AMA with Matilda Gosling, researcher and author of 'Evidence-Based Parenting' - open now!

[NicolaDMumsnet]

Hi everyone,

We’re pleased to announce social researcher and author Matilda Gosling will be doing an AMA this evening in the wake of her new book ‘Evidence-Based Parenting’. Matilda is a researcher specialising in education, skills and issues affecting children and young people. She has degrees from Cambridge and the LSE. Matilda co-founded and ran an international social research consultancy for 12 years before returning to freelance consultancy and writing, and has led field research in more than 60 countries. She has also researched gender identity in teenagers and the effects of gender identity beliefs on the women’s sector.

Evidence-Based Parenting

‘A search for ‘parenting’ returns over a billion unique hits on Google. How can parents know which approaches actually work?

Evidence-Based Parenting draws directly on over one thousand studies, and indirectly on thousands more, to create a single resource for parents of young children. This vast knowledge base has been condensed, for the first time, into straightforward ideas to support children to be happy, healthy and fulfilled – all while helping parents maintain their own sanity.’

Please post your questions below. Matilda will be answering questions throughout the evening.

As always, please remember our guidelines - one question per user, follow-ups only if there’s time and most questions have been answered, and please keep it civil.

Thanks,
MNHQ.

Hi, Matilda. Congratulations on your book! I've read the "Behaviour" chapter twice because it's been so helpful. I just wonder, given all the research you clearly did for this, how it might have changed your own approach, feelings and beliefs if you'd had this book as a new mother? (How, if at all, would it have changed your own approach to parenting?)

I have dipped in to the book and have enjoyed the section on managing conflict. As your children get older it's easy to get defensive when they challenge you. Any thoughts on managing that rising feeling of annoyance when the kid thinks they know better. 😆

What area do you think needs research more? And what is your favourite biscuit?

Hi Matilda,

I know this book is focused on younger children but I am asking you this question as a Dad of teens.

it seems that teachers and social workers are increasingly wary about setting boundaries around teen behaviour, almost saying that children should be given what they want.

obviously it is important to listen to children and to allow them to take more risks and responsibility as they grow up.

However, I wonder if we are removing boundaries too fast at too young an age, expect older children to behave like ‘mini adults’ and in so doing are creating a generation of less resilient people.

I know it’s a balancing act and there is no right answer but wonder if you had something to say about:

1. Appropriate evidence based approaches to changing boundary setting as kids get older.
2. How parents can hold their own if and when there are disagreements with fashionable approaches taken by teachers and others in positions of authority when it comes to parenting.

I’ve not read the book yet but wondered whether there’s any one lesson you think we need to take away from the research?
Oh and can you please write one for parenting teenagers?!

Our copy of the book is on order and we're looking forward to reading it. My question is also around setting boundaries and when to enforce them. Sometimes it pans out easier to let our kids come round to things in their own time, rather than starting major battles all the time, but that comes with a fear about what character traits that will leave them with, especially coming from quite a strict up-bringing myself.

Hi Matilda,

Really looking forward to receiving my copy of this book (it's on its way!).

In a world where most of us are eating crazy amounts of ultra processed food and our children's health is at risk from so much, how can we try to get the balance between eating tasty (and cheap?) convenient food which our kids will eat, and setting up healthy habits for life?

If I'm looking for rewards for good toddler behaviour I've often ended up wanting to give my kids sweets or equally accessible treats rather than a sticker chart which is never immediate enough. Any ideas about how to get around this?

Any suggestions for how we can encourage physical activity to balance all this?

Thanks!

Thanks so much for the questions so far (I've always wanted to type my favourite biscuit into a Mumsnet chat). I'll be online to start replying in the next few minutes.

Hi @Fakkers. This is an excellent question and one I’ve pondered since poring over the research! I think I would have been a little less self-sacrificing when my children were younger. I had it in my head that their needs should be prioritised over mine – which, of course, they should be in some ways, but not to the exclusion of most other things. Parents need time/opportunity to connect with friends or wider family, to do things they enjoy and to exercise; to get the structures in place so that they aren’t wrung out from lack of sleep, once children are old enough to support this, etc. It’s very easy (I found) to slip into martyrdom, but children tend to do best when their parents are healthy, rested, well-nourished and generally not fraying around the edges. It took me too long – and a lot of reading research/listening to advice – to understand this properly.

Thank you! No chance of martyrdom here, but I definitely need to exercise more (at all).

Hi @JoGo1. I haven’t found a magic bullet for this! One approach is to keep in mind that it’s developmentally appropriate for children to do this as they get older. They learn to separate by testing boundaries/challenging parents. (This may not help massively when your child is informing you Billy’s parents are much nicer than you are, because they let him stay out late, but it might help a little bit to normalise it.) You can also try stepping away when you need to, and discussing your (valid!) feelings with friends/family/partner so they don’t overspill onto your children. Finding an outlet can be useful – for me, something like going for a run can help to reset things a little. It’s also worth being assertive when you need to be – if your child is challenging boundaries in a way that’s rude or unpleasant, you don’t need to absorb it.

One interesting finding from the research is that parents tend to let resentment after conflict hang around much more than their children do – children, on average, get over it much faster. They’re also more likely to show up well the next time you interact with each other if you talk to them as if they’re the delightful child you want to see, rather than the grouchy one who argued with you at dinner.

Hi Matilda - is there anything that you've come across in your research that went completely against your instincts and surprised you/you struggled to agree with? I know you've already mentioned not always putting your children first.

I'm thinking of researchers in other fields where one can struggle to stay "evidence based" when the evidence suggests you're on the wrong track and its your pet project- we all have our biases!

Hi Matilda, I’m not 100% familiar with your book, but I’m of the view that parenting of young children is being made so much harder for (most often) women now because of people considering all forms of sleep training cruel, and promoting longer bed sharing where actually getting the 1 plus age group into a solid sleep routine has benefits all round. I suppose my question is did you look into this? And if so is there really much evidence that allowing an older baby/toddler to cry for a few minutes is actively harmful? Especially if it aids them in learning to self settle?

How can parents remain sane when trying to manage/support young autistic 9 year old girl with anxiety, eating restrictions, meltdown and social interactions. With local CAMHS offering no support for 18 months as they are under resourced. This is a national problem and reality.

Hello @drwitch. There are three areas of research process I pulled out in the book as needing more attention. The first is involving fathers more in parenting research (so much of it focuses on mothers).

The second is having more systematic reviews of areas that wouldn’t be suitable for scientific trials. There are many areas of low-quality research that cover really interesting areas, but would never be suitable for a trial (for example, you would never be able to divide parents over a long-term period into two groups, telling one of them to hover over their children and the other group to do the opposite, then to measure how their children turn out). But what you can do is pull together the findings from lower-quality studies – the ones that link areas of parenting with child outcomes, but aren’t necessarily able to tell you the direction of travel in terms of causation – to give a more solid evidence base.

The third area is to have more studies that try to work out what works for different children/different families, rather than trying to measure outcomes for all children. At one level, everything is individual anyway – nothing is going to work in exactly the same way for any two given children – but I think there’s some useful nuance in getting a more general sense of what might work better in terms of behaviour/health/learning/well-being/relationships according to whether children have lots of siblings or none, or have a neurodevelopmental condition, or have parents with a history of trauma, etc. There’s a bit of this, but not enough.

Obviously there are lots of topics where more research would be useful, but I’ll pull out two that have struck me. One is resilience – it’s not been well-defined by researchers yet, and we’re lacking extensive evidence as to what might support it for different children. Another is connected, and is mental health. There’s some early research being done by some excellent researchers looking at prevailing mental health narratives and whether they might be contributing to declining mental health in older children (the theory is that greater awareness of mental health conditions – which is extremely well-intended – might be leading children to identify with these conditions, prompting a decline in their sense of well-being). It would be great to have more researchers looking into this area.

My favourite biscuit is a plain chocolate digestive. Thank you for asking 🍪

Thanks for writing the book @matildagosling. My question: was there a point when you were researching the book where you realised that something you’d been doing as a parent (and had thought was just Dandy) was in fact a v big No No? I’m possibly not expressing this very well!

Name changed for this, but my question is about your research into gender identity in teenagers. DS came out as trans at the age of 16 on the basis of liking female pronouns and not liking having facial hair or a deeper voice - and after talking to other (apparent) teens on a discord channel. It's not progressed beyond that in the last year apart from he/they very occasionally mentioning puberty blockers/surgery.

My strategy has been to nod along and not do anything active beyond that – pointing out that it's a bit late for puberty blockers and that sex change surgery is really expensive/probably painful and that you'd have to be really unhappy in your body to take it further – with the hope of coming to terms with puberty in the next few years. Does that sound about right or is that a bad move for any reason? Am I doing any damage?

It strikes me it's not been a great time to be a sensitive teenage boy in the last few years, what with Andrew Tate and Me Too. Is this something you recognise with the wider children/trans thing? Thanks

Hello, @JKRowlingsright (she is). I’ve just finished drafting the follow-up book on teenagers, so your question is well timed! The first thing I would say is that I agree 100% that teenagers need boundaries, as do younger children – but they shift and change, and what is appropriate for one teenager may not be for another. It’s hard to have consistent rules as families, experiences, maturity, character etc vary so massively by the teenage years. Some areas that are nevertheless likely to be important include sleep, knowing where they are (within reason), screens (for younger teenagers, at least) and eating together as a family. It’s worth, I think, holding firm lines on the things that really matter to you – but not to go overboard, and to focus on what’s appropriate for your child/your family.

In terms of engaging with teachers and others in position of authority, it’s important to have the confidence that you know what’s right for your child, and it’s appropriate to push back where you believe it’s important to do so – while being careful about where the lines for this lie. It’s probably fair to say that your teenager’s geography curriculum isn’t reasonably within your scope, but issues touching on parenting/child development are. I did a paper for Sex Matters (available on their website under Resources for Parents - the third in the series) that has a short section on engaging with schools on issues relating to gender identity, the ideas from which might be useful for other areas of potential difference too. You might also want to find other parents who feel similarly, depending what the issue is. There’s power in numbers, as well as a sense of security from having the support of others who feel similarly.

On resilience, I suspect it’s a wider issue than boundaries. There’s not a huge amount of evidence in this area yet, but early possibilities for potential declines in teenage resilience include absence of boundaries, of course, and the linked risks of being overly child-led; not leaving children (screen-free) time to be left to their own devices; and changing mental health narratives, as I mentioned in my previous post.

PS Have also suggested talking to a counsellor either in school or in an outside local body but not much interest there really.

Hi @leytonjo. My one lesson, possibly irritatingly, would be that there's no 'right' way to parent. Different things work for different families/children (and at different times – a golden strategy for today may have lost its potency by next week). You'll understand better than anyone else which approaches are likely to work for your child – but it can be useful to have some evidence-based options for particular challenges, and to understand when they may be more or less likely to work. I found it much easier to work out what was likely to suit my own children once I'd sifted through the evidence. Oh - and a key one, though you didn't ask for two – parenting perfection is probably quite bad for children if this is the aim. Well-intentioned mediocrity is underrated.

There will be a follow-up on parenting teenagers!

Hello Matilda. Congratulations on your book. Looking forward to reading it. As part of your research what cultural differences did you come across (if any) on how other cultures raise their young and was there anything in particular that you thought would be beneficial to see more in the UK. Thanks

The legal age of becoming an adult is 18. Do you think this is exactly where the line between childhood and adult hood should be? or higher? or lower? Or higher in some regards and lower in others?

Thanks, @TaupeHedgehog. I agree with you – it’s impossible to know for certain where there’s room for flexibility on many areas relating to boundaries, and the research isn’t granular enough to help (though we can be more confident about some boundaries that it’s crucial to hold – e.g. on sleep, physical activity etc). For younger children, one approach is to hold a boundary by offering options. Perhaps your child wants to have a sleepover tonight, but it’s a school night, and you make this clear while asking them instead if they’d prefer to have the sleepover on Friday or Saturday.

But while we can’t be 100% certain about long-term impacts in many areas, we can probably be pragmatic and work out where there’s room for movement – does it really matter if a child wears odd socks to nursery or gets to stay up late on holiday? If my child gets offered a doughnut at the school gate, the benefit she gets from sharing something with the friend who has given it to her probably outweighs the negative health impacts, even if I might have chosen not to buy her one. But sleep, fresh air, security, etc are really important – as is consistency (most of the time - see the holiday example on staying up late). If you are able to be consistent about certain important boundaries, you’re much less likely to get push-back on them – and being flexible where it’s less important can have a similar effect. Your child then knows you are moving with them when you can, but holding the line when it’s important to do so. (And if you are considering these questions, it's likely your child will be absolutely fine in the long term!)

Hi Matilda, my daughter struggles with emotional regulation and becomes overwhelmed frequently by anxious feelings. Do you have any evidence based advice to support her to manage her emotions so she doesn't become overwhelmed? Thank you

Hello @Mumsrun. As you say, most of us eat a huge amount of ultra-processed food, and it’s pretty much impossible to sidestep. We probably need to be pragmatic – aiming for healthy food when it’s possible, but recognising that we’re probably not going to be making gnocchi from scratch on a Tuesday night. Modelling is important, according to a lot of the research in this area – if I eat lots of fresh vegetables and healthy protein/fats, my child is more likely to do so too; the same applies if I’m going straight for the salt and vinegar peanuts or cereal bars when I finish work. Offering a wide range of food, without too much in the way of compulsion, is also a decent way of getting children to eat more healthily – e.g. leaving out a bowl of veg sticks and hummus before dinner.

A note of caution – I’d be slightly wary of tying physical rewards into behaviour, and that includes sticker charts. These tend to be a short-term fix, but they don’t often work in the longer term. The behaviour you’re rewarding can stop as soon as the reward is no longer on offer (I learned this, before reading the research, to my cost). You could try rewarding good behaviour after the event, but not in a way that your child expects it; praise is also good, as is focusing on what they get right a lot more than what they get wrong. You’ll see a lot more ideas in the behaviour chapter, when your book arrives - including ways to make a sticker chart work, if immediate behaviour change is your priority.

On physical activity, following children’s lead tends to work well. What do they enjoy doing? You could also see if there are available friends to do joint activities – your child may be more likely to join the after-school football club if a friend is doing it too. Tying walks (these were a never-ending battle with my children) into things they like doing can be helpful – for example, going via the swings or stopping by to see/pick up a friend.