Instant Genius - Childhood, with Dr Emma Byrne

Episode Date: August 8, 2021

Dr Emma Byrne, author of How to Build a Human, tells us about the hidden science of childhood. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you���ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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today. I'm Thomas Ling, staff writer at BBC Science Focus magazine, and in this episode, I'm joined by Dr Emma Byrne. While initially an artificial intelligence researcher, she's turned her scientific mind to the topic of childhood, writing the book How to Build a Human. Today, she delves into what science can tell us about being better parents. Hello, Emma. Welcome to Instant Genius. Hello, Thomas. So today we're going to talk all about parenting. And I think when talking to any parent, they're likely saying that one of the biggest challenges of raising a young child is to simply get them to bed, hassle free. What can the world of science teach you?

teach us about making bedtime easier? Yeah, I mean, there is a reason why one of the best-selling children's books for a long time was go the F to sleep. The reason it's so hard for babies and children to go to sleep is that they're just not designed to. I'd started to sort of look at some of the research around this. And one of the things that really chined with me is the fact that outside of industrialized societies, we don't sleep. The human race does not sleep in eight-hour blocks. that the majority of our sleeping is done in biphasic ways of sleeping.

So even adults and older children are not designed to go to sleep at, say, 10pm and wake up at 6am. We're just not. The other thing is that very small babies need to eat. They have incredibly rapid metabolisms. They need to, particularly if they're breastfed, they need to essentially refill their stomachs about every two hours. Now, the nightmare of this is that, for the fact, adults, it takes us two hours to fall into the deepest part of our sleep, the sleep that we need to restore ourselves, whereas a small baby is going to be waking up every two hours.

All of the research that says that babies can sleep through the night is based on bottle-fed babies from the middle of the 20th century. We know now that it's just not true if you predominantly breastfeed. So the best thing you can do, and this is going to sound incredibly glib, but some of the advice that you're given about sleeping when the baby sleeps is incredibly important, But if you can't turn your entire life upside down to fit around your child's schedule or your baby schedule, finding someone who can essentially, you know, whether it's calling in favours from other parents, if you live close enough to your grandparents, if your partner is supportive, and I hope they are, if you have one, but whoever you can get to take the baby out for a minimum of three hours

so that you can get some of that deep sleep in that first 18 months, we'll do so much to preserve your sanity, because you cannot live on two-hour cycles of sleep. As they get older, what we need to do is essentially prepare our kids for the stuff that we struggle with as adults, which is turning off devices a long time before bedtime. Sorry, that's advice that everybody hates.

Sticking to really similar routines, there is nothing like habit to, teach your brain when it's meant to fall asleep. And in the book, I look at research from all around the world about what constitutes the ideal bedtime routine. And the hilarious thing about it is that each and every culture has its own version of an ideal bedtime routine. So in some cultures, particularly Northern Europe, we like to give babies a bath before bed. We believe it to be very relaxing. In other cultures, they think that's insane that, you know, you bathe when you wake up to freshen yourself up for the day. Some people swear by hot milk. Some people

swear by stories, some people swear by complete silence. Most cultures that have very few sleep disturbances are fine with co-sleeping. That was one of the other things that I found is very interesting, is that if your child wakes up in the middle of the night and is frightened or worried or just doesn't want to go back to sleep on their own, there is nothing wrong with letting them get into your bed for a bit. You are likely to sleep better with them, you know, fidgeting a little bit before you're falling asleep next to you, then standing in their bedroom, sort of hoping for that moment of drowsiness that you can sneak away and you don't suddenly hear that voice from the bed going, Mama, where are you going? Alongside bedtime, I guess the other so great

mystery or parenting, particularly for young children, is why is it so hard to make them eat healthy foods? Why are they sort of naturally prone to not liking them? Well, a lot of foods that we think of as being very healthy, particularly the dark leafy grains, and they are. They are very healthy. I don't want to get in a fight with the nutritionist here. But the problem is, is that a lot of them come from the mustard family, and they have compounds in them that are incredibly bitter. Now, the reason small children dislike bitter flavours is that they're just much more physically sensitive to them than we are. They have far more bitter receptors than we do. And that's likely to be evolutionarily selected because that bitterness is also quite often related to toxicity. These same compounds

like tannins, they combine with the kinds of enzymes in your bloodstream that break down the food into usable compounds. So when you taste something that's bitter, if you're very, very small and you go ahead and eat that anyway, there's a good chance that it's going to completely upset your digestion. So babies are going to find it difficult and small, children, even up to the age of about 17, 18, those bitter things are going to taste a lot more bitter. Adults get used to bitter things, partly because our taste buds start to die off, which is a little bit depressing. I realise quite how now at the age of 46, things will continue to taste ever more bland. And as with sleep disturbances, eating disturbances or eating

worries seem largely to be matters of parental perspective. We tend to worry that our kids aren't eating enough or are eating the wrong sorts of things. And that can lead us to putting pressure on them at meal times. And the research that really changed my own behaviour, as I was putting the book together, was the research that showed just how counterproductive pressure is at meal times. All you're doing is teaching your kid that broccoli is not only slightly bitter tasting or incredibly bitter tasting is the thing that causes the row at dinner time.

there are some great studies that look at people, you know, so 20, 30 years later, there's a study called you will eat all of that. And it's about people's recollection of being made to eat things and how many years later they still generally couldn't face them. There was also a lovely soup study of basically putting kids down with soup and either just sitting next to them or encouraging them to eat. You know, keep eating the soup, eat more of your soup, please. And they have these lovely standardized encouragements that are delivered at,

these sort of metronomic intervals to make it a nice fair test. And they found that the more you bug kids over eating the soup, the more they complain about it and the less they eat. So just kind of relaxing about it. And if your child is, you know, well enough to, as my own daughter, is get up seven or eight times from the dinner table to show us this new dance that she's doing or, you know, run around and chase the cat or whatever, then chances are they're not malnour.

So focus on your own food. And again, just model your own enjoyment of a wide variety of food and the way that you like to share food together. And that taking that stress out of it and waiting for their taste buds to develop is likely to be the best approach. How important is it that the entire family eats at the dinner table? Yeah, I mean, that was again something that really changed my behaviour. there's some amazing research that shows that that 20 minutes on average that families spend together at the dinner table is responsible for so much of a child's well-being. It's the time when they're most likely to hear language used. It's the time when they're most likely to be able to talk about emotional things or challenges they've had during the day. It's the time they're most likely to be able to see you talking about or demonstrating the kind of values that are important to you. And research has shown that families that eat together tend to have far less family conflict.

They tend to have children who are less likely to be obese. They tend to have children who are more likely to do well at school and less likely to dangerously use drink or drugs. Now the difficulty with this is there aren't that many intervention studies that have said, well, we'll take this family that isn't eating together, get them to eat together for a few months and see if it makes things better. So we don't know whether perhaps families that have the time and the resources to all sit down and eat together are also more likely to have, you know, more support, more leisure time, more space, more wealth. It's possible that that's the case.

But if you find that you're so basically going, I don't know what's going on with my kids anymore. And I don't, they do these things that seem inexplicable to me and they seem to be far more influenced by their friends than by me and I'm not super happy about it. and, you know, we're in conflict a lot of the time. Making time for family dinner dates, you know, and especially if it's something that you all enjoy, if you're not in the habit of it, you know, sort of saying we're going to do something exciting,

but making sure that at least a couple of times a week, you're sitting down together and modelling the kinds of behaviours you want from your children because they are phenomenal little mimics our children, then you are likely to see the benefits pretty quickly, I think. looking at the research. One of the big milestones for any baby in our modern world is their first words.

Is there anything a parent can do to make their child speak earlier? Is there anything to do to speed up that process? There are a couple of things. British Sign Language or Macaton or Baby Sign are all pretty useful. The reason being that the muscle movements required to make those signs,

as an adult learner, they feel extraordinarily complicated. I remember learning babyside with my daughter and going, oh my goodness, this is a lot to remember. But if you compare trying to copy what someone is doing with their hands versus trying to copy what they're doing with their diaphragm, their lungs, their throat, their uvula, their tongue, their teeth, their lips, that's much harder.

So children tend to be able to sign words before they can vocalize them. So that can help with communication. Also following your child's attention, so not feeling like you have to direct them all the time. Look at the ball, look at the dog. See what they're looking at. There's great research that shows that letting the child lead what they're interested in and commenting on that is more likely to help them pick up vocabulary faster than essentially sitting there with flashcards going, look, drum, look, dog, you know, let them lead.

The other thing is actually, yes, attending to your child and listening to what they're telling you. And even in that sort of early babbling stage, it's amazing what you can deduce from a combination of, you know, their body language, their gaze, you know, the way they're looking or pointing, and whether or not they sound excited or sad. They're very good at mimicking our emotional tenor long before they have the words to describe it. And then the other thing is just keep talking. children who hear more words from their caregivers, and particularly if those words aren't things like no and don't do that. Words that are injunctions don't seem to help very much. But all other language seems to help children develop their own vocabulary

and their understanding of language in context. And we learn language not through passive consumption. We know this because children who are exposed to a second language purely from recorded media like radio or TV, don't pick up that language. But being involved in a conversation, even if they're not able to take an equal part of it, is really important for children. What do you think about theories put forward by linguists like Nome Chomsky when they say that children largely aren't sort of taught how to speak by their parents? That it's actually quite an innate skill. I wrote a book on swearing,

which I think might cover some of my responses to that. I won't do that for the benefit of your readers, but there was research, even before this idea of a grammar module, there was research that had been done largely by women, largely looking at women, about what used to be called motherese, but we now more technically call it either infant directed or child directed speech. Now, Chomsky's argument was the way that adults speak to each other is what he called degenerate. We make lots of grammatical mistakes. We point to things and say this and that rather than saying the names of the objects. We assume a lot of contextual knowledge and say things go without saying. How do children learn from

this degenerate input? And the thing is that people had been studying how parents speak to their children for about a decade before that and found that that kind of conversation is incredibly different, incredibly sophisticated and utterly responsive to the child in front of you. And so what I mean by that is things like when your child first starts babbling, if you listen to, you know, both yourself and other caregivers and the way they talk to them, your responses will tend to be one, maybe two words in length. So they might sort of stare and make a noise. You go, yes, you know, dog, look, dog. And then as your child starts to be able to parrot back those nouns, you will add one or two more, you know, a verb or an adjective to go with that noun.

And then a little bit more after that, we start to get into triples and quadruples, these sort of slightly longer utterances. And then there is this brilliant sort of development that happens in every culture and different languages have slightly different orders. But things like in British English, we tend then to talk about wants and desires. So, oh, you wanted the thing. And we talk about false belief. Oh, you know, oh, you thought that was an ice cream.

It's mashed potato. We tend to talk about emotions, although gallingly, a study on Western English-speaking society showed that we talk far less about emotions with boys and we do with girls. I think boys hear about a third number of emotion terms, as young girls do. So it's no wonder that boys find it harder to name their emotions and to deal with them. and that's something that we could all address, I think. But we follow this program. We give them this amazingly tailored program

of a linguistic apprenticeship that grows at just the rate that allows them to stretch without breaking. There are great studies that show that parents who deny vehemently that they would ever do anything as infantile as using baby talk, infantile, or child-directed speech, when you record them alone with their baby, that is exactly what they do.

So without knowing it and without training for it, we become these linguistic teachers to our children and anything that embarrasses adults out of using something that is so sophisticated and so essential, it just frustrates me terribly. I mean, we know it's so useful, even in adulthood, because if you give people who speak English have never spoken any Mandarin at all.

And you essentially give them sort of pictures and they hear the noun for whatever it is they're looking at in Mandarin in a sentence that was recorded as if it was directed at adults. They just don't learn the nouns. They're just, you know, a few hours later you test them. They can't remember what any of the pictures should sound like in Mandarin. But when the actress who records these nouns does it in a voice that is more influential, directed, then the adults remember about 70 to 80% of these novel Chinese words.

That's astounding. And it also makes me think that this idea that we can't learn second languages as we get old is as much to do with how people speak to us as what has happened in our brain. There is definitely a window of greatest plasticity early on that does make it easier to learn language. But getting someone to speak to you as if you were a little baby is probably quite helpful. Something I really wanted to ask, how important is playtime to children and their development? Oh, so important.

I mean, throughout human history, and it seems now looking at studies on Neanderthal cultures, throughout proto-human history, play has been the way that we have inducted our children into becoming members of society. And we might not realize we're doing it, but even just things like, you know, a teddy bear's picnic or dolls tea time or playing at, you know, doctors and nurses,

it's a way of them getting to practice the sort of tacit skills that we don't really think of. But we know enough about, for example, how to talk to people when we want them to do something versus when we think that they might want us to do something. Just these very tacit rules of something called pragmatics in linguistics, We tend to teach that through play. We also teach things like the values that we think are important, whether that is solidarity or individuality,

whether that is kindness or ambition. We teach those through play. But also it's what allows for creative connections to happen. Michael Rosen writes about this in his book on play. Play is that space where there aren't any wrong answers. So there's a difference between playfulness. and games. Games quite often have very hard and fast rules and there is a winner and you know what, you know, how the game should be played. Whereas playfulness, there aren't rules. There are

no winners. There is this sort of collaborative and open-ended and risk-free environment. And it's in that that your children can be little scientists. They can experiment with, you know, what is it like to be the baddie? What is it like to take care of a poorly tedding? what is it like in other cultures to make a tortilla or to hunt an animal using a knife? In every culture we give our children our cast-off tools, whether that's broken tortilla presses in the Andes, whether that's sharp knives in the or dulled knives, sorry, in the Pacific, or whether that's your broken iPhone. And then they will, you know, they will play at being us. And so play is hugely important because it has this dual purpose of allowing them to try out absolutely anything to use their imaginations and be creative, but also to direct themselves towards what seems to work for adults in the world through mimicking us. So, yeah, having time for that play rather than there's a big market for educational games, that's not the same as playfulness.

Playfulness is invention, creation, mimicry, and it's absolutely essential. Emma, that was all amazingly interesting. Thank you so, so much for your time. And I look forward to speaking to you again soon. Thanks very much, Tom. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Dr. Emma Byrne, author of How to Build a Human, what science knows about childhood. If you want to hear more from Emma talking about the science of parenting, head over to the Instanty. St Genius Extra podcast right now. If you've enjoyed this episode,

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