Something You Should Know - Where Christmas Traditions Come From & How to Talk With Children

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, the germiest things you're likely to touch in a restaurant. Then, the backstories of some of your favorite Christmas traditions and how trains completely changed Christmas in the 1800s. Now that rail travel was not only possible but also pretty affordable to most people, Christmas was instantly rebranded. If you moved to the city for a job, you could come home for Christmas.

Starting point is 00:00:56 If you lived in the city, you could have goods shipped in from the farms for Christmas. That changed everything. Also traps retailers use to get you to spend more money. And how to talk with children. It's not always as easy as you think. We really want to get away from this typical dynamic, which is the adult is the expert, and the child is someone who needs to learn something.

Starting point is 00:01:18 Actually, the insights that children have, the ways they think about things, can actually help us be more creative, can help us be more playful. All this today on Something You Should Know. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please, read your personal owner's manual thoroughly.

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Starting point is 00:02:06 The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hello. Welcome to Something You Should Know. I came across this article at HuffingtonPost.com. It's a couple of years old and things may have changed with COVID since we're a little more conscientious. But restaurants, restaurants are public places, so it should come as no surprise that there are a lot of public germs in restaurants. And unfortunately, those germs are on items that are really hard to avoid. Here are the dirtiest spots in a restaurant. Your seat, the menus, lemon wedges, salt and pepper shakers, the table itself, the rim of your glass, the bathroom door handles, the faucets in the bathroom, ketchup bottles, and the salad bar tongs. Now, as germy as restaurants are, you'd probably pick up even more germs at the gas station. The handles of gas pumps have been found to be some of the

Starting point is 00:03:14 filthiest things out there. And that is something you should know. Christmas is a holiday with a lot of traditions, from putting up the Christmas tree to singing holiday songs, eating holiday food, wearing holiday clothes, wrapping gifts, and on and on and on. Each one of these Christmas traditions started somewhere, at some point, with someone. And those stories behind how they got started are often really interesting, even though they're not always widely known. Here to discuss how many of our Christmas traditions got started is Brian Earle. Brian is a designer, a writer, and a podcaster. He's host of the Christmas Past podcast, which has been around about as long as this podcast has, since 2016.

Starting point is 00:04:06 Brian also has a wonderful book out called Christmas Past, the fascinating stories behind our favorite holidays traditions. Hi Brian, welcome to Something You Should Know. Merry Christmas. Hi, thanks so much for having me. So maybe a good place to start is with Merry Christmas. Why do we say Merry Christmas? Well, the short answer is that we used to say Merry Christmas, and then a lot of people wanted to move away from doing that. In England, when the Puritans were in power, they banned Christmas.

Starting point is 00:04:37 And then after the Restoration, it came back in. It kind of came limping back into public consciousness. It had kind of gotten wiped out, and it worked its way back into the culture slowly. And up until around the Victorian period, Christmas was something that we celebrated kind of like the way we celebrate, say, Halloween or the Fourth of July or Mardi Gras, meaning an external and outside kind of celebration for communities to celebrate in the streets rather than ones that families celebrate in their homes. And it had sort of taken on a reputation of being kind of a drunken carousing kind of holiday. Anyway, the upper class, when they decided they wanted to domesticate Christmas,

Starting point is 00:05:19 if you like, they wanted to move away from saying Merry Christmas because it was associated with that merrymaking, that kind of celebration style of the common people and wanted to add the high class touch of Happy Christmas. And indeed, in George III's radio address, he started using Happy Christmas at the end of that as a way to socialize that idea. But it's interesting that the word merry, at least in the English language, it seems to exist only to continue wishing one another a happy holiday season. Like when else do you use that word unless you're describing a merry-go-round or saying the more the merrier. It's one of these antiquated fossilized words that we trot out for six weeks out of the year. And that's pretty much all it's good for. This idea of or the concept that we have now of Christmas, of Santa and Christmas tree and presents. And when did that really gel?

Starting point is 00:06:09 When did what we think of Christmas become Christmas? Yeah, I mean, first of all, I like the way you frame the question, what we think of as Christmas, because Christmas isn't one thing. It's kind of, it's gone through so many different versions. And this, the Christmas we celebrate is just the current version. It won't be the last. And it certainly wasn't the first. It all started to gel around the middle of the 19th century. Before the Civil War, one in every three Americans was a farmer, right? And then as we became more industrial, just the economy was changing, more goods were

Starting point is 00:06:39 being made in factories and shipped to stores. Store-bought items became a big thing, as did the print media. The number of daily newspapers, something like triple during the late 19th to early 20th centuries, and that created new avenues for advertising and also an avenue to socialize an idea about Christmas. Because prior to, certain communities didn't celebrate Christmas at all, or if they did, it was highly regionalized and very specific to that area. The idea of Christmas as just one thing that we all kind of understand what it is and how you celebrate it, that could only be true if there was a mass media to propagate ideas like that. And as a matter of fact, in 1849, it was Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who were shown in Godey's Women's Magazine as celebrating Christmas around a Christmas tree.

Starting point is 00:07:26 Now, Christmas trees have been around for a long, long time, but they were never popular until that point. And then it was the next year that it became the must-have Christmas accessory on that side of the Atlantic. Over here, Franklin Pierce was our president during that time. He had the first national Christmas tree. And then it was several decades later, when Christmas trees were grown as a commercial crop, that they truly became as ubiquitous as they are now. Isn't it also true that department stores and the metropolitan big city department stores also changed the way we do Christmas in some ways? Department store shopping, where you take things off the shelves and bring them up to the register,

Starting point is 00:08:07 that was new. Before that, things were behind the counter. You'd go into the shop and the shopkeeper would get things off the shelves behind the counter. But now that we have these enormous department stores and the perfection of plate glass, which created an avenue for having these beautiful storefront windows and the Christmas displays that introduced the notion of window shopping and walking down the city streets and just seeing Christmas as just part of your atmosphere. All of that came into being right around that same time. So many factors converging at just the right time. And is that roughly the time when Christmas became such a big deal as it is today?

Starting point is 00:08:45 I mean, you probably ask people on the street, what's your favorite holiday? Nine out of 10 of them are going to say Christmas. I would imagine that Christmas is a big deal to a lot of people. When did that become the big deal? It was, yes, it was right around then. You know, again, Christmas had kind of gotten beaten up a little bit and was working its way back into the culture. Certain things couldn't have become popular until we had all of those conditions

Starting point is 00:09:14 coming together. Another one of them is right around the mid to late 19th century, lithography, a printing technique, was coming into its own, which allowed pretty cheap and efficient color printing. And that's right around the time there were certain postal reforms in the UK. The invention of the postage stamp, a uniform price to send things to and fro, coincided with the creation of the first Christmas card. And you have to think before that, communicating across long distances wasn't really a big part of life for most people. The other thing that happened in the 19th century in America and in England is rail travel. Now that rail travel was not only possible, but also pretty affordable to most people, Christmas was instantly rebranded as a time where you can have a homecoming. If you moved to the city for a job, you could come home

Starting point is 00:10:00 for Christmas. If you lived in the city, you could have goods shipped in from the farms for Christmas. That changed everything and really made Christmas what it is today. Certainly our image of Santa Claus has changed over the years. And as I recall, Coca-Cola had something to do with the current version of who we think of when we think of Santa. If you remember the poem, Twas the Night Before Christmas, that came out in 1880 in a newspaper. There were no illustrations, but the words are really interesting if you pay attention to them, where he rides in a miniature sleigh with eight tiny reindeer. He has a little round belly. He's an elf in that poem.

Starting point is 00:10:39 He's described as an elf. And Houghton Mifflin did an illustrated version of that that you can find online pretty easily. That was in 1912, I want to say. And the pictures of him show that he's, yeah, he's about three feet tall. So shortly after that, we start to have a bunch of different artists creating their image of Santa Claus. And where Thomas Nast was doing things for Harper's Weekly, Norman Rockwell and J.C. Leendecker were doing covers for the Saturday Evening Post in the early 1920s. And we're starting to see in those images, Santa shifting toward more of the notion that we have today, that he's not an elf. He's not this gnome-like little creature. He's a six-foot guy. He's a fully human grandfather.

Starting point is 00:11:21 And then it was Haddon Sundblom, who was a commercial artist who worked for Coca-Cola, same guy who did the Quaker Oats guy, started doing Santa Claus in the early 1930s. And he would do at least one or two of these paintings every year. And then it was Coca-Cola's massive marketing budget that allowed them to just propagate this one image of Santa really far and wide. So there's kind of one of those internet rumors that Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus. I think it's more, there's a little bit of truth to that. It's more accurate to say that that's the work that Haddon Sundblom did is kind of the point that we stopped iterating on our notion of Santa Claus. So it's more like they finalized our image of him. Talk about the idea of giving presents to each other, wrapping the presents,

Starting point is 00:12:06 putting them under the tree, that tradition that so many people follow. Well, giving gifts at Christmastime wasn't always a huge deal. I mean, it was in as much as it's common to give gifts on almost any kind of celebration. But Christmas wasn't a major gift-giving holiday until a couple of things were true. Number one, until we started getting the notion that it is, and that was really a matter of there being more goods to sell, right? You think as we become a more industrial society, you're going to have the media giving merchants an avenue to advertise through that media. And also the merchants and producers themselves saying,

Starting point is 00:12:45 oh, this Christmas thing is another way that we can get people to buy goods. So it wasn't until we get to this period of the late 19th to early 20th century, that Christmas became a major gift giving holiday. Prior to this, Christmas gifts were something that they'd be very, very small. Children would get gifts in their stockings that they leave either at the end of their beds or on the mantle. Adults would give each other gifts to some extent, but maybe not much. They'd usually be handmade items, and they'd almost never be wrapped. You'd always just give it over to the other person.

Starting point is 00:13:17 Gift wrap as we know it can probably trace its roots back to the early 20th century. Merchants would sell tissue paper. They used to refer to it as gift dressings. It was usually plain white. And it was often if something came in a box, right? If it was a product that you bought from a store, it came in a box, you'd want to wrap it up. Smaller gifts would typically be hung in the tree. You'd either stick them in the branches or hang them from something. And it wasn't until an article that came out in Good Housekeeping, and I want to say this was in the early 20th century, that actually recommended putting gifts under the tree. And in the 1920s, there was an incident at a stationery store in North Carolina where they were selling their tissue gift dressings, but they ran out. So it being a stationary store, one of the owners ran into the back and found some spare paper that they were going to use as envelope liners. It was a bright yellow paper and said, well, I guess this will do.

Starting point is 00:14:13 It's better than nothing. Put it out on the on the shelves and the stuff just flew off the shelves. They couldn't keep up with the demand for it, even though it wasn't intended as a gift dressing. And most people would say that that is the point where this idea of brightly colored or ostentatious decorative wrapping paper really got its start from that one mishap at that store in North Carolina that was run by J.C. and Raleigh Hall, who are the brothers who are famous for creating Hallmark. The traditions of Christmas. That's our topic today. And my guest is Brian Earl. He's host of the podcast Christmas Past and author of the book Christmas Past, the fascinating stories behind our favorite

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Starting point is 00:15:26 Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness

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Starting point is 00:16:31 Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Brian, when you look at this, when you look at all the traditions that we celebrate around Christmas time, what is it about this that really fascinates you the most? Well, I think in general, the thing that fascinates me the most about Christmas is that it is so much newer than you probably realize. You think this is based on a 2000 year old religious story. It's filled with all kinds of candles and wreaths and Christmas trees, things that feel ancient, things that you think they must have been around for centuries. But most of how you experience Christmas are made up of things that were produced in the last decades. And on the one hand, that's really obvious, right? I mean,

Starting point is 00:17:15 White Christmas was written in the 40s. My grandparents didn't grow up with that song. But even the Santa Claus that we know really came from the 30s. Again, my great-grandparents didn't know that. And again, with the Christmas trees, they didn't really become especially common in American households until, you know, about the late 19th, early 20th century. Well, that's my great-great grandparents for someone my age. It's not exactly ancient history. I mean, those are people, I know their names. I have pictures of those people. So, so much of Christmas is just brand new and a great deal of the remainder isn't all that much older. And that even is true of certain Christmas songs. You think like Hark the Herald Angels Sing just kind of has this ring to it that it must be this really, really old song.

Starting point is 00:17:55 But no, that was mid to late 19th century. Yeah, well, let's talk about the music of Christmas because there are so many Christmas carols and Christmas hymns and Christmas just pop songs. It's almost like its own little industry. The interesting thing about that is that it did not become an industry until about the late 1930s. And the logic was in the entertainment industry, why are we going to invest in creating a product that people are only going to be interested in for a couple of weeks out of the year? And so you notice there really aren't a lot of great Christmas songs, American Christmas songs prior to the 1940s. Now, Winter Wonderland was written in the late 1930s. The original version is no longer popular. You can find it

Starting point is 00:18:40 online, but it just has too much of like an old timey feel. So what changed? Well, the movie industry came along and a lot of songs were written for movies that either featured Christmas or were about Christmas. This is another interesting thing. Even though a lot of our favorite Christmas movies come from the 1940s, there really weren't Christmas movies in the 1940s. It wasn't until television came along that you have this annual tradition of watching movies on Christmas. You have to imagine, the same couldn't be true before TV, that movie theaters would show the same Christmas movie every year and that families would have a tradition of going to the movie theater. That just doesn't make sense. So a lot of these movies like Miracle on 34th Street and It's a Wonderful Life actually premiered during the summer, but that's a bit of an aside.

Starting point is 00:19:23 But it was really during the 1940s that a lot of these songs were written for movies. And then once that sort of proved the concept, you had a lot more of these Christmas songs being written. All of this, of course, coincided with World War II. And you notice the lyrics to a lot of these songs are like, I'll be home for Christmas. I'm dreaming of a white Christmas. This nostalgia for the way things used to be and family gatherings. And that music really, believe it or not, had a lot to do in shaping how we see Christmas today as this time for gifts and romance in the snow and homecomings and thinking about the good old days and all of that. They've made an enormous impact and had an enormous influence on shaping Christmas for this generation. I'd like to talk about Christmas food because no holiday has more food attached to it than Christmas.

Starting point is 00:20:18 So let's talk about that. Well, one of the probably the most interesting thing about a lot of our Christmas foods is that they didn't start out as Christmas foods. They only became that through a process of elimination. Fruitcake is a really great example. In Victorian times, fruitcake was just something you had. You might have it with your cup of tea. It was common to serve it at weddings. And as a matter of fact, it was served at Queen Victoria's wedding.

Starting point is 00:20:39 And she very famously saved a slice and didn't eat it to practice her restraint. There were all kinds of legends around fruitcake, where if you cut a slice and put it under your pillow, you would dream of your future love, things like that. But only recently has it sort of disappeared outside of the Christmas season. The same is true for gingerbread. Gingerbread for a long, long time was almost like the funnel cake of its day. The thing that you would go get at a fair, you would look forward to the festival having the stands where you'd get your gingerbread.

Starting point is 00:21:10 And then it's mostly been weeded out of the rest of the year. Eggnog or some version of eggnog, right? But eggnog is more like a family of drinks called posset, these milk and egg punches that are spiked with alcohol. You'd see those all over England. And they came over here too. I think George Washington famously served something that we would recognize as eggnog to visitors. Martha Washington published a recipe for it. How these things disappear outside the Christmas season is really the story. And for each of them, it kind of just has its own little trajectory. Gingerbread's an interesting one because I think it's mostly in America that we tend not to think of it outside of the Christmas season, whereas in places like Germany, you're more likely to find it

Starting point is 00:21:55 throughout the year. Minced pies are a particularly interesting one because previously, minced meat was literally that. It was meat that was minced up, and you would preserve it by adding sugar and dried fruit. Over the years, the meat was taken out, and it was just the dried fruit and the sugar, and we now have the version that we're familiar with today, which is usually this sugar, fruit.

Starting point is 00:22:23 Usually you preserve it with a little bit of alcohol, so it has a bit of a boozy kick and then wrapped up in a pastry shell. Well, word is that during the Puritans ban on Christmas in England, mince pies in particular were banned, that you could get fined for baking one. I did a chapter on this in the book where I interviewed this journalist from the BBC who said she looked into that in particular. And it turns out there's probably not a lot of historical accuracy to calling out mince pies in particular. And it's more that a legend spread about the Puritans really being petty about mince pies, you know, as a way to sort of mock just how ridiculous the ban on Christmas had become. Tell the story of Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer. Where did he

Starting point is 00:23:06 come from? This was back in the 1930s. The Montgomery Ward department store would hand out little booklets to shoppers. So parents would come in, they'd give something to the kids to keep them busy while the parents shopped. And what they did is they tapped a copywriter named Robert L. May and said, what we'd like you to do is come up with something for this year's Christmas season. And so he had a daughter who really loved the reindeer exhibit at the zoo. And the legend goes, it's probably a mixture of fact and legend, that he got the notion when he was driving home one night and it was very foggy and he kind of put two and two together. He wanted to do something his daughter would like. He wanted to make a story about a reindeer who gets caught in the fog. So he wrote up the story and he worked with the commercial artist there to kind of do a little bit of a mock-up.

Starting point is 00:23:55 And he took it to his bosses and they just rejected it. They said, no way. I don't want to do this. This doesn't work. He tweaked it a little bit. And part of the feedback that he got was the red nose. This was a time when W.C. Fields was really popular in the 1930s. And they said, well, I think the this booklet, which it's a story told in rhyming verse. You can find it pretty easily online. And eventually it just sold out. Or not sold out, they gave it away. They ran out. And then something really interesting happened where

Starting point is 00:24:34 Montgomery Ward gave the rights to the story over to Robert L. May, which is really unusual. He was just a copywriter who worked for the company. But anyway, Robert L. May's brother-in-law was a guy named Johnny Marks, who, if you know the song Silver and Gold and Holly Jolly Christmas, he wrote those songs. So he asked Johnny Marks to write a song based on Rudolph, which he did. And it came out, I think, in 1934. And then the following year, Gene Autry's version came out, which was a number one hit. And then eventually he sold the rights to it to make that Animagic movie that came out in the 1960s. So, and during all of this, Robert May was, again, kind of a workaday copywriter. He was writing catalog copy for Montgomery Ward, you know, just things like about buying, you know, the sweater and things like that. But during all of this, his wife was dying of cancer. And so he was in financial straits. He was raising a young daughter who's still alive today, by the way. But after all of the success with Rudolph, he died a very wealthy man in the 1970s. And Rudolph, for all practical purposes, should have been just an other

Starting point is 00:25:41 annual leaflet handout for Montgomery Ward. But it really caught on, and now it's just an essential part of the Christmas season. Well, this has been really fun. It's really great to hear the backstories of some of our traditions, Christmas traditions, and where they came from, how they developed, and what they mean. I've been talking with Brian Earle. He is a designer, writer, and podcaster. The name of his podcast is Christmas Past, and it's also the name of his book.

Starting point is 00:26:09 It's called Christmas Past, The Fascinating Stories Behind Our Favorite Holidays Traditions. And there's a link to the podcast and to the book in the show notes. Thanks, Brian. Merry Christmas. Thank you. Appreciate that. And you as well. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

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Starting point is 00:27:52 check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Children are a big part of the holiday season for many of us as families get together to celebrate this time of year. So I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how we adults talk with children. Sometimes I think, and I know I've done this, we talk to kids as if they're just little adults. Or perhaps we talk to kids as if we're so smart and we need to tell them what we know without really listening to what they have to say.

Starting point is 00:28:26 But I know for me that every once in a while, you can have an amazing conversation with a child. And so to help have more of those kinds of conversations, whether with our own kids or other kids we come in contact with, I have as my guest Rebecca Rowland. Rebecca is a speech pathologist, writer, and Harvard lecturer, and she's author of a book called The Art of Talking with Children. Hi, Rebecca. Welcome.

Starting point is 00:28:52 All right. Thanks. Thanks for having me. So what is it you think we get wrong when we talk to children, especially people who maybe don't have kids or aren't around them a lot? What is it that goes wrong in the dynamic of a conversation with a child? What we're really talking about here is having authentic relationships and actually learning from kids because kids, for the most part, are so authentic that they can teach us about having authentic relationships if we take the time to listen and learn from them as well. And so how do you do that? So let's dive into some specifics here. Like

Starting point is 00:29:26 when you're thinking about talking to kids, what's the shift that goes on in your head that, okay, now we're talking to kids, so things are going to be different here. Yeah. So we really want to get away from this typical dynamic, which is the adult is the expert and the child is someone who needs to learn something. So the child is the subject or the person we're going to question or the person who has to answer the question. We wanna flip the dynamic

Starting point is 00:29:55 and have it be much more back and forth. So the child is able to ask questions just as much, the child is able to stoke our curiosity as much as we're stoking their curiosity. So we often don't think about that back and forth as actually teaching the adults and teaching the children simultaneously. We often think that we're the ones who are the repositories of knowledge and kids are the ones who need to learn things. But actually the insights that children have, the ways they think about things, can actually help us be more creative, can help us be more playful, if we're able to actually take the time and have those back and forth conversations.

Starting point is 00:30:33 So give me an example of that. Yeah, so one time I was with my daughter in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and we were looking at the mummy exhibits. And we were staring at them for a while, and she asked me, well, where did the mummies go? And I said to her, well, they're right here. They're right in front of us. And she said, no, I don't mean that. I mean kind of where they went, kind of their souls or their spirits. She didn't use that word. And I said that I didn't know. And I asked her, you know, what did you think and she was wondering well where did they go before they were born that was her next question and then she wondered well where were you before you

Starting point is 00:31:13 were born so she had a series of these questions that made me actually reflect and say I'm actually not sure about that I've never thought about where I was or who I was before I was myself. And I asked her, I turned it around and said, what do you think? And she said, I still remember this. She said, well, I was an old man and I got sick of being so old. And so I turned into a baby again. And I thought that was so interesting and philosophical.

Starting point is 00:31:41 She just said it completely with a straight face and really made me reflect on, well, how much children often think about things in quite different ways than we do and in ways that are really profound if we can take the time to listen. You mentioned that we often have this dynamic of the adult is the expert, but what else do we tend to do wrong when we talk to kids? What else are we missing by not really paying attention to the type of person we're talking to, which is a child? Yeah, so oftentimes we come in very much with our own agendas. And the child comes with their own agenda. And often, the two of us never actually meet. So one example of this would be a child comes and

Starting point is 00:32:26 says, look at my toy robot. He's running out of batteries. And we say, okay, it's time to go to soccer practice or it's time to go see your grandmother. And the child says, but look, it can go upside down. And we say, okay, where are your shoes? So you can see this dynamic playing out, especially with children, but really you can think about this also as playing out sometimes with adults. When we have these two differing agendas, it might sound as if we're being heard, it might sound as if we're having a conversation, but really we're having two one-way monologues. And over time, if we continue to do this, both of us end up feeling not very heard and not very seen and

Starting point is 00:33:06 not very appreciated. So a lot of the goals of what I do and what I think about is how to actually have more fulfilling and meaningful conversations. And so if someone comes to you and says, I want to have more fulfilling and meaningful conversations with kids, my kids, whoever, what's your advice? So I really think about what I call the ABCs of rich conversations with kids or more meaningful conversations. And the A just stands for adaptive, meaning that you really want to focus on knowing the child in front of you. So adapting to their mood, to their temperament, to their age and their stage, and even their interest. The B stands for back and forth. So thinking rather than talking at kids, really talking with them. So actually balancing that back and forth between you and a child. And the C stands for

Starting point is 00:33:59 child-driven. So actually focusing by starting on what's on a child's mind, and that might be positive, what the child's excited about or, you know, wants to tell you about, or even neutral or negative if the child is worried about something. So by actually combining those three ABCs, you're much more likely to have a meaningful conversation. And yet there are, as you were talking about before, you know, the kid wants to show you his toy and you're saying, you know, wear your shoes because sometimes we need to get your shoes and get in the car and go somewhere. And we can't, you know, stop and have a meaningful conversation with the child. Yes, definitely. And I've been there.

Starting point is 00:34:41 I'm also a mom myself of two kids. And so I'm not saying, for example, that we never have these logistical conversations. Sometimes we need to. But what I would like to think about is how can we not have these mostly? How can we make sure at least a couple of times a day that whatever child is in your life, you take the time to move away from that type of logistical conversation and really have more of this back and forth. Well, I think any parent, anybody who has kids in their life knows that so much of the conversation is about, like, let's get things done. You need to, you know, clean your room or

Starting point is 00:35:18 get dressed or, you know, brush your teeth. It's all about getting things done rather than sitting and talking about something deeper or more meaningful. Definitely. Yeah. So that's what I've seen as well. And I think that what's so interesting is actually, it's not just at school that kids are learning. So we actually know that kids, they did a study that kids are only in school about 15% of their waking hours. And so actually kids are learning from each other, from us, from these conversations all the time. So we actually have the chance, you know, to move beyond what's really in the here and now to do a lot more of this imaginative work, to think about predicting the future, talking about the past. And these are actually so

Starting point is 00:36:04 important for children's well-being as well as for their school success. And how do you know that? I mean, where is, is, I mean it sounds like it's probably true, but is there research that supports what you just said? Yes, there's a ton of research. And a lot of this goes into many different areas of children's development. Just as one example, there's something called emotional reminiscing, which is where you talk in pretty detailed and using a lot of emotional words to children about their past experiences. So things like if they went to the doctor, you know, you're going to ask them to talk about it in a detailed way. What did it look like? How did it feel? And talk about how they tried to cope. For example, you know, what

Starting point is 00:36:51 did you do when the doctor gave you a shot? That kind of thing. And research has found that this kind of talk actually really helps children be less anxious and less depressed and even changes their experiences of painful memories. So we actually know that talking about memories and especially focusing on coping strategies supports children in coping better and actually feeling better about what happened in the past. What else about these kinds of conversations do you think adults don't get? Because, you know, we were once kids, it seems like we should somehow instinctively know how these conversations should go, and yet we don't. Yes, I think a lot of times there's so much of a push in our society

Starting point is 00:37:36 to think about sort of academics first, or knowledge of, you know, colors, of numbers, of facts, that we forget that even if kids don't know those particular things right now, they're often thinking about other very interesting things. And we can think back often as kids, you could spend hours staring at water dripping, and looking at wondering questions like, I wonder how long it's gonna drip for,

Starting point is 00:38:03 or I wonder what happens at the end, or how much, you know, it could go on until it overflows. So actually helping realize just how curious kids are, even at older ages and younger ages, can help us get away from some of those more rote questioning strategies, like how many are there, what color is this? Those kinds of things. Well, I would imagine that how you talk to kids changes as kids age. And so how does that change? How, as kids get older, how should you change the way you talk to them? Yeah, so a lot of times I think about a couple of different factors as changing. The first is how concrete you are. So as kids get older, you can tend to focus less on what you hear and see right in front of you. And you can talk about things more abstractly. That changes as kids develop and as they're able

Starting point is 00:39:01 to think more in the abstract. And younger children, you can also think abstractly, but oftentimes you want to start from something that you see right in front of you, just like I was talking about the mummies in the past. Similarly, you can also do more predicting and going back into the past, remembering, especially with older children. So you can go kind of further and further out into the future and the past. Whereas with younger children, you tend to stick more to things that were more immediate because they're more in their closer memories. But at the same time, you can always

Starting point is 00:39:36 think about trying to stretch a child to see how they react. And if they seem like this is out of their comprehension or too difficult, you can always cut it down. But I think I always try to think first about stretching a child. I've noticed that when you talk to a child, it's sometimes different than when you talk to them with their siblings, that one-on-one conversations tend to be a little different than group conversations. I'm not sure why or if it's important, but it conversations tend to be a little different than group conversations. I'm not sure why or if it's important, but it does seem to be the case. Yes, I've noticed that as well in my work, and I think there's a couple of things going on.

Starting point is 00:40:15 One is that when kids are with their friends or even with siblings, there is this sense of either competition or wanting to impress or even being embarrassed to share things that they don't feel embarrassed to share with an adult. So I do think it can be so important to have one-on-one time with a child, even if you have multiple children. Not necessarily every day if it's not possible, but at least once in a while to really get a sense of what's on their mind, what they might not want to tell other kids

Starting point is 00:40:45 or might not feel comfortable sharing. Are there things or ways that you see or that you know the way people talk to kids that really is headed for trouble that we shouldn't do? Yes, I think one thing that I see a lot and what I think can be damaging over time is really this projecting of what we want our children to be or who we wanted to be as a child onto our children. For example, a child really doesn't want to continue playing this sport, or they really aren't

Starting point is 00:41:22 a person who's very energetic in the morning, or they really aren't a person who's very energetic in the morning, or they really aren't someone who needs to have a lot of friends to be happy. And just recognizing that sometimes we can take our own desires that went unfulfilled, or our wishes or hopes for ourselves, and put those on to our children, and sort of be disappointed if they're not that way, or if they didn't turn out the way we would have wanted them to turn out. And I think that kind of unfulfilled desire or disappointment can be very hard and damaging for a child.

Starting point is 00:41:56 Talk about praise and criticism, because it's very easy to criticize kids when they mess up, and perhaps we don't praise them enough when they do good things. So talk about that and why it's important. Definitely. So obviously kids do need praise and encouragement, and they get a lot out of that. But there's also a way in which we can take it too far. So some researchers have created what's called the praise paradox, which is they found that especially for children who have low self-esteem to start, over-praising a child can really further lower their self-esteem and make it so they often don't want to try again.

Starting point is 00:42:39 And this over-praising really means things like when a child brings to you a simple drawing or something maybe they don't feel that great about you say things like oh that's so amazing or that's so fabulous or i've never seen anything that amazing things like that and the reason is because children often can sniff out false praise they can sense if we're not being authentic and if we're overdoing it, and this can further lower their self-esteem. And criticism? Criticism obviously is important as well. And what I think we really want to get to is to helping children through criticism and critique to be their own judges of their performance. So this doesn't mean this happens all at once, but we want to support children in becoming self-reflective. So rather than

Starting point is 00:43:30 criticizing them, for example, oh this part of your drawing isn't good, or your math test, you got a bad grade on it, it can be much more helpful to really point out first things that were going well, and second, help them analyze what didn't go so well, and even take that step of, well, why didn't it go so well? And when children are able to do this on their own, they're much more likely to be more independent going forward in actually analyzing their own performance. And that's what we want over the long term. When you talk to kids, I mean, I've heard it said that, you know, you should get down to their level, physically get down to their level,

Starting point is 00:44:16 that you should, you know, somehow kind of adopt more of their mindset and try to talk in their languages. Are those things valid? To some extent, yes. I think when you picture especially a young child, and especially if they're in a heightened state of excitement or frustration or upset, and they're staring at your legs or you're staring down at them, it can feel very frustrating for a child, and they can feel as if you're much more distant.

Starting point is 00:44:41 So getting down on a child's level can really support them in looking into your face, in seeing your expression, and in getting comfort or understanding or whatever they need from you at that point. Talking at their level, I would say, is slightly different. So you do want to support a child in understanding what you're saying and not using too difficult vocabulary or too long sentences. But we know that children can understand a lot more than they're able to express as they develop. So oftentimes understanding of language comes first and expression lags a bit behind. So I wouldn't

Starting point is 00:45:19 feel as if you really need to mimic a child's speech patterns in your own speech, but you can always see how far you can stretch your own language before a child's speech patterns in your own speech, but you can always see how far you can stretch your own language before a child doesn't understand you. There's also that tendency you sometimes see people where they like almost baby talk a child much below the child's level, like they think the child's an idiot or something. Exactly, yes. And we know that baby talk with actual babies can be very helpful, because it does actually, the intonation helps the child listen for specific words and make sense of this world around them. But definitely, as they grow out of babyhood, our baby talk should grow out of us as well. I wonder, because as we've been talking, we've been talking about this from the adult perspective

Starting point is 00:46:10 of what it's like for an adult to talk to a child. But what's it like for a child to talk to an adult? I mean, is it stressful? Is it hard? Is it something they like doing generally? What's your take on that? I think that oftentimes kids really are longing to have someone to talk to. So oftentimes we don't see it or there may be a veneer of coolness or of I'm not interested or apathy.

Starting point is 00:46:39 But I think if you peel that layer back, and especially if you present yourself at least once in a while as the person who has something to learn, if you ask the child to teach you something, I think you'll find that many children are very excited to engage in conversations. Well, as I said in the beginning, this isn't one of those topics people think about, you know, talking to children. We just do it. So it's interesting to hear a little more about it and maybe how we can do it better, especially now around the holidays. Rebecca Rolland has been my guest. She is a speech pathologist, writer, Harvard lecturer, and the name of her book is The Art of Talking with Children. And there is a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Rebecca. Thanks for being here. Awesome.

Starting point is 00:47:25 Thank you. Buy one, get one free. That sounds like a very tempting offer, but be careful. It is a classic trap that retailers use, and it's very effective. According to a Columbia University marketing professor, those bundle offers are designed to trigger your impulse buying tendencies, and it works like a charm. Another bundle offer to beware of is the percentage off if you buy two. You know, buy one, get half off the second one.

Starting point is 00:48:03 Those items are often the ones that don't sell particularly well on their own. And another classic shopping trap is to watch for disorganized or messy sales racks. They're an effective lure to get shoppers frustrated and headed over to the more organized but expensive racks. And that is something you should know. If you would take a moment and share this podcast with someone you know and ask them to give a listen, it would be appreciated by, well, by me and by everyone who works here. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks.

Starting point is 00:48:41 And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up for hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and, you know, possibly enrage you. In Don't Blame Me, we dive deep into listeners' questions, offering advice that's funny, relatable, and real. Whether you're dealing with relationship drama or you just need a friend's perspective, we've got you. Then switch gears with But Am I Wrong?, which is for listeners who didn't take our advice

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Something You Should Know - Where Christmas Traditions Come From & How to Talk With Children

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