament, and I sort of sat there working with the two of them and tried to take up as much as I could for my own work.

Dr. Sarah (00:03:55):

That’s amazing. And so my guess is that anybody listening has heard the word temperament, but the chance that we actually really know what it really is is actually pretty small in my experience, that it’s very, very misunderstood. If someone is very brand new to this concept of temperament or is about to be open to reframing and redefining what they have previously thought, temperament was, how would you give someone a primer?

Dr. Koraly (00:04:30):

Sure. So I think if you’re going to discuss temperament or think about temperament, particularly in the lives of children, there are three main pillars. One that it’s early appearing, two, that it’s biologically based. Three, that it’s relatively stable. So the first that it’s early appearing, and this is the notion that even as early as four months of age, you can see individual differences across babies and how they respond to their social world. Do they like noise? Do noises stress them out? Are they oblivious to noise? Do they notice sounds in the environment? Do they seek out information from the environment and stimulation or do they like to be cocooned and somewhat insulated by what’s happening around them? That’s not their personality yet. That’s their temperament, but that temperament is going to give us one puzzle piece that’ll help shape their personality. That’s probably a bad analogy. Let’s say a piece of clay.

Dr. Sarah (00:05:51):

Mhmm.

Dr. Koraly (00:05:51):

That there are different types of clay with different consistencies and that are harder or easier to mold. So that early appearance, that’s their clay. Two, that it is biologically based and this means that if that child is sensitive to noise, sensitive to light, sensitive to social interactions, there’s something in their underlying biology that makes that, so we see it in brain activity, we see it in different balances of different neurochemicals. We see that in their heart rate. We see that in their skin conductance, so their body reflects the behavior we see. But I think it’s important to say that doesn’t mean that it is static, it’s biologically based and it has some genetics to it, but it’s not like eye color or hair color. Again, it’s giving us clay and we can mold that clay in different ways. And that leads to number three, that it’s relatively stable, that the very sensitive infant to noise, to sound to social interaction is more likely to become the shy toddler and the shy child and the introverted adult, but it is not a given and there’s a lot of room to play with that clay, but that clay is not glass, it is not steel, it is not wood.

(00:07:42):

You can’t create whatever you want out of a child. The child is bringing him or herself to this equation, so is she going to be super shy or a little shy? That’s where we get to play with the clay and mold it over time where temperament becomes personality. So you have early appearing bi biologically based, relatively stable. Those are the three that can apply to a whole range of temperaments, and that’s what puts them in the temperament family.

Dr. Sarah (00:08:20):

Okay. And when we’re measuring temperament, are there certain sort of categories or facets that you are looking for to determine sort of the constellation of features that a temperament has?

Dr. Koraly (00:08:34):

Yeah, so a lot of the work that we do looks at first principles is approach versus withdrawal. So when confronting the world around them, does a child tend to throw himself in there, run forward without thinking about it and just try to soak up what’s happening? This child is approach oriented or does the child wait, maybe even pull back a little bit, maybe even refuse to engage when asked, they’re slow to warm up, they need to see what’s happening, and they often prefer the familiar, are they approach or are they withdraw oriented? That’s sort of the initial motivation. The other thing we look for is their ability to regulate, to be effortful in deciding what they will do or not do. So for example, the approach child, he can notice and decide, oh wait, this is a circumstance where I really shouldn’t just go running across the street without looking both ways, and maybe I shouldn’t just talk to everybody I see on the street. And they learn to effortfully control that and be more regulated just as in the same way the child who initial reaction is to pull back and withdraw, they can say, you know what? This is a circumstance where maybe I should try something new. Maybe I should engage with the social world a little bit more. And effortfully push themselves forward. So the child with the help of parents learns to control or regulate that initial approach or withdraw tendency. So it’s reactivity approach, withdraw and regulation, their ability to effortfully control that initial reaction.

Dr. Sarah (00:10:44):

Okay. And when you say regulate, you’re talking about regulating behavior and initiation specifically?

Dr. Koraly (00:10:48):

Behavior and emotion.

Dr. Sarah (00:10:51):

Okay, because I’ve always been curious, I’ve been really curious about temperament with, you talk about the highly sensitive person or the highly sensitive child research, and is that the same? Is it tapping into something different? How much of temperament is an effort for? Is the way a child is starting to regulate their nervous system’s response to the stimulus in their environment?

Dr. Koraly (00:11:17):

I think that’s right there with it and overlapping so that if you have a child who’s very sensitive to the environment, they need to learn to regulate more so than the child who’s not sensitive. And that’s I think the difficulty for parents when people give parenting advice is that, and we all have seen it, here’s the checklist, here’s the workbook, here’s how you organize a nice tidy daily activity chart. There’s some kids who don’t need the chart. They are the chart. They are a walking chart. If anything, you’re trying to convince them that it is okay if we do item two on the list before item one, right?

(00:12:01):

For other children, they need that external scaffolding. They need that regulation from the parent. So it is not as if you have your firstborn and you’re the perfect parent and you’re like, oh, I’m just going to use the same tips and tricks with second born, second born might need an entirely different toolbox. And so it is matching the needs of the child with what the parent is bringing to the situation. So if the child is very well regulated, then maybe you don’t need to think about daily, how do we organize ourselves and make sure we avoid tantrums or make sure we avoid running across the street without looking both ways and so that the child is interacting with the environment and telling the environment what it needs, and then it’s up to us to listen to that signal and then adapt.

Dr. Sarah (00:13:02):

Yeah, which is I think hard for a lot of families, especially hard, I was a very, just personally my first temperament is very quick to warm up and high regulation. That’s just just how he was. He was very, very easygoing and kind of rode all the waves, not when he was an infant. When he was infant, he was really, really colicky.

(00:13:34):

But then after he hit that threshold, everything kind of shifted for him and which I think had something to do with nervous system development. I think once his nervous system got to a point where he was able to regulate more, she was able to, but then I had my second and she’s just temperamentally very, very different. She slower to warm up and she regulates. She struggles with that. It’s not easy for her to always regulate and she gets hit with these huge waves of emotionality and she just doesn’t have the equipment to regulate it as well. And it was like, oh, it’s not me. I’m not, who’s making this one kid super easy, the kid. And I was a big dose of humble pie or reality check.

Dr. Koraly (00:14:31):

So when we do research with little ones, so first of all, we don’t start before four months of age because before four months it is. So the nervous system isn’t really clicking in sleep, eat and poop cycles aren’t even that greatly organized. So what is there to see? But when they get older, we sometimes talk about our California babies or our potato babies. We throw everything we can at them in the lab and they’re just chill. They’re just like, oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, I once had a baby, he was sitting in a high chair and he just literally lifted his leg up and put it on the high chair tray just like, this is cool. Other babies, you do a 10th of what? We show them a mobile, we show them a jack in the box and they are out, they’re gone. It’s just too much. And it’s sort of like regulation is hard if you have a lot of emotion, if you’re chill and you’re just sitting there and your heart rate barely bleeps, you got barely anything to regulate.

Dr. Sarah (00:15:36):

Yeah.

Dr. Koraly (00:15:37):

So it’s the two sides of the equation coming together there. And until a child is old enough to regulate for themselves, it means caregivers, parents, teachers, aunts and uncles, peers sometimes have to step in and we’re better and worse at it. Right.

Dr. Sarah (00:15:56):

Well, I would imagine our own temperament and our own nervous system can have a big impact. I happen to temperamentally match my son’s temperament more. I am very quick to jump in and I have a pretty steady ability to regulate my affect and my physiological stuff. But if I were really sensitive. If I was approach avoidant, if tons and tons of stimulation in my environment made me really overwhelmed and I had a kid who was really, really, really needing my constant regulation and I didn’t have the tolerance for that, and by all means, I do not always have the tolerance for it, a breaking point for everybody, but mine’s higher, just my own biology, my own temperament and my own work as an adult on those skills. But if I imagine the match of the child and the parent’s temperament can also clash sometimes.

Dr. Koraly (00:17:03):

They can clash, I think, and it’s hard to project out or to predict a good mix versus a bad mix, only because temperaments are so complicated. And there are multiple temperaments. I think regardless of the temperamental match, it’s empathy on the part of the parent on trying to understand what the child is feeling. And that could be easier or harder if you’re exuberant or yourself you are inhibited because that’s a different skill set. I think sometimes what we find, and again this is my own bias, I tend to study the inhibited children, is that the difficulty we have sometimes is when you’re an inhibited parent with an inhibited child and you’re trying to overcome your own tendencies to withdraw and not let that color, the child’s tendency to withdraw that just as you’re pushing yourself a little bit forward, you’re pushing your child a little bit forward as well. And I think that reflects a lot of the times our needs to match expectations. What do people expect of us as parents and what do they expect of our children? And it is that clash that I think sometimes makes it difficult for parents and for the kids. I mean the kids have a say in what they’re feeling and how they’re responding to what’s happening around them.

Dr. Sarah (00:18:38):

Yeah, that makes me think too because one of the things we together before we hit record really wanted to make sure we kind of underlined here, is that yes, understanding temperament can be a huge asset in parenting. It can help you understand your kid, it can help you understand yourself, but it can also, if you understand it and you kind of put it in its place, can help reduce a lot of the pressure. Parents often feel like, how much are we supposed to be? How much can we be expected to raise a child mold a child? I, I mean believe this is getting, we’re moving out of this. My hope is that we’re moving out of this, but there’s been a longstanding sort of implicit and sometimes even explicit belief that parents’ job is to fill up this empty vessel and how good of a job they do is determined, is judged by society, basically is like, does this vessel fit?

Dr. Koraly (00:19:48):

And it’s funny you use the phrase empty vessel, and I often use that with my students when introducing these concept. And I use a quote from John Watson from 1924, so we’re going back a hundred years, and he was at the peak of behaviorism. All I have to do is shape the environment. And he has this quote and it’s beautiful and poetic and I think in many ways deeply democratic. He says, regardless of the race and of the gender of the child and of national origin, he says, give me my own private island. And regardless of all the things that were at the root of many prejudices of the last century, I can make this child a doctor, a lawyer. But then he also says, or a beggar man or a thief, and it’s democratic. And because it opens up opportunity for all children, it breaks away from that older, biologically based, superior, inferior view of people, but it replaces it with the empty vessel that the child has no say in it. You let me control this child and I’ll make it what I want him to be a doctor or a thief. It’s up to me to decide what this child will be. And it removes the agency from the child. So I think it swings the pendulum too far in the other direction.

(00:21:26):

And temperament I think helps us in addition to studying parenting and attachment and other socio and cultural components, all the different parts of the formula that the parent has a role, society has a role, culture has a role, biology has a role, but the child has a role as well, right? Again, he is clay, but he has his own form of clay. He is not completely moldable. And I love the John Watson quote because it lets this conversation come out that we can have positive views of our children. They can be anything they want to be, but not falling into the trap of if they are not perfect, then we missed or we did something wrong because the goal was perfection. Because anything you can want to be must equal perfect. And we need to dial it back a bit and say, there are a lot of things you can be, and there are a lot of ways to be good at things and we can’t use the same measuring stick for all children, and we have a role to play. So, and happiness is also part of the measuring stick. What kind of job you get is part of the measuring stick, what kind of relationships you have are part of that measuring stick. And let’s not be as worried that there is only one way to say you succeeded as a parent.

Dr. Sarah (00:23:12):

Yeah. Yeah. I really, really love that. I think, and it makes me want to layer onto that because I think we’re so, we focus so much on achievement. We’re a really achievement oriented culture, but I feel like, and this is less to do with temperament, but more what we’re talking about, this idea of molding the child versus bearing witness to the child’s coming into their own and creating an environment that meets them where they are at and creates opportunities for a kid to find sort of self-actualization. I always say self-actualization is far more predictive of achievement than the other way around. And I think we flip it. We think that the more we focus on achievement and giving our kids every possible opportunity to achieve that, we are increasing their chances for this sense of self-actualization. And I think we get it backwards. And I do think that if we understand our kids’ temperament and we respect it and we want to be curious about it and help work with our kid and scaffold them and stretch them in places where they would benefit from extra skills, if they move towards a more inhibited temperament, then they’re going to at baseline be more inclined to avoid stuff that’s overstimulating or challenging or just feels too big for them. And we live in a world where being able to regulate that and try things and stretch is healthy.

(00:24:59):

Bend, not break, right? Yes. But if we can do all that with our kids and help them live in a world that sees them and buffers them to some degree and also pushes them to some degree, I guess it’s like we’re helping them to find their own way. And then kids who self-actualize tend to achieve, but they might not achieve in the way that we imagined or Fanta or that society said is the right way of achieving.

Dr. Koraly (00:25:40):

And often we use the term “niche picking”.

Dr. Sarah (00:25:45):

I like that.

Dr. Koraly (00:25:45):

That through develop. And it’s a phrase that we stole from mythologist who use it in studying animals out in the wild that for survival, you pick those environments or those niches that have the good balance of giving what you need, being flexible, you can survive the flood, you can survive the drought, your species will thrive there. And in many ways, sometimes part of development, part of becoming an adult is finding what those niches are.

(00:26:21):

So I often joke that if you look into offices of accountants, if you look into academic labs, you’re going to find a lot of previously inhibited kids who found their niche, they found where their skills are valued, where they can go into work every day and come home a little tired but refreshed, where if you take that same inhibited child and send them off to be a salesperson who has to live on commission, who has to cold call, who has to create these relationships to generate business, it’s not going to work for them. It’s the wrong niche. They’re not dumber, they’re not less personable. It’s not the right niche for them. Same thing, the exuberant person who gains energy from social interactions, who thrives being in the social world, you’re going to shrivel them a little bit by forcing them to sit in the corner quietly. And I think for parents, the difficulty is letting their child find that niche when that niche might not be your niche, where it’s different than your prediction for this child was. And as a parent, and now my children are 19 and 22, so this is sort of going back in time retrospectively, is trying to find that really tricky balance between honoring who they are as an individual and yet at the same time trying to equip them with the skills they need to succeed or achieve.

(00:28:16):

In the society we live in, even when their core traits don’t necessarily match, right? How do we honor who they are and yet equip them to survive?

Dr. Sarah (00:28:31):

So that’s a very good question. And I’m thinking going back to earlier ages, I think you see this, we just started school, right? First day of kindergarten for my daughter was last week. When you have kids who are slower to open up, who need more control over the incoming stimulus in their environment or want more control over things in general, what can we do to help support them? Again, we want to see them for what they are. It’s kind of like that middle space of giving them, well, maybe we could talk about scaffolding. People aren’t familiar with this term. How do we use scaffolding? What is it and how do we use it to help an inhibited kib and an exuberant kid?

Dr. Koraly (00:29:30):

So not to get too nerdy, but I think in our field…

Dr. Sarah (00:29:34):

Nerd away. I love it. I can nerd out on this stuff forever.

Dr. Koraly (00:29:39):

So for most of us, we use the term scaffolding coming straight out of the work of Lev Vygotsky, who was a Russian psychologist working in the early part of the 20th century. His work was lost. It was never translated into English until the latter half sixties, seventies where people like, oh, look at him. And he was mainly working in academic settings, but we kind of took the word scaffolding and ran with it. And it’s basically saying, look, children have certain skills at any one moment in time, which means they can only do a certain amount of stuff at any one moment in time by themselves.

(00:30:21):

But if they have teachers, parents, even peers who have more skills work with them, they can do more together than they can by themselves. So it’s a really intuitive concept. So if you have a young child who’s having a tantrum and they are on the ground and they are really mad, you’re forcing them to, oh, I don’t know, wear shoes. When they go outside, they can’t regulate by themselves. So sometimes you have to get down on the floor with them. You have to first physically get them to stop thrashing around, then model breathing for them, then calm them down, then talk about why they’re upset, and then explain the need for shoes and then explain the fact that they’re not going out to the park until there are shoes. And hopefully by that point you’ve slipped these shoes on and you’re going out the door, you’re scaffolding regulation for this child. And with time, your hope is all of those little mantras, you gave them all of the little breathing techniques, you start to see it by themselves. They’re like 1, 2, 3. So they’re doing it without you modeling it for them, and then eventually miracle of miracles. They do it internally and you don’t even see them regulating.

(00:31:56):

And then one day they just put on their shoes and walk out the door. And so you’ve scaffolded that for them until they can do it themselves. It literally almost evokes this notion of a construction site until this building can stand up by itself. Let’s put those scaffolds up there, but those scaffolds can’t be permanent. At some point, you’ve got to take them down and let the building stand. And I think parents who intervene to the extent that they just take over, it’s okay, baby, you don’t have to wear shoes or It’s okay, we will figure out another activity where you’ll never have to wear shoes again. That’s helping the child any and that building will never stand. So in scaffolding, we figure out what do we need to do until the child can do it by themself, whether it be in a social setting or an academic setting. We count with our fingers until we can internalize those concepts. And so depending on who your child is, the type of scaffolding might be different. A very exuberant, highly reactive child may help need help calming down and figuring out what to do in the moment and not leaping ahead. The very quiet child might need scaffolding to come out of their shell and engage with the world. You mentioned start a kindergarten.

(00:33:27):

Often school districts do this for all children, but it’s particularly important for the shyer child is to go to the room the week before. What does the room look like? I mean, remember, you’re five, you have no idea what school looks like. It’s not, sorry, what’s the word in? It’s not familiar. And familiarity is good for these children. So seeing what the classroom looks like, seeing the physicality of their desk, putting a face to the name of the teacher, seeing how they fit into the three dimensional world of their school is really helpful. First days might still be rough. They might come home and say, I don’t think I want to go back, but it’s going to get easier and easier. There’s a professor, Sarah Rim Kaufman at the University of Virginia, and she has studied inhibited children in classrooms and she says that first couple of weeks of school you can walk in there and pick them out, bang, bang, bang. You’d know them by the end of the school year, they’re still evident, but not as much. And then you go to first grade classroom and that first week or two, you can pick them out still, but it’s not as sharp a distinction.

(00:34:53):

And every school year, they’re less and less evident because they’ve become more familiar with school, they become better at regulating and they have friends, they’re not captain. Would you say that their temperament changed though? They’ve learned to regulate their temperament, so they’re not necessarily going to be captain of the football team. They’re not going to necessarily be president of the clubs, but they’ll join the club. They’ll have two or three really close friends. Those two or three close friends buffer them when they feel that anxiety again about something new. We’re not turning them into extroverts. We’re giving them the tools to deal with the world as who they are as people. So we’re not pushing them. You got to be cheerleading captain. We’re saying, what activities do you want to be part of?

Dr. Sarah (00:35:52):

I love that because it’s like, again, in understanding temperament is relatively stable and we can learn how to regulate how it holds us back or shoves us forward and to maybe have some control over. I know I have the urge to hold back, but I can try something. I have trust in myself that I can handle this uncomfortable feeling and I can give it a go. That comes with practice and a lot of support. And sometimes our time permit wants to shove us forward and we have to be able to say, I want to slow down and just check first. How would that play out? Those are skills, right? That’s not changing your temperament. That’s just adding skills.

Dr. Koraly (00:36:42):

And I think we as a society tend to focus on one end of the spectrum than the other in terms of things we need to change. We worry. We bring kids in because they’re so shy, they don’t have a lot of friends. They won’t go to Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts aren’t the life of the party. They sit and read books all day. And I think it has to be very extreme on the other end before parents worry.

Dr. Sarah (00:37:14):

In early childhood or later on?

Dr. Koraly (00:37:17):

I think a little bit of both the exuberant child who’s very positive emotionally, who jumps into social situations, who someone who gather around, that’s considered good.

Dr. Sarah (00:37:32):

We value that.

Dr. Koraly (00:37:34):

We value that. And it’s at the extreme when we realize, oh, wait a minute. They’re pretty not well regulated in these social situations. They take over, they don’t listen to the cues of the other children or adults. They’re not part of the social situation. They tend to try to dominate it or use it for their wishes. Then the parent’s like, oh, I might have to tame him down a little bit, or she needs to take a step back and be part of the group. But it takes longer, I think, and it has to be more extreme before parents and teachers and peers say, oh, wait a minute, where for the quiet shy child, we point that out right away because it doesn’t fit our view of in our western hyper competitive of world. They’re like, people are going to walk all over her. She’s got to learn backbone. Or the phrase often is, closed mouths don’t get fed, right? She’s going to have to figure out how to ask for what she wants, or he’s going to have to step out into the world.

Dr. Sarah (00:38:46):

It’s so funny because your work, I mean, you’ve done so much research on inhibited children and social anxiety and all this stuff, and it’s funny, we live in our silos. I work so much with families of explosive kids.

Dr. Koraly (00:39:07):

Yes.

Dr. Sarah (00:39:07):

Who are exuberant, but really low regulating where they have a lot of trouble hitting the brakes. They’re really, really impulsive. But interestingly, and this is why I wanted to ask you this, because I actually see a lot of kids who fit that profile where they’re like moving 50 miles an hour and have no brakes, but they’re also very anxious and they are very slow to warm up, and they do have a lot of, they get stimulated really, really easily by their environmental noise and chaos and people looking at them and seeing them. So can you be both right that, what’s that profile? I see a lot of those kids.

Dr. Koraly (00:39:55):

Right? Amy Hayne, who’s now a professor at Williams College, thought of those kids as intense kids’, really high up on negative emotions. They’re really high up on positive emotions. They get triggered on both sides really quickly. And so you can think of the child who’s highly exuberant, high positive, running around, and then on the dime has that negative temper tantrum, right? They swing from one end to the other. And part of it is sometimes their inability to control their emotions and control their wants in the moment, leads to frustration, leads to anger, leads to negative emotion that the temperature often is higher than say the inhibited child who kind of percolates at the sad level. They kind of feel sad where the exuberant child goes straight to angry. And I think it’s, again, it’s the way in which their nervous system, their psychological processes are really reactive. They go from zero to 60 and depending on the circumstances because they’re getting something they really want or they’re being denied something they really want, it comes out like whoosh, right? Inhibited kids don’t tend to whoosh quite as much. That is not to say that inhibit kids don’t have tantrums, and that is not to say that exuberant kids don’t have quiet moments where they just need to be left alone for a little bit and kind of rebalance themselves. It’s just that the intensity of their feelings often come out and they come out at both ends of the emotion spectrum. And again, when I was saying the California babies, it’s well and good to regulate when there’s nothing to regulate when you’re just even keel, heart rate barely goes up, breathing’s always steady. But when you’re really feeling something, whether it’s really positive in your mind or really negative in your mind, those regulatory skills have to work over time. And it’s the scaffolding of teaching these kids how to regulate intense emotions where their peers might not have to work at it either because they’re really good at regulating or there’s nothing to regulate.

Dr. Sarah (00:42:24):

Yes, that is such a helpful way to explain what I see so much of, and I feel like I’ve got lots of episodes that talk about those explosive or high intensity kids. But I’m really curious, since I’ve got the expert on the inhibited kids here. If you have a child who is very slow to warm up and needs more control over their environment and has a tendency to withdraw or avoid, and the worry is, oh my gosh, they’re going to have social anxiety, they’re not going to have friends, they’re going to isolate one. How do we separate that projection from the temperament, but then also how do we set them up for success in terms of fitting into the environment that they have to go and work in? And I don’t mean work vocationally, but they need to figure out how to be in that space.

Dr. Koraly (00:43:22):

They need to learn how to move around and interact and survive and thrive in their world. I think the important thing to first point out is that nothing is a given per se, that the very shy child is likely to be the fairly shy adult, but there is no given that they’ll be socially anxious. And that part of that outcome is how we respond to that child.

(00:43:55):

So there’s been work by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, chin Chen, who did work on temperament in mainland China. And in the nineties, he found that the kids who here in the US we say are at risk for anxiety or at risk for having poor peer relationships because of their inhibition were thriving in China. They had friends, they had less anxiety, they had less depression. They were the best students, not because they were somehow different at day one from the inhibited children in the us. It’s because people valued those traits and they reinforced them and they gave them praise for that and gave them positive opportunities to stretch, which we tend not to do in the us. But what was really interesting is that he’s gone back multiple times and he has found that this relationship, this positive outcomes for the inhibited children in China still holds strong in rural areas. But if you go into the urban areas of China, Shanghai, Beijing, it’s looking more like the US because as Chinese societies become more hyper competitive, more westernized, the traits that used to be valued are now considered worrisome, so to say. It’s not that the child changes or the child has changed, it’s how parents and teachers and society reacted to this child.

(00:45:39):

So if we act like it’s a problem, you increase the odds that it will be a problem. All this to say, and I hate saying this, I hated hearing it as a parent. There’s sort of this Goldilocks just right middle road. If you have an inhibited child and you say, oh, my sweet baby child, you don’t like going to daycare, you don’t like going to play dates, you don’t like going to gymnastics, so we will pull you from daycare play dates and gymnastics. You will stay home with me where you feel comfortable. And that way you never have to feel stressed. That child will be ill-equipped for the inevitable stress of interacting with the world and is at increased risk for social anxiety.

(00:46:35):

If you say, this is our social behavior bootcamp and we’re going to pull you into swim class and gymnastics, and we’re going to force you to do X, Y, and Z, and if you’re too scared, tough deal with it, then you’re going to have a child who is at increased risk for social anxiety. They are overwhelmed and unable to regulate, and there’s no scaffolding them, so they’re going to withdraw even more. So there is this middle ground. Let’s have a play date with one child, someone you kind of know already. Then build up to two or three. Let’s go to a mommy and me and hopefully daddy in me classes where I’m there so you have a space that feels safe, but I’m going to pull back little by little so that you’re interacting with the other kids independently of me. I’m not just dropping you off and leaving day one, but I’m pulling back so that the child gets the skills they will need. You’re not going to be next to them at all times, and it’s this middle road. You don’t throw them on the deep side of the pool on day one, but you give them the ability to swim. You have to teach them to swim. You cannot hold them by your side on the edge of the pool and never let them get wet past their ankles because one day they’re going to fall in and they won’t know how to swim.

Dr. Sarah (00:48:14):

Oh, that’s such a powerful metaphor. And probably also quite literally what happens with inhibited kids at swim lessons.

Dr. Koraly (00:48:22):

Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. My one at gymnastics was like, oh, no, we’re not doing this. And then by the end, they were tumbling, they were running around, but at the beginning it was like, oh, no, who are these people?

Dr. Sarah (00:48:36):

Yeah. When my daughter, I took her to a dance class when she was, I want to say three or four maybe, and I joked that it was a very expensive separation exposure because we didn’t do dance, but we went every week. We went every week, and we stood in. There was a little room outside the dance room, and she would stay with me out there for a while, maybe she’d go look into the window and watch the kids dancing, and every time I’d bring her back and sometimes she’d make it in at the end of the class, she’d go in and then she’d go in for a little longer, and eventually she was going into dance class a couple times before the end of the session. And it was like, okay, yeah, if I was focused on she’s going to dance, I’m paying for dance lessons and she’s not dancing, I might get frustrated and pull her out. And also that would’ve been fine, I suppose too, if you were like, this is not worth it. I didn’t renew it. I was like, this might not be her thing. But I really did want to just like you were saying, that Goldilocks approach of like, okay, I’ve committed to this. I’ve spent the money, instead of not showing up anymore, I’m going to do this exercise in separating exercise, in being in an uncomfortable space and just scaffolding this process of going into the dance class. And it was hard for me. It was very not the way I wanted to spend my Saturday mornings.

Dr. Koraly (00:50:10):

Especially when you look at the other moms who the kid just shows up, runs inside, and they’re over there with their latte and they’re reading or doing whatever. Again, their job is done. They got the child to the event, and you’re like, what did I do wrong? That I am not here sitting with my latte. In fact, I am sweating left and I’m trying to not think of what the other moms are thinking of me trying not to think of what my daughter thinks of all this, because they’re probably resenting you from dragging them there. Whose relationship have I saved here? But that’s the thing. We assume that the good profile is parent shows up with child. Child happily skips away, parent sits and has their quiet time, and that’s good parenting. And anything less than that means you must have done something wrong.

Dr. Sarah (00:51:06):

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves too much. It’s interesting because I also think there are some kids that require more work to our point, some kids don’t need a lot of scaffolding because there isn’t that much to scaffold, and it’s really lovely when you get dealt that hand. But there are kids who require more, and I work with a lot of parents too, not just kids, but parents who have their own. They’re dealing with their own mental health issues because the stress of parenting a child that requires so much more has led to profound burnout and depression and anxiety sometimes, but definitely burnout and huge guilt and shame because they’re just doing everything wrong. Reality is like now you got a kid that requires a lot more. And yes, it is more work to parent a kid this way.

Dr. Koraly (00:52:04):

The fatigue plus guilt is a double whammy. You’re really tired and you’re really upset that you have to do all this. And somehow, what did I not do early on that fixed it?

Dr. Sarah (00:52:18):

And then you feel guilty because you want a break.

Dr. Koraly (00:52:20):

Yes, you need a break, you need a break, you need a break. And sometimes you see these clashes. So Andrea Kronis ano at the University of Maryland does work originally on ADHD, so children with ADHD. And she found first anecdotally, but then in her research that kids with A DHD tend to have parents with often undiagnosed ADHD. And so they’re not best equipped to deal with the scaffolding this child needs because they’re not really great at scaffolding themselves. And so you have to both help the parent and then help the parent help the child.

(00:53:01):

So she found that we had erroneously only focused on the child as if the child just came out fully formed ADHD, and the world just did what they needed to do to help. But that child tended to have the parent who also had those same challenges, and to make the child thrive to the best of their ability, you have to help the parent thrive to the best of their ability. Yes. Same way that inhibited children tend to have anxious parents. And so if the parent is scared of the water in the pool, they’re less likely to force their child to get in the water. And so it’s sort of like my mom was born in Puerto Rico, does not know how to swim, is terrified every time I go to the beach, even though I know how to swim. Because in her mind, she’s living her anxiety of the water and of her child. And again, it’s not just the child, it’s the child and who’s taking care of them that often creates that environment for them.

Dr. Sarah (00:54:11):

It makes me think of the parenting therapy for child anxiety called space supportive parenting for anxious childhood emotions. It’s out of the Yale Child Study Center. Eli Lebowitz came up with it too. Are you familiar with it?

Dr. Koraly (00:54:25):

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Sarah (00:54:26):

So I’m sort of getting certified in it. We use it a lot at my practice. And the reason why I loved it so much when I found it was like, oh, there’s a way. Obviously yes, if a child has anxiety or OCD, we can work with the child and help them reduce those symptoms. But because I work from a very family systems model where we’re always looking at the interplay of everyone in the family and all the roles that we end up playing, when you have a really anxious child, they pull for parental accommodations, what you’re describing, right? Oh no, my darling, I’m going to shield you from all the things. And what you’re kind of implying is whether you believe it or are saying it explicitly or not, you’re kind of saying you can’t handle this feeling. You can’t handle feeling anxious. You can’t handle being in a situation where you don’t have control. You can’t handle being overwhelmed. So I’m going to prevent you from ever having to be in a situation where you have to feel that feeling because you can’t handle that feeling or I don’t believe you can handle that feeling.

Dr. Koraly (00:55:25):

Or I don’t want to have to help you handle that feeling.

Dr. Sarah (00:55:28):

Right, or I don’t believe I can handle you having that feeling. And so in space, we do a ton of work with helping the parents, one just map out all of the things that they’re doing on their end that is accommodating the anxious rituals or the anxious avoidance, and slowly and sort of systematically pull those things and allow the child to experience the anxiety in a safe and supported way. And to your other point, it’s always this middle space of if you are just communicating confidence that they can do the thing.

(00:56:07):

It’s too demanding, it’s too much. If you’re only saying, I am going to protect you from all the anxiety, then they don’t have a chance to experience it and see for themselves, oh, I can handle this. It’s hard, but I can do it. And so Ellie talks about a supportive statement, which is validation of the anxious experience. This is really hard. It is really hard to go to dance class and say goodbye to me and start this thing with these other kids and confidence that they can cope. I know you can handle this feeling. I know you got this.

Dr. Koraly (00:56:45):

Right. And I think what’s really interesting is sort of the bi-directional influence here. So the space dealing with the parent to help the child. But Wendy Silverman, who’s also at the Yale Child Study Center, has this paper, the study sheet ran where they did a treatment of the child. But what they found is before and after treatment, after treatment, mom’s symptoms went down. She was feeling better because again, like you said, the child is pulling for all these needs. The parent is having to give them or believes they have to, they’re feeling tired, they’re feeling stressed. When there’s less of a pull from the child, now the parent can breathe a little bit more. So it’s both ways. Help the child. You help the parent, help the parent, you’re going to help the child. There’s a system there.

Dr. Sarah (00:57:43):

And I’ve done space with a lot of families, and not always, but very, very, very often, the parents are also anxious. They either have a diagnosed anxiety disorder or they’re just self, I’m anxious, this is a lot. They identify as anxious and we know it’s genetically loaded. Same with the ADHD. That makes total sense to me.

Dr. Koraly (00:58:08):

And I think it’s just then I understanding your concerns, which are legitimate, and then how do you overcome your own concerns so that then as needed, focus on the child’s concerns. And we as a society, and I think it’s gotten worse over the years, have pushed the parent to the side a little bit. I think I’ve read studies where the amount of parenting time, if you were on the clock, has increased so much in the last decade or two that we put pressure. And to be fair, upper middle class, well-resourced families, right? There are families who are really struggling and can’t give the children the time they need because they are literally putting food on the table. But once you get to a certain point, we’ve given these expectations of enrichment time, one-on-one time child-centered time to the point that we are outstripping past generations in terms of what we think is needed necessary, and minimums for child development. If I were to say something that I think parents might actually be helpful rather than the stupid Goldilocks, well, what does that mean too much and too little? So I can fail both ways for the most part, for most children, loving caring people in their lives who spend time with them, engage in activities, help them deal with the things that are tricky for them, praise them for the things that they’re really good at, that 90% of the time is more than enough. So there’ve been studies where shy, inhibited children who go to daycare or go to school become less shy and inhibited, not because they went to a special program, not because they did some workbook, but just because they spent day in and day out dealing with people who broke their crayons, stole their glue, ate boogers, gross, and they figured out, I can handle this. So yes, we put pressure on ourselves, but most of the time, if we’re coming from a place of love, you’re already doing enough. It’s a really small percentage of kids who need more and systematically need more.

Dr. Sarah (01:00:46):

Yeah. Yeah. That’s such a helpful and hopeful message and empowering, right? You’re doing a good job and your kids can do a lot all by themselves.

Dr. Koraly (01:00:57):

Right. And parents aren’t perfect. Nobody says we are perfect, and yet we’re living our lives and we tend to have pretty good lives. So that’s what our kids need. What are they equipped with so they can have pretty good lives we didn’t expect, or we shouldn’t expect perfection from ourselves. How could we expect that from a 6-year-old?

Dr. Sarah (01:01:20):

Yes. I love that. If people want to learn more about your research or get in touch with you or read things that you are working on, how can they connect?

Dr. Koraly (01:01:30):

I am a professor at Penn State. I am the head of the CAT lab, C-A-T-L-A-B. So if you just Google Cat Lab, Penn State, it’ll pop up. Or if you try to Google my name, I’m literally the only one on the planet. So between this combinations, you can probably find me pretty easily.

Dr. Sarah (01:01:51):

Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much.

Dr. Koraly (01:01:54):

Oh, no worries. Thank you.

Dr. Sarah (01:02:01):

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