“Is RIE backed by scientific research?” It’s a question that comes up every once in a while among parents who use the Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE) approach to raising their children, and then they all (virtually) look at each other kind of uneasily because no study has ever shown that children raised using RIE methods have any better outcomes than children who aren’t. Given how much I focus on scientific research, you would think that I would have determined my overall approach to parenting through extensive reading of the literature – but actually I discovered RIE even before I started looking at research and I latched onto it because parenting in a respectful way just felt right. I knew that love was necessary but not the only tool I would to discipline (used in its original sense, meaning “to teach”) my daughter about how to live in our family. I knew immediately that respect was the tool I sought. But it always niggled at me (and these other parents): Is RIE backed in any way by science? Naturally, I could find no expert who could speak to this. So I recruited the assistance of a fellow RIE-practicing parent to help us think through RIE’s basic principles, and whether (or not!) the research backs these up. If you’re new to RIE, you might want to listen to this introductory episode on What is RIE first, so you’ll have the background you need. I actually recorded this Science of RIE episode first so it does have a very brief introduction to RIE, but then I realized it really wasn’t sufficient so I recorded the extra episode. Have questions about RIE? Want to continue the conversation? Come on over to the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group and ask away, or join the Toasted RIE group which I help to moderate! Read Full Transcript Jen: 00:00:38 Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today, we are going to do something we have never done before in more than 60 episodes of the show. Someone else is going to interview me and what are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about a concept that has been absolutely foundational to my parenting. It's an approach to caring for children called Resources for Infant Educarers, which is abbreviated to RIE and pronounced rye. This episode has been a really long time in coming. I had actually thought of doing it when I first started the show, but I figured it would probably be a fairly new concept for a lot of people and I didn't want you all to think that I was some kind of crazy-granola-eating-Californian with really weird ideas about child rearing before you'd probably gotten to know me, but we're at 60 episodes into the show now and I feel like I've mentioned RIE enough times that it is starting to get silly that we actually haven't done an episode on it. Jen: 00:01:29 So when I thought about who I could interview on this topic, I considered all the usual suspects that those of you who are somewhat familiar with who I might have considered, but I quickly realized that probably nobody was going to be able to talk about exactly the aspect of it that I wanted to discuss, which is how does RIE aligned with what science tells us about raising children? Because quite frankly, I've never seen anyone discussed this at all and given that we use scientific research a lot on this show, even though we're not slaves to the research, I couldn't think of anyone other than me to be interviewed on it, but I didn't want to just sit here for an hour and try and convince you about how great RIE is, because when people first learned about it, they tend to have a lot of questions, so I posted in one of the RIE Facebook groups that I'm in and I said, hey, would anyone like to interview me? Jen: 00:02:12 You'd need to be familiar with the basic principles, but really nothing beyond that and you should be interested in learning about it and not openly hostile towards it and you have to be willing to push back if what I'm saying doesn't make sense. So, I'd like to introduce you to our interviewer today. Silvana Naguib, who says that she knows a little bit about RIE that she's gleaned from blog posts and Facebook groups, but she's never read a book about it and she's a lawyer and so she certainly going to push back if what I'm saying doesn't make sense. Welcome Silvana. Silvana: 00:02:40 Hi Jen. Jen: 00:02:41 Thanks so much for joining us today. I think you're joining us from Los Angeles, which funnily enough is actually the home of RIE. So can you tell us a bit about your family and yourself as well, please? Silvana: 00:02:50 Yeah, so I'm actually a recent transplant to Los Angeles. I'm originally from Cairo, Egypt, which is where I grew up and I've been living in the US for about almost 20 years now. Silvana: 00:03:00 And I'm a lawyer by trade and I am married with my husband Ben and we have a daughter, Carolina who is almost three years old. She'll be three this summer and we live here in LA and I'm one of those crunchy-granola-eating social justice lawyer types. I’m actually about to start a new job representing people who are homeless. And so my whole thing in life is I try to help people and make the world suck a little bit less so. Jen: 00:03:32 All right, well thanks for that. Silvana: 00:03:33 That was part of my interest in RIE. I was trying to figure out how to do that for my kid. Jen: 00:03:36 Ah, okay. So how did you first learn about RIE? Silvana: 00:03:39 Well, it actually was on Facebook. A friend of mine had posted a link to a blog post by Janet Lansbury who is a blogger that writes a lot about RIE and she's, I think, well known and I started reading a lot of stuff on her website and thinking, wow, this is a totally different approach to parenting than pretty much everything I've read and how most of the people I know deal with their kids. Jen: 00:04:03 And it struck a chord? Silvana: 00:04:04 It did. And I sort of started poking around if there are any Facebook groups talking about this and reading some other blogs out there. But it's been a pretty superficial exploration. Mostly limited to reading blogs, talking about it on Facebook. Jen: 00:04:19 So, that's kind of the level we're coming at this. So if you don't know a lot about RIE then this is going to be just the interview for you. We're going to go into a lot of the basics and we're going to keep it more relevant to the toddler years. RIE is traditionally and typically used in the zero to two years group, but because my listeners are people who have preschoolers and possibly a little bit even older than that, we're definitely going to focus on the older years and how to apply those principles there as well. So. Silvana: 00:04:48 Well that's perfect for me since I have almost 3-year-old. Jen: 00:04:51 Excellent. Great. Yeah. So we're out of that official period but it's still relevant to us. So this is your interview. What do you want to know about first? Silvana: 00:04:57 Well, I would love to start with some background and just find out where did RIE come from and is it derived from any research, psychological or any other kind of research about child development? Jen: 00:05:09 Okay. So it's actually kind of a strange story about where RIE comes from. There was a pediatrician in Hungary called Emmi Pikler and she had developed this approach to raising children based on respect for them as people and respect for their individual physical developmental processes. And it was in about the middle of the last century and she first tried it on her own children and then after the Second World War, the government asked her to open an orphanage because there were a lot of children that didn't have parents who had been killed in the war, had died after the war. And so she did that and she continued to refine her approach at the orphanage and she did publish some research papers on it, but unfortunately I haven't read many of them because most of them are published in either Hungarian or French. And I read French possibly, but not really a scientific paper level. Jen: 00:05:57 So Magda Gerber, who is the name, who is more traditionally associated with RIE, met Emmi Pikler and this random meeting, Pikler’s daughter and Gerber’s daughter were classmates. And one day Magda Gerber's daughter got sick and their regular pediatrician was out of town. And her daughter said, why don't you call my friend's mom, she is a pediatrician. And so Emmi Pikler came over and Magda Gerber started to tell Pikler about her daughter's symptoms. And Pikler just motioned to her to please be quiet and she started talking to Gerber’s daughter and asked her about her symptoms and how she was feeling and had a very respectful dialogue with her. And Magda Gerber was just blown away and so she ended up getting a Master's in Early Childhood Education in Budapest and started working in the orphanage as well and she works alongside Pikler for a number of years and then after the Hungarian Revolution in the 50s, they moved to Austria and then onto the US and she held a variety of jobs there and eventually moved to Los Angeles where she worked with children who had cerebral palsy and later autism and then in the early 70s, an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford asked her to help him co-direct a program that supported parents in interacting with their children and this guy Forrest and she co-founded the nonprofit Resources for Infant Educarers in Los Angeles. Jen: 00:07:19 But it's actually really unclear in the literature what happened to Forrest after that point. So, he seems to have disappeared off the face of the RIE planet. Hopefully, he didn't disappear entirely. So, she started these parent-infant classes and she also taught development classes at universities around the LA area. So, I guess when I first heard about this background, it was pretty surprising to me that an approach to raising children that was founded in an orphanage in Hungary, something that could even be appropriate for children in a family setting in the US and other places in the world. And I think it's also really interesting how diametrically opposed it is to the traditional Western way of parenting. But we're going to talk a lot more about this and so that's basically where it came from and it's surprising to me that it's relevant, but at the same time I'm so grateful that I found it. Silvana: 00:08:16 Okay. So, the name of this organization, which is now sort of symbolizing this whole movement, RIE has this term educarer in it. What is that? Is it a term they made up? Jen: 00:08:28 Yes, it is actually. And she did that, I always assume it's because she didn't have access to branding experts who are to come up with a lot catchier, but it combines educator and carer and she gives the definition as being one who educates children in a caring manner and that it's not a caregiver or caretaker because a care neither gives nor takes. A care that puts love into action and the way you care for a child is how she experiences your love. So an educarer is showing that love for a child through everyday activities like feeding and diapering, and the idea is that these aren't just chores, these are interactions that deepen your relationship with your child and babies learn so much from these interactions and so if we step back and allow that learning to happen rather than explicitly trying to teach them things all the time, they actually ended up learning a lot. Silvana: 00:09:19 So, do you think that branding it that way was a way to sort of make it seem less about, oh, I'm always doing things for my child and more like I'm just sort of being and experiencing them? Jen: 00:09:30 Yeah, I think so. And it's sort of a weird word and I think it would have been better if it was a word that was a bit more approachable, but yeah, the idea is you don't have to do things, buy things for, take on all these responsibilities about bettering your child and educating your child that your child has an inbuilt drive to learn and that if you step back and support that drive, then amazing things will happen. Silvana: 00:09:59 Okay. So, I'm listening to your podcast and you talk a lot about research and what the science supports. So, we want to try to look at RIE through the lens of what the science and what the research says. We don't want to cherry pick, so maybe we should talk about the eight tenets of RIE and whether there's evidence support either of them. So, I guess one of the things that is most associated with RIE in the limited stuff that I read is this idea of respect. And they put that as their first principle. The RIE website says, “Respect is the basis of the RIE philosophy. We not only respect babies, we demonstrate our respect every time we interact with them. Respecting a child means treating even the youngest infant as a unique human being, not as an object. At RIE, we show respect, for example, by not picking up an infant without telling him beforehand, by talking directly to him and not over him, and by waiting for a child's response.” Is there any evidence to support this idea of respect for even the youngest infants? Jen: 00:11:01 This is actually kind of a strange place for us to start, even though it is the first principle and it is the most important one for us. From a scientific perspective, I would say there is not a ton of evidence for this, particularly on the very young child and I imagine that's more because nobody thinks to study it than people have studied it and found that it is irrelevant or not useful. So, I wanted to quote something that I found in a book of Theories on Early Childhood Education and it describes how Gerber moved to the US and it says “After devoting a good deal of time to becoming grounded and comfortable in her understanding of mainstream American family culture, she set out to find a way to support parents in childcare providers in her new homeland, in rearing confident, competent and authentic children.” And then she said about proposing a method of rearing children that actually goes against mainstream American family culture. Jen: 00:11:53 As an example of that, I was interviewed recently on another podcast and the host of the show ended up being a fairly mainstream parent and I actually hadn't realized that to quite the extent before I started the interview. And halfway through the interview I started talking about my respect-based approach to parenting. And she said, “Respect? I gave birth to them. They should respect me.” And I had to pick myself up off the floor a little bit. And so yeah, I do think that this idea is very strange to a lot of people, I mean in the quote that you mentioned from the RIE website, we don't pick up a baby without first, at least telling him if not asking him about it. And so I didn't do that when my daughter was very young. I discovered RIE when she was about 4 months old and now mostly defunct blog. Jen: 00:12:44 I have a series of pictures of me doing non-respectful things to her. But at that time I'm standing her up while she's standing on the table, she's a month old at the time. She clearly can't stand by herself and so RIE would say that that's not very respectful. And so yeah, we have this approach that is very, very opposed to traditional American parenting. So, to answer the question specifically, no, we don't have any research on being respectful to babies, but I think the closest thing that we have is a book that I love. It's by Alfie Kohn, who's a well-known author in this field and he wrote a book called Unconditional Parenting and it really does a deep dive into the research on tools like withholding love when a child does something that the parent doesn't like or punishes them or rewards them. He finds those tools which really are not based in respect do damage our relationships with our children and he cites a ton of research on that topic and we actually discussed that book at length in an episode we did a while back called How Do I Get My Child To Do What I Want Them To Do, which was the title that I picked on purpose to pique people's interest. Jen: 00:13:53 So I would say overall, if we want to raise children who are respectful of others and compassionate and self-motivated and empathetic, which I think is the goal that a lot of parents have for their children, then we need to model those qualities and treat children with respect rather than just saying, you will be respectful and not having that respect-based relationship. Silvana: 00:14:17 I have a question about that because I actually also read Alfie Kohn’s book and I really read it as more applying to sort of older children. I mean that was definitely his lens and when people get to that stage, preschoolers and young school-aged kids where they're trying to get their kids to do or not do this or that and they use punishment and rewards to try to get their children to behave a certain way and I wonder sometimes if thinking about this respect with very young infants is almost like when you talk about modeling, is it this idea maybe that we just want to start from the very beginning so that we're going to carry that all the way through without necessarily knowing whether it matters to a 2-month-old. If you say, I'm going to pick you up now. Jen: 00:14:58 Yeah. I think that really is it and I can't remember where I read this, but somebody once asked the question. So if you don't start by being respectful, when do you start? Silvana: 00:15:07 That's a really good point. Jen: 00:15:09 Yeah. Well, when the child can talk. Why is it that point? Is it just because they can answer back and tell you that they don't like it? Well, presumably they've been not liking what you've been doing for a long time now and so I think it goes along with the idea that RIE has the children are competent individuals from birth and I've actually seen very young babies, a few weeks old if you have said to them from birth, I'm going to pick you up now before you pick them up, they will actually stiffen their neck because they know what you're about to do and they in a way are cooperating with you and helping you through that process. Jen: 00:15:46 And so to me it's mind boggling and that is supported by neurological research. We understand so much more now about children, very young children and what they're capable of. It seems like every time we test younger children's cognitive abilities, we discovered they were capable of some kind of reasoning we didn't know they could do before. And so yeah, it's the idea that, well, if we don't start now, when will we start? When is this child deserving of our respect? Do they have to earn it? Then we might have to wait awhile. So yeah. So the idea is let's start from birth because why not? Silvana: 00:16:21 Right. Okay. So the second principle in the eight RIE principles is our goal in authentic child and it says “An authentic child is one that feels secure, autonomous and competent.” What's going on here? Jen: 00:16:37 Yeah, this one's actually a much easier one in terms of the research to support it. There's a theory called Self-Determination Theory and it was put forward by Edward Deci. I hope I'm saying that right, and Richard Ryan, and it's probably been a solid 20 or 30 years now and it's been supported by decades of research and basically it looks at how people motivate themselves or others to act. And so there are...