Episode 160: Redefining Intelligence for Ourselves & Our Kids with Dr. Rina Bliss
/I'm excited to share that my latest podcast episode features a special guest, Dr. Rina Bliss. Dr. Bliss is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University and the author of several books, including Rethinking Intelligence: A Radical New Understanding of Our Human Potential.
In this episode, Dr. Bliss and I discuss the following:
The true nature of intelligence (Intelligence isn’t something you can rank and compare with an IQ or DNA test.)
Our cultural script about intelligence and how we can change it
The many ways to optimize intelligence
And so much more…
I hope this conversation inspires a deeper understanding of the complexities of intelligence and how it impacts our children's development.
You can find Dr. Bliss on her website, www.drrinabliss.com, for more insights on genetics and intelligence.
TRANSCRIPT
Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.
Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts, and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!
Laura: Hello everybody. This is Doctor Laura Froyen and on this week's episode of the Balanced Parent podcast. We're going to be diving into the topic of intelligence and how we kind of need to be redefining what that means and how we can be setting our kids up to develop a lifelong love of learning and see themselves as really a whole well around individuals and that aren't obsessed with external validation and achievement. So to help me with this conversation, I have Doctor Rena Bliss here. She's got a beautiful new book, Doctor Rena. Thank you for being here.
Dr. Rina: Thank you so much.
Laura: Why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself, who you are, what you do?
Dr. Rina: Great. So I am a writer, a researcher, a professor. I am a professor at Rutgers University. I research teach and talk widely on health and illness and the relationship between genes and environments. I am really interested in education, pedagogy, parenting. Of course, I'm a mom of three. I have identical twin kindergarteners and a single 10, 4 year old. So I'm just a person who is deeply interested in the relationship between the mind, the body, the environment, and especially what we can do as parents to help our kids along, help them be successful and emotionally and wise and knowledgeable and caring, compassionate human beings.
Laura: That sounds like what we all want here, right? I mean, that's what we're going for is to raise compassionate caring individuals who are going to go out there and impact the world in the way and in the level, that's right for them. You know, it's good stuff. Okay. So can you tell me a little bit about this idea of re-thinking intelligence and what it means and why you think we need to shift the way we view it in this, in the world that we're in today?
Dr. Rina: Definitely to do that. I, I wanna tell you a little bit about how I have thought of intelligence in the past, how I grew up and you know, what it kind of meant to me growing up and why I want us to move away from the general narrative that still exists today. So I grew up in a mixed immigrant community in Los Angeles in the eighties and of course, the nineties and when I was little though I was in this community where when I say mixed immigrant, I'm talking about like, you know, all kinds of people from all over the world, all the continents were represented, like it was a very, very diverse, culturally rich, ethnically rich place. But one thing was similar about us, which is that the families that lived in my community were challenged by the fact that the parents had had to work constantly working all hours, working, you know, many jobs, multiple jobs, that kind of thing. So we didn't have a lot of help with. First of all, homework learning, you know, hand holding through difficult learning challenges or tasks right. We didn't have help with our academics.
And at the same time, a lot of us had parents who were ESL English as a second. A of course. And so our parents were just struggling to communicate their own, you know, thoughts and feelings and everything in English. And so, like, for a lot of us there wasn't, you know, basic vocabulary in the household and, you know, books that were in English and things like, so it's like, you know, we were challenged in that way and yet test was completely everywhere and constant, right? Like my first test that I remember standardized intelligence, you know, aptitude kind of test was at five. So at the age of my kindergarten kinder or twins now and, and, you know, it was so that I could place out of my elementary school, the public school I was zoned for into a magnet school, which was supposed to give us give gifted kids. That's how they called it.
At least they gifted and talented kids an advanced curriculum, right? And my mom wanted this for me and my family wanted this for me and all of the, you know, moms and families in, in my community wanted us to, to test up and out basically. But, but, you know, I didn't and I mean, none of my, none of my friends in my community did either, you know, and so it was just, you know, the system was just really set against us. Right. And it's interesting because I was actually just talking to a student of mine the other day and she here in New Jersey, I live in Princeton, New Jersey. So she had the same experience and the same trajectory as mine only even starting earlier when she was three, you know, and so that she could test into a, a public pre-k program.
Laura: Rina, I still remember missing out on, I, I still remember the talented and gifted kind of test level and that moment when I found out that I didn't test into it and my older sister had, I mean, it still is burned into my memory.
Dr. Rina: Exactly.
Laura: Feeling of just my heart sinking, that feeling of not being good enough, not being smart enough.
Dr. Rina: Right? And so this was the dogma, then this is the dogma. Now that intelligence is fixed, it's a score we can score you on it. It has something to do with your IQ or something that you were born with. Something that you got from your genes, your parents, you know, passed it down to you. And you know, there's a lot of talk now about this like genetic lottery, like some of us are winners, some of us are losers, the winners have high intelligence, the losers are, you know, losers, they have low intelligence. And so this is the current dogma and the whole principle of intelligence testing is comparing and ranking people to each other, you know, people who are based, like based on similar age or, you know, something usually it's age based, right? But so that's the dogma as well is that we can score you because you compare to your peers as, you know, higher me, you know, just average or lower, right? And so that's like just the assumption that we have to compare each other, you know. That's, yeah. And actually, you know.
Laura: I understand that we are comparable. Right. I mean, so the, I mean, these tests are, you know, the research on them, they're wildly biased.
Dr. Rina: Exactly. Exactly. And, and they do a great job at picking up on who has been coached for the tests, who has had everything that they needed to take a test and ace a test. Right. So they are consulting firms. There are all kinds of businesses that, you know, coach your kids to pass a test so that they can get into a gifted program or a magnet or a special charter school that's, you know, basically a magnet school or, you know, poses as kind of like a private school that's publicly funded and free and all that. So, but the interesting thing is I started to, you know, in my college years I started to look at, started to, like, you know, look at sociology of race behavior, all of these different kind of things and genetics as well. And I started to learn and build like kind of an expertise around genetics specifically and the relationship, as I was mentioning before, between genes and environments. And what I learned from all of that is that genetics actually tells us the opposite of that dogma.
It tells us that our genomes give us the architecture of intelligence and give us the architecture of something that's really important. A concept that I think, you know, many people are starting to become familiar with, but that is neuroplasticity and our brains are always growing and changing with respect to the environment. And our genomes are also doing that our genomes are changing with respect to the environment. And so there's a part of our, our genomes, which we call the epi genome.
That is usually there are these DNA modifications. So modifications to our, our genes basically, and they tend to fall closer to the like basically the upstream starter regions of the genes where they tell the genes, go ahead, turn on, express yourself, go to work or don't be silent. Chillax, don't do anything. And so all of this research into our genes has shown that most people have the genetic material and the architecture to do what they need to do, to learn from their environment, to know things right, to learn and to build skill sets, you know, communicate, express themselves all of these things because these parts of our genome, the epi genome, the parts of our of our DNA that are responding to the environment and telling our genes whether to turn on or off are very susceptible to things like pollution, stress, you know, poor nutrition, poor quality of water, air, things like that, that the there are many of us who are not getting the full potential of our own genomes, right? And so one of the things I focus on in my book, Rethinking Intelligence is this issue of stress, you know, because stress is just so toxic to us, especially toxic to our children, you know, whose brains are growing and who are particularly neuro plastic and particularly, you know, sensitive in terms of their forming epigenome, right? So yeah, so basically genetics tells us that we can do this. But if our environments are endangering us or if we have a lot of these toxins like stress that we won't be able to do this, right?
Laura: Okay. And so I, I like, I feel like I hear that my audience having a kind of a collective intake of air because we are realizing that much like you, our young children have just lived through an incredibly stressful three years. Yes. So we're through that time right now, we're in a big area of recovery. I hear from the teachers that I get a chance to interact with and work with the children all over this world are experiencing stress and symptoms of anxiety and depression at levels they've never seen. So what is it that we can do if we're thinking about how important, you know, things like stress are in supporting our children in their learning process. What can we do to help kids?
Dr. Rina: So I think that one of the things is to examine how we see our kids and how we see ourselves, of course. But talking about kids in particular to see that they have infinite potential, they have infinite potential, they are already born with that potential and that we are just here to enable them to live out that potential, right by providing them the right environments. So one of one piece of it is promoting learning, promoting learning in healthy ways. And I can talk about that in a moment.
But back to the stress thing is to reduce stress in their home environment. Of course, we have more control over that. But also in their educational environments, you know, getting them back into the flow of school and then forcing them to get back into standardized testing and into this kind of like teach to the test all year long kind of thing. And it's not even something that, that are, you know, for me, I'm a parent of, of 25 year olds and a four year old. It's like, it's not even something that might five year olds escape because they're not yet of the age of being tested. They already are being molded into future test takers.
Laura: Absolutely. And I mean, in kindergarten they're already sitting there at first exams to be, you know, the benchmarks and being placed for where they are in reading and everything too. I mean, it's, it's happening and I think that that's something that a lot of families run into. My family has been very privileged that due to the pandemic, we realized that public school was not a fit for one of my kids and we were able to move her into a situation where she doesn't have any of those test taking stressors, but lots of families aren't in a place where they can do that, they aren't able to move.
And so I guess I, I'm wondering about what we can do as parents when we have little control over some of those stressors that are happening at school to help our children interpret what they're going through. Because I think that that's, you know, for, for you and me. I, as we think about what that exact, you know, that test that we took when our result didn't let us get into the program. I don't know about you, but I didn't have anyone help me interpret what that meant about me as a person. I didn't have anybody helping me. Like I had test taking anxiety my whole childhood. I sat down to do the IO test of basic skills and it was awful. I was sick to my stomach the whole time. No one helps me no one told me that these tests don't matter or whatever. You know what I mean? So, what can we do to help? I'm sorry, I'm talking a lot and what can we do to help our kids? That's when we don't have control over what they're exposed to.
Dr. Rina: Yeah. That's exactly something that I do. As a parent, I talk to them about testing and, and I talk to them about assessment and evaluation and I teach them to, to think critically and yes.
Laura: Like how do you do that? What do you say?
Dr. Rina: So, you know, my, it's not just me, I have to credit my husband, he and I, we do this together. So we are as, you know, as much as possible. We have these conversations, all of us and that way the little one also gets to be privy to the conversation and builds into his knowledge base, you know, but we ask them like, oh, you know, what did you have this? Because, because the, the teachers at the public school are supposed to tell us when they're doing assessments, they're supposed to tell us and they do, you know, they, they message us, we have apps, you know, we communicate with them a lot and, and so, you know, we know about these kinds of things. We also know about behavioral things that are going on and any time that we get a message, like there's something going on and especially if it has to do with assessment. You know, we, we ask them, we, we kind of prime them, we prime them for the activity with our own narrative.
We implement, you know, we plug in our own thing first where we might say like, Okay, so it looks like you're going to be reading with. So and so teacher and someone is gonna come from the other part of the school and, and come and also read with you, you know, so, you know, sometimes when people ask you these questions about reading or they asked to listen to you, sometimes if you feel a little bit nervous or if you feel like you need to take a pause, you can do that. And if you don't feel like you wanna do it, then you don't need to do it that time, you could do it a different time. And if it's an activity that we know that we already do with them and mostly we, we do everything, we've already done everything with them that they, that they're gonna be asked to, to perform or do you know, because we've been reading with them their whole lives and we spend a lot of time at the library and with like, you know, library books at home and stuff like that.
So, you know, we're very privileged in that respect that we get to spend a lot of time doing uh reading and, and counting and math and stuff like that with them. But yeah, we just talk them through it and we remind them that these are like fun things that we like to do at home. And, you know, also if, if they feel like doing the activity, then, you know, also to remember that they can just think of how they, how good it makes them feel to read to their little brother. They love to read to their little brother and how good it makes them feel to do these things when they're with us. You know, so that they know that they have a friend there. But they also know they have an option and later as they get older, you know, we, at this point, we're talking about abstaining from testing them. So I do have friends who have done that and I also have friends, you know, in who are educators who are, you know, who won't do that and don't think that's a, that's valuable, you know. So I'm not saying it works for everybody but for us, this is how we're handling it.
Laura: I think honestly, I think lots of folks don't even know that they have the option to opt out of some of those testing, the state mandated testing. And it's possible that different states do it differently too.
Dr. Rina: It's true. And that's one of the worst parts of this whole thing is that so few people know their rights know what they can do and what they can't do and know that even if there's a so called, can't that if you pushed the right, you nudge the right places and the right people that you also can opt out. Right.
Laura: And see even that is a privilege and a savviness, you know, like, just even that is a, it just all these systems that are hard to navigate.
Dr. Rina: Yeah, I'm a professor. I have, one of my duties as a professor is graduate admissions and undergraduate admissions to a certain extent, but graduate admissions and, you know, we use those SAT scores, we use those GRE scores. We use all of these other standardized tests that come later down the line. And I have been advocating in the universities that I've taught at to cancel those, to get rid of those, to get rid of the standardized scores, those scores because I believe that they're completely unfair.
And, yeah, and it's worked in my departments that I've worked in. We have canceled them. And so, one of the things is that a lot of applicants don't know that they don't need to, to take those tests. Right. So, at least for us for our, not for the whole entire school and not for recovery. But even before there were exceptions that could be made, right? But nobody would know that there are exceptions that you could, you could opt out of taking those tests back when they were mandatory there. Nobody knows that. You know, this is the kind of thing like parents don't know.
Laura: Yeah. Absolutely. So, I, I want to think about so this type of teaching to the test and the anxiety that it can bring up in both parents and kids because it's not just kids. We want the best for our kids too. You know. It's, it's us, we can be as complicit and active in it too, you know. And so I think if we're thinking about what we really want for our kids, I'm guessing that most of the people listening here don't want their kids, you know, stressing over getting A's, but they want their kids to actually enjoy learning and being curious about the world and being creative in their pursuit of a further and deeper understanding. That's what I'm looking for for my kids, you know, I, I don't know about, I guess, I don't know it about anybody else, but that's what I'm looking for. So how like, how can I, we support our kids in that?
Dr. Rina: I think that teaching them a better way of learning at home as much as you can and then letting them and empowering them by letting them know. This is how you can introduce this into your learning at school. And you know, and then also if you, if you feel like ready to talk to their teachers and talk about, talk about that, you know, like our technical word in education and higher education is pedagogy, right? But like, it's not even like pedagogy, it's more like learning styles, you know. So one of the things that I write about when rethinking intelligence is connected learning, so that's learning where you're basically another way of calling it is collaborative learning, right?
So just like learning where you're learning with others and we do this thing, kindergarten education, right? But you don't really do it in higher education unless you, unless your professors, like I'm gonna do this, right? But yeah, so it's, it's where you have kids teach each other, learn together and, and there's a reciprocal nature to that. So there's this kind of synergy to their learning process and there's a social emotional component built into it. And for me, the most beautiful kind of learning and this is what we do with, you know, we're lucky we have three kids. So we, and they're almost the same age. So, you know, we're, I know that we're very odd in, in that regard, but like, you know, we have them learn together whenever we're learning things, we're, we're doing the activity with all of them and they're doing it together.
And, and so the best for me is when, you know, when there's a compassion element to it. So I know it's a lot, it's like, you know, I'm talking about learning with multiple kids, you know, not everybody has multiple kids and, and I'm talking about learning with, you know, compassionate giving element to it, you know, compassionate, like, you know, caring element to it. Giving is one of my favorite kind of tools. But you can actually do this if you're just one on one with one kid, right? So you, you can be the other person who's learning with them. And so the kind of activity that I write about in the book is, you know, is this kind of like shop that we set up where we're like, you know, and it doesn't have money because, you know, I don't even know, I don't know if I've ever had, if I, in the last, like, 20 years, if I've even had like coins or anything, you know, tangible, tangible money.
But like, you know, we do, like, you know, here's like, like a little heart that we've cut out, right? Like we cut out these little hearts and like, you can trade this heart and you can use this heart to pick, a stuffy for your brother. Okay. But you've got this many hearts and you've got to, you know, you've got to pick from, from these over here and you want to make sure you save one for your other brother and, you know, so it's like a like, and then they're gonna give to you and, but, you know, you might want to keep one in case you want to get a different thing for someone else for like daddy or whatever, you know, it's just like these kinds of like little like counting exercises that have to do with giving, right? Laur, like another thing I read about was like, you know, doing a baking activity activity where you're baking something for grandma, grandpa, whatever, you know, like we're gonna make this and how many do we need and how, and we're measuring and things like that. So it's just that kind of like turning what could be achieved on paper with, you know, solo with no other human being connected to it or what could be just achieved on like a computer or like your phone or app turning it into like a whole love production.
Laura: And an experience. Yeah, I love the use of play in that way too. I think it's so play. I mean, everybody listening knows how much I love play and the way that play really can impact kids, but play is just one of those beautiful ways where they can manipulate big concepts in really tangible ways. It's so good for them in learning and in healing. And I think the other piece of it is that make it about making it fun and interesting. I remember the, the moment where I really realized that we needed to make an educational change for my daughter.
And we were a few weeks into the pandemic and we'd been on a walk in the woods and we had started noticing some moss was coming up, was starting to green up and grow and stuff and we spent, oh, gosh, maybe an hour just being really curious about the different types of moss and where it was growing and just noticing where it was growing, you know, noticing the environment that it needed to grow in while it was on some trees and not others, you know, just being super curious, I didn't know anything really about mass. So I didn't, it wasn't like I was a keeper of knowledge and was handing it, you know, we were discovering together. And as we were walking home, I said, you know, honey, I think that was just science class. And my daughter said to me, she goes, but that was fun and learning can't be fun. And my entire experience with learning, my whole life has been that learning is delightful and fun. And I, I almost cried when I heard her say that learning can be fun. And that's when I knew like, so we had to do something different for her because it was just sucking the joy out of it and it's supposed to be fun.
Dr. Rina: I mean, just these, these very small like small decisions that are made at the system level that can really crush a, a child's natural society. It's like, you know, I have one child who's in a forest school and one and two, two children who are in excellent public school and such a loving community and they actually do, they are situated in some woods. So they have the ability if they, if it were, you know, permitted by the school district and, you know, whatever all of the, all the powers that be, that decide what's safe and, you know, pay, it would be if it would be permitted, it could basically be a forest school as well.
Prechool has its own forest. We're lucky about that. It's like named the same as the preschool, you know. So it's like they have their own woods, but you could call the public schools woods that it's surrounded by the that school's woods. You know, like it would be, the school itself is actually named after a little river. And so it's, it's named after something that is right there for them to learn from, but they will never learn from that. I go into the forest off, off limits. And so it's, it's just really striking to me how, you know, these kinds of decisions really change everything. I also, you know, can't be more shocked every time that I reflect on how the little one, he has all of these weather clothes because every day is outdoors, it doesn't matter matter what the weather is and the kindergartners, they also have the same clothes because they were in pre-k last year at this preschool, you know, at this private preschool and they have not used those clothes.
Laura: It's wild. I mean. So, yeah, my, my kids, um, have a primarily outdoor education to, at least for kindergarten. They're inside more now that they're in the grades, they're a little bit older than your kids. But they spend, you know, probably an hour and a half to two hours outside every day in all weather. And we're in Wisconsin, it's, it's cold weather, it's cold and they, out there it doesn't matter if the win is negative 20 they're out there and it's so good for them and it's, it's so important.
And my nieces and nephew live right near us. They're in the same school district and we were just talking with my nephew who is, um, just turned 13 about how his middle school, there's a really great attractive, huge snow mounds and none of the kids in the entire middle school are allowed to leave the black top. They're not allowed to play in the snow. 12 year olds, 13 year olds aren't allowed to play in the snow because it would cause too many slippery hallways. And it just breaks my heart that these kids have to grow up so fast and they want to play, they want to play, you know.
Dr. Rina: Definitely.
Laura: It's just, I, yeah. Okay. But I mean, and, and then, then, and then there's the privilege and of it that I'm able to move my kids into a setting that is, it's just, it's a lot to think, be thinking about. So when we can't do that, I think it's about balancing it, you know, balancing access to free play, lots and lots of free play, advocating for our kids, letting them know that, you know, whatever you have on this score on this test, you know, or in a class matters much less than whether you were interested and fascinated while you were learning it, you know. Do you know what I mean?
Dr. Rina: Definitely. One thing I will say about systems is that our system is not the only way and our system is definitely not the best way. There are public school systems that are completely different and are more akin to your kids, Waldorf school or my preschoolers for.
Laura: Absolutely.
Dr. Rina: There are, there are countries out there. The whole public education system is truly public in the sense that every single citizen and even residents gets access to it. It also is higher education is completely public and they don't begin working on academics until the kids are seven or eight years old. Yeah.
Laura: Yeah. They, and they have the best test scores when kids come out. And so do Finland.
Dr. Rina: I know Finland Denver like there and, and the other thing is that, and this is public. So this is, and the other thing is that those they, the children start school earlier than our kids do. You know? So my kids, my partially because of the pandemic, partially because we just wanted to be with them as much as possible. My five year olds didn't start school until last year when they were four.
And, and so it's like they're over there, they, the kids start school when they're before they're one and then they get the social emotional learning all the way until in our system, when we would start doing that standardized testing to them. Right. So, it's like, what a difference and what, what a travesty that we only are exposed to this set of options for us and that we're making these kinds of, you know, awful decisions in a way, you know, back to the thing, the point that you were making about, you know, how it's stressful for us as well. It's partially like the thing that I'm talking about is thinking of intelligence, not as a score, right? And not as these kinds of, you know, academic benchmarks, right? But rather thinking about intelligence as just learning from your environment, being aware that you can learn from your environment, that's something we all can do.
Laura: Or even being plugged in or connected to your environment.
Dr. Rina: Yeah. Yeah, being aware, you know, so in this definition, there's no norm, there's no normal, there's no like right way there. And this is a process, it's something that we're engaged in where it's ongoing. We're always learning, we're always learning from our environment. And so we need to see ourselves this way as infinitely capable, right? As, as having that potential. So, you know, we're all capable of knowing, we're all capable of awareness, we're all capable of self awareness and we're all valuable. We're not just some kind of score that somebody, you know, got from us, from us having to perform in this totally just alien to humanity kind of way. Right. And so, yeah, it's like, I don't, I, I, I don't want parents to feel like they have to have their kids go through what we went through and at the same time I feel like we parents shouldn't have to go through it either. You know. Our lives shouldn't be this kind of like siloed, think by yourself, you know, put, like, clock in and do your work and then clock out and like, you know, it's just all of that is so bloodless, it's not healthy for us either. You know.
Laura: I don't think that's how we were meant to live as a, as a species. I don't think that it's how we've evolved to live. We are, have evolved to be deeply connected to one another. Yeah. And, and to, to rest and play. I mean, those are things that are our birthright as humans that the modern educational system and capitalism systems don't allow us to engage with in the same ways, especially here in the US.
Okay. So I just want to have a second here as we're wrapping up. I wanna have maybe like a few just very practical things that families can do today. And I feel like we've already even talked about them, give your kids opportunities for free play with you by themselves outside. So opportunities for lots of free play. Another one I feel like that we've covered is so I'm just kind of summarizing is giving them the narrative about their experiences that reflects your worldview and how you want them to be thinking about themselves. So being really conscious and aware and intentional about the narrative and not just leaving it up to a child's brain to draw conclusions about themselves and their position in the world. Yeah.
Dr. Rina: Yes, definitely. So having those kind of proactive conversations on anything else like that we can really just be doing right now to really foster a a lifelong love of learning, reduce that focus on external validation, you know, really being self driven for kids. I, I think that some of the things that, that you've, you know, hit on in, in and other, you know, episodes and also with other guests and you know, just that kind of thing of like you were just saying, giving them the language, giving them the narrative, right and speaking to them in ways that encourage their connected, learning their collaboration and like speaking in ways that encourage that kind of as it's happening, the narration of that kind of thing so that they get that like, oh, this is going on right now and this is how we do it in my home.
And this is something that we, you know, that I, I know it's happening, I'm aware of it and I'm, and I'm, and we value this, you know, when they go into another situation and they are, you know, in, you know, say, in, in the, in the school, in, in their academic setting, you know, and it's, and learning is given to them in a contrary way and it doesn't look right that they can identify the other way.
Laura: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, and that, of course, like we can't give you scripts to say to your kids because this is all very individualized for your child and the environment that they're in. But just as an example, my kids' school, they, they do hand work, there's knitting and crocheting that they do. And one of my kids was starting to feel a little anxious about and not just noticing who's the fastest knitter who, you know, and doing some comparing who's fastest at knitting and stuff. And so we've just always, you know, whenever she brings that up, she's like, yeah, we're like, yeah, they're, everybody's knitting at the pace. That's right for them, you know, and I mean, just kind of continually saying those things and, and now when she sees her friends comparing, she'll just, I think that there was a moment where one, a couple of people were not really teasing, but like noticing that one person was a little slow and she was quick to step in and say she's knitting at the pace. That's right for her.
Dr. Rina: That’s so great.
Laura: You know, and I mean, and so giving them that language I think is really important and it can be in a variety of different, you know, I know not most kids are knitting.
Dr. Rina: But no, I, I mean, we, we do that a lot with the social emotional learning that they are doing where, you know, if there are kids who are having trouble communicating in positive kind ways and you know, and we hear them tell each other and we also hear when they tell us when they report back to us about what's going on, you know, it's like we can hear the language that, that they have gotten from our conversations with them and you know, that kind of thing of, of we're planting it already that everybody has the potential to be their best self. Everybody has the potential to learn and to do a better job, you know, and that they're not like, especially like one of the things that is coming up for us a lot is bullying, witnessing, bullying, you know, they're just, they're in kindergarten.
This is the beginning for them of learning that there are some kids that, that are going to be rough with other kids and it's gonna be a pattern, right? But at the same time, we're trying to give them, the kind of language and narrative so that they can help that kid to communicate in a better way and to feel loved and to feel seen and not just to, you know, feel like they're, you know, to get pigeonholed because fortunately the educators, they don't want to pigeon hole the kids either who are having a hard time, but because they have to discipline them, it happens, right?
And it starts to be a pattern where they're like, you know, singled out and, you know, it's like they're the problem kid and all this stuff. And so we hear it a lot, our children saying things that we've said and they say like, you know, oh, but he's, you know, we're, we're gonna help them to, we, we'll give them a hug, we'll, we'll help them to feel better, we'll help them to feel better. You know, that, that's, that, that's not a, that's not a nice way to talk to this other person, but that we understand that they just didn't feel good that, that moment and that they needed a hug, you know?
Laura: Yeah. Oh, I think modeling that compassion is so important. Okay. That was beautiful, Rina, thank you so much for this conversation. I wanna do, wanna make sure that people can find your book if they want to check it out or learn more from you. Where can they find you?
Dr. Rina: Yeah. Well, you can always go to the website of the publisher Harper Collins and rethinking Intelligence. And I have a website Dr. Rina Bliss.com and you can always go to Amazon or whatever, you know, the copy that you can already order now.
Laura: Yay. Okay. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, it was really great to talk with you and I think that these are really important things for us to be thinking about. It's easy to engage in systems that have just kind of been the same way that they've always been without really consciously and intentionally deciding how we want to show up in them. And so it's always good to have that brought to our attention and have an opportunity to be a little bit more aware as parents.
Dr. Rina: Yes.
Laura:Thank you.
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