NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION

When we talk about communication most of us default to the assumption that we're talking about...talking. But in this episode we start exploring the importance of non-verbal communication, and especially the ways that relates to our communication with our kids.
We chat with Yolanda Williams about her raising her daughter Gia, advocacy and racial bias in the medical community, and about why viewing single parents as superheroes is counterproductive.
We also talk with Dr. Patricia Speier about the importance of understanding non-verbal communication, and about various strategies that all parents can learn and employ to maximize effective communication between parents and kids.
You can find "The Talk" on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and If you'd like to contribute to the conversation by sharing your story about one of our episode topics, you can do so by sending a voice memo or an email to thetalk@thetalkthepodcast.com. 

Transcript

Eli: She might speak tomorrow. You have no idea. It might—she may never verbally communicate in the same way that you or I would, but there is no specific trajectory or timeline that would indicate what her progress is or where it will eventually end up. It's all about making the goals immediate and making them successful for her to communicate more efficiently. So if she is capable of verbalizing, even with just sounds, and it's not a tantrum, that's progress and that's progress that has to be marked for her personally, not against anybody else's indication.

You're listening to "The Talk": a podcast where we explore the possibility of creating a radical new communication environment between parents and children. An environment that's open, honest, and candid. And where nothing is off-limits.

Mel: As far as we can gather, Maggie's receptive communication and receptive language is very developed and she has a great understanding of what's going on. There's a tendency, especially by people that are close to Maggie, relatives, grandparents, family members, to not baby her, but in a certain sense, take care of her more than they need to. My parents watch Maggie often, and again, just because they're grandparents, first of all, they're going to baby their grandchild regardless. But I think just not...not being aware of that receptive language or thinking that maybe it's not quite where it actually is at, she gets away with a lot. She gets away with them helping her get dressed, helping her take care of different daily activities that she's more than capable of doing. But because you don't necessarily have that input, sometimes it's hard to know what she's actually understanding when you are speaking to her and what she is actually capable of.

You just heard from Eli and Mel. Their daughter Maggie just turned six and is on the autism spectrum and largely non-verbal. I've known Eli since well before Maggie was born and we've talked a lot over the years about our kids. My first was born just a week before Maggie. Early on in this podcast, and much thanks to a conversation with Eli, I knew I wanted to dedicate an episode to nonverbal communication because when we talk about communication, and obviously we do that a lot here, most of us default to the idea that we're talking about, well, talking. But there's plenty of research indicating that what we say to others has relatively little to do with the words we use. In the back half of this episode, I'll speak with Dr. Patricia Speier about how that knowledge can impact the way we relate to our kids and about specific strategies we can employ to increase the positive impact of our interactions with them. But first, let's hear from Yolanda Williams. Yolanda is the founder of Parenting Decolonized, a podcast that unpacks the ways colonization and white supremacy affect black families. It's a deeply insightful and important conversation that I'd highly encourage you to seek out. I came across an Instagram live conversation with Yolanda several months ago and in the course of that conversation, it was the mention of her daughter that piqued my interest.

Yolanda Williams: My daughter, Gia, is three years old. She just turned three this past November. She was definitely an unexpected gift in my life. I had her when I was about thirty-seven and I had never planned to have children. And so she is definitely someone that came into my life when she should have, definitely a blessing. Her name actually means "God's gracious gift" because having her in my life is definitely something that's making me level up as a person. Even though she's not formally diagnosed with autism — we just had her autism evaluation last week and she's not formally diagnosed— but she does have sensory processing disorder. She also has some speech delays and it's been definitely challenging, but also really rewarding to see your child, with this sort of neuro-divergent brain, figure out life, because three-year-olds normally speak a lot. They have a lot to say and she doesn't use words. But we still are able to communicate just with how we interact with each other. So it's just been a—it's a learning curve, don't get me wrong. And there are some days I'm just like, "Wow, this is so, so hard" because I'm a single mom. And so this is so, so hard. And I — I have to pull back that whole thing "I wish she was" and when my brain starts to go there, I'm just like she's exactly how she's supposed to be. That's the learning curve for me. For her, she's like, "I'm just living life." Very carefree girl.

Jeremy: Yeah. Do you have her in any kind of speech therapy or occupational therapy at this point?

Y.W.: I do. She has been getting occupational and speech, she gets it three times a week, and—just this past August it started—I and I have seen leaps and bounds improvement in how she communicates, but also just interacting. I realized that there was some issues when she wasn't looking people in the eye and she didn't pay attention to children. But I wasn't able to get the doctors on board until she was after about two and a half. And they were finally like, "OK, let's get her evaluated." And that's when they realized, "Hey, there's some delays here."

Jeremy: Did you feel like that was because she was still in a window that the doctors didn't consider to be outside of typical developmental expectations?

Y.W.: So some of that is true before they turn two because I noticed these things around 18 months. She had stopped speaking words. She was starting to say a few things, but she had stopped speaking words. So I brought this up around when she was about 18 months and her doctor was like, "Well, every child is different. Some children have a lot of words right now, and some kids have like four or five. So let's just see when she's two." And so when she was two, I was like, "There's no words now. So what—how can I navigate this? I want to get her tested. I want to see what's going on." And they're like, "Well, let's just wait and see if it improves." Now, there's a few things. Yes, developmentally, some kids just really do speak later than others. And around two years old is when they really start to develop language. But about two, normally, kids have about ten to 50 words. So she had zero. And a large part of that is also there is some racial bias within the medical industry. This is a prevalent problem within the black community with getting our children tested. 

Jeremy: Absolutely, yeah. I was going to ask if—are her therapists that she's working with—are her therapists white? 

Y.W.: Her two speech and occupational therapists are white. Her last evaluation I had for the autism evaluation, she was a black doctor. And the doctor who also finally listened to me happened to be a black woman as well. 

Jeremy: Yeah. When you were seeking out the speech therapy for her, was that a consideration or did you find yourself vetting those therapists any differently? Because they're white therapists and your daughter is black?

Y.W.: No, I didn't. And to be honest, I didn't really have a choice. They were like, "These are therapists that are available." And where I was at, I was kind of desperate to get her into something. I was feeling like there are windows with our children and brain development and that was kind of slipping away because nobody was listening to me. So when they were like, "Hey, we have these two therapists, they have room," I'm like, "Fine." And they are so amazing with her. So I did have that initial concern like, "Wow, I really wish I could have picked my therapist," but it wasn't possible for me. And I grew up in California. I live in Arkansas, but I grew up in California. And California is just—I grew up around everybody. So there's racism there. But I also didn't think about things in this sort of black and white,  looking at the world this way for a very, very long time. So I'm used to the people, educators, doctors, all that stuff being mostly white women.

This is not the first time we've talked about this on this podcast. On the very first episode of "The Talk", I had a conversation with child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Sara Heron, the only black female provider out of over forty at her organization. Sara told us that the lack of options for patients in the Black, indigenous, people of color community can be really harmful. Black people who are seeking care often inherently distrust white doctors because of the long history of bias, neglect, mistreatment, and abuse. That distrust is warranted and can discourage people who need treatment from seeking or accepting it at all.

Y.W.: And it's frustrating because, like I said, the person who listened to me turned out she was a black woman finally, and she could see the relief on my face. I started crying and she was like, "Let's get her an evaluation. I'm noticing some stuff." And yeah, I was like, "Why couldn't anyone else do this for me?" It was really heartbreaking. But I also really—I felt a lot of relief because finally, someone heard me. And I also felt relief when I saw her autism evaluator was a black woman because I knew that looking at her, she wouldn't be clouded by any kind of racial bias, so she'll be able to see her and really be able to evaluate her from a clear perspective. 

Jeremy: When it comes to communicating with your daughter, I mean, we always hear this fact that verbal communication is only a small part of the picture when it comes to communicating with anyone, with other people. So I'm curious if you've found any surprises in terms of like, "Wow, that's really effective," And if those things have bled over to the way that you perceive communication from other people in your life?

Y.W.: I have definitely had to been very cognizant of my face and my body language. She searches my face a lot. And so I have to be really intentional about how I'm looking. Now, when she does stuff, as a three-year-old does, she's very hard-headed, sometimes. I will frown. And it's funny, she doesn't care. Like, she really does not care if I'm upset with her. She usually just laughs like most kids do at that age. But I'm trying to show her the different expressions. So there's times where I'm watching a show and she looks at faces even in the cartoons. Like Daniel the Tiger, that's her buddy. She watches him all the time. And when he has a very bad day and his brow is really furrowed, she starts to—she busts into tears. She can't handle it. And I talk her through that. I can't tell if she knows what I'm saying, to be honest with you, but I'm just like, "You know, he's not upset with you" because children that age don't know that there's a difference. So I was like, "He's not upset with you. He's just going through this thing right now." And I'm explaining to her. And then I used to turn the channel really quickly because I didn't know what to do. And now I just let her kind of deal with those feelings because they're natural feelings and she can cry if she wants to. And so I kind of do the same thing. We like—when she wants something from me, she'll just look and I can look over and see what she's looking at and give it to her. Now, this is part of the problem. This is part of the reason that her speech is delayed. Not part of it, but I'm not helping it.

Jeremy: I see, okay. 

Y.W.: Yeah. Because I'm not forcing her to point or to like—I forget sometimes because I'm working or it's just easier when I'm handing her her cup to say, "Here's your green cup." I'll just hand her the cup and then she's good. So this is part of the issue. This is what the speech therapist was like, "You have to be intentional about speaking as you do things so she can start associating together."

Jeremy: Yeah. Narrating what's happening.

Y.W.: Yeah, I have to narrate. And it's hard because I forget. Parents get busy and we just start doing stuff on autopilot. So again, it's about being really conscious, being really intentional. About making sure that I am doing things that are going to benefit her speech but also kind of getting her outside of her comfort zone. If she wants something now, I make her point. If it—now she's got to the point where she just will hand me something, and forcefully, too. She'll open my hand and be like, "Take this remote control and turn." I'm like, "OK." She has no problem communicating what she wants at all with anyone—and my sisters, my mom included.

Jeremy: Yeah. I was going to ask who else is in her life and who's around that she gets to interact with and have those people been pretty quick and pretty able to pick up on the things that you've learned from the therapists in terms of communicating with her?

Y.W.: So I am a single mom out here, but I moved out here because my family's here. My mom and my two sisters. And my middle sister has a fourteen-year-old daughter and she loves her, her cousin. It's like they're sisters and she is the only "baby baby" around. She's just not around other children all the time. And so having my niece around I try to like get her over there during the weekends and they—she interacts with her, she climbs all over her, she's talking to her in her gibberish. She actually talks a lot. It's just not words. She does a lot of verbal communication. I know when she's mad at me because she is gibberish yelling at me. And so she does that a lot.

Jeremy: Do you sense her feeling frustrated with not being able to articulate things that she's trying to articulate?

Y.W.: Sometimes. Today, in particular, I could tell what she wanted from me, but I wasn't able to do it for her in the moment that she wanted it. And she she was doing a lot of verbalizing. And I can tell she was frustrated, like she wanted to say "Now." And I just — I can see when there's a difference between her just being upset and her being frustrated that she's not able to say what she wants to say. It doesn't happen often. The thing with her and I think it's because we are so close, it's just her and I. The majority of the time, eighty percent of the time, the girl is smiling and laughing. But when she does get what she wants, she's going off and I can tell when there's a frustrated "I can't get this out, I can't tell you what I want" versus I'm pissed because you didn't do what I told you to do at this moment."

Jeremy: You've talked about the fact that there are some challenges to this. But do other parents and other people in your life—is there kind of an assumption that this must be really difficult, this must be really hard? And do you find that assumption to be true or does it feel patronizing? Are people not seeing the whole picture?

Y.W.: Sometimes it can be patronizing, especially when it comes to single motherhood in general, it's like "you're so strong" and I really don't like when people say that to me in regards to single motherhood because it's all hard. And, yes, it is—it does require you to constantly be on. You get no break unless you really, really ask for it. But I know a lot of married single women. I know a lot of partnered single parents. And I just feel like what we want is for everyone to understand that, yes, it is definitely very, very difficult. But I don't want it to feel like I'm doing something that no one else—like Supermom. I don't like that mentality, especially as a black woman. We are the strong woman trope. I need help. I'm not as strong as people think I am. I need more community care. I need more government care. There's—I have needs. And so, just being like, "Oh, you're you're so strong." I don't have a choice. This is my life. I have to do my life as an adult and parent. But I'm not as strong as folks think I am. And it really kind of diminishes my struggle when people don't necessarily—they don't mean to. I get that. But I'm not as strong as folks I think I am at all. I need help.

Jeremy: And for you, if you were to just acknowledge that as the compliment that maybe it's intended, it would let those people off the hook and it would let those systems off the hook in a way that's really not healthy. It's not useful.

Y.W.: Doesn't serve me. It doesn't serve my daughter. It doesn't serve me and it doesn't serve the community at large. We're not taking care of each other. Yeah. And so to just be like, "Oh, you're so strong, you're dealing with it." Yeah, the best I can with the resources I have. But as a community, we have to take care of each other. And that includes single moms. Single parents, I should say.

Jeremy: Your daughter is really young still, but I would like to know when you think about her future, when you think about her growing up and becoming a teenager and growing into adulthood, what kinds of things do you envision for her?

Y.W.: You know, my ultimate dream out here in Arkansas is to get some land, build on it, have a small little farm and be able to host other families and do fun things for the community. When I envision her a little bit older, teen years and whatnot, I see her using her neuro-divergence in a way that inspires people. I am definitely raising someone who is—will hopefully be an activist and will hopefully use her powers or whatever they may be to inspire others and to help people who may have been in her previous position. I don't know when Gia will start talking, if she will, and I don't want to be harmful and call it disability, but with anyone who is "outside of the norm," there's still—your life isn't over. If she never speaks, that doesn't mean she's not able to have a full and happy life. So that's really all I envision for her is to have a full and happy life. And for me to do the mind work and the decolonizing and the conscious intentional parenting to make sure that I'm not putting my stuff onto her to be something that she's not. I want her to be the fullest version of herself, whatever that looks like, and hopefully is someone who wants to use that to help other people.

Jeremy: If you'd like to hear more from Yolanda Williams, and I strongly recommend you do, you can find her on the Web at parentingdecolonized.com. Follow her on Facebook @ParentingDecolonized and find the Parenting Decolonized podcast probably right here on whatever app you're in right now listening to "The Talk". Also, keep an eye out soon for Yolanda's new membership site called Conscious Parenting for Social Justice.

Y.W.: What I've also kind of learned since I've been doing this podcast is a lot of people of color and white parents are also in the process of decolonizing. And that just means "What mindsets do we need to let go of that keep us parenting from a place of fear instead of a place of freedom so we can raise liberated children?"

Coming up, we hear from Dr. Patricia Speier, a psychiatrist who specializes in non-verbal communication.

Tom: Willa did say, "How did you make me?" At some point, I was like, "You know…"

Jeremy: What did you say to her?

Tom: I think I managed to distract and avoid. 

Jeremy: In an upcoming episode, we're talking about sex. About how and when we begin that conversation with our kids. Our kids have questions and they deserve open ears and honest answers from us.

Ellen: As far as talking to the girls, my concern is where do I draw the line in terms of letting them know that it's normal and it's natural, but also making sure that they stay safe and they make smart choices in terms of partners. 

We'll be doing stuff like breaking down the cultural idea that there's a "right time" to talk to kids about sex, talking about the reasons for parental discomfort at starting the conversation, the problems with the dominance of heteronormativity in sex education, in the inclusion of a wide variety of fulfilling types of relationships like ethical non-monogamy in the sex conversations we have with our kids. 

Tom: When they explained the physical act of intercourse, the penis goes in the vagina, I was just like, "What?" And it blew my mind.

As always, I really want all of you to be part of this conversation. So I'm inviting you to send me a voice memo that you'd be willing to share with our listeners. How did your parents, community, church, and school teach you about sex as a kid? If they did at all. As an adult, do you feel adrift or unknowledgeable about your own sexual pleasure? And how has that impacted your relationships? And if you have kids, have you started that conversation with them?

Tom: Did your mom like, "Alright, here's the deal"?

Ellen: I brought it up. If I hadn't brought it up, I honestly don't know when it would have happened.

If you'd be willing to share your story, you can send your voice memo to TheTalk@TheTalkThePodcast.com or visit TheTalkThePodcast.com and click "contact". I look forward to hearing from you.

As we spoke about with Yolanda Williams, good medical and psychological resources and care for our kids are really important. Finding practitioners who understood her and her daughter and were willing to listen was a game-changing moment. To add some clinical perspective to this conversation about understanding nonverbal communication, I turned next to Dr. Patricia Speier.

Dr. Patricia Speier: I'm a child and adolescent psychiatrist. I teach at the University of California, San Francisco, where I am a full clinical professor. My training in residency was at UCSF in Psychiatry and then at UCLA in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. I'm also trained as a union adult psychoanalyst and a union child and adolescent analyst. So it's a little bit of everything.

A good deal of Patricia's work is with children whose primary mode of communication is nonverbal. Parents often come to her when their child's speech isn't developing along a typical path. Speech isn't coming easily, or there's a question about why a child isn't speaking.

P.S.: The hearing has been looked at and other things like that. And so they want to understand, from a psychiatric viewpoint, what's going on with the child.

Jeremy: Yeah. Of course, this podcast is all about communication and when we talk about communication, I think there's sort of a general assumption that we're usually talking about talking because that feels like our primary way, as humans, of communicating with each other. But of course, that's not actually really true. Would you tell us a little bit about the impact that nonverbal communication has on our overall communication with each other as people?

P.S.: Yes, it's huge. First of all, we really underestimate it tremendously because talking is so precise. And really what we do when we're using words is we're directing the communication in a certain way.

Patricia told me that researchers estimate at 35 to 40 percent of our real communication is in our voice, our tone, pitch, and inflection and that over 50 percent of our communication is in our body language, how we move, how we sit, how we are looking at the person or people we are communicating with.

P.S.: And that's huge. And we're communicating that with children every moment of the day we're with them.

With babies, who are obviously non-verbal at the start of their lives, the way we employ nonverbal strategies is particularly crucial in making them feel safe, secure and understood.

P.S.: Helping them to know where they should be looking in order to understand something. And our voices are telling them that we're connecting with them, that we care about them. And that's really the essence of so much of what we do.

Jeremy: There are nonverbal skills that we learn and practice a lot when our kids are very young because we have to. It's their only way of communicating with us at that point. But are there techniques that we tend to let fall by the wayside after their speech develops that we maybe should be trying to hold on to and continue to employ at that point?

P.S.: Yes. What I—one of the things I teach my child and adolescent psychiatrists who are learning how to really be with kids is how to play. Because play is really the essence of understanding somebody else's mind. But everything has a little bit of playfulness with a child and some of that gets lost too quickly. Keep a warm eye contact, and that doesn't mean staring at a child, but sort of looking in and kind of looking around and then seeing if you can create a mutuality in the eye gaze. But we need to keep doing that as the kid gets older, getting down on the ground to the kid's level. Parents forget. As soon as a kid starts talking, they forget that they need to kind of get into the kids, I guess. So move toward the kid, come down and be on a kid's level in order to communicate most fully.

It's also really important for us to be aware of our tonality. Patricia notes that if you're in the other room and have to yell in order to be heard...

P.S.: You're losing your power of connection. So you want to really come in and connect down and in an intimate way and then using touch and using nonverbal gestures, the thumbs up, the bright smile, the head movement to the left or to the right. All of those things help a kid know that you're paying attention to them.

Jeremy: You mentioned yelling and losing the connection by raising our voices with our kids and that's so interesting because I feel like once our kids start to talk, then we sort of see that as them being able to communicate "on our level." But it's so interesting to think about the reality of that actually being reversed, because, like you said, we need to keep ourselves on their level. It's such an interesting way of sort of reversing that assumption about verbal communication.

P.S.: Yeah, I think that people often—we want our kids to be verbal and it is important for them in their world in order to to have mostly good, receptive language. They should be able to understand what's being communicated to them. But parents get lost in that and they also have kind of these hard stops that happen. I see mothers go from the warm kind of "mother-ese" talk, which is really important for children up until somewhere between three and a half and five where kids start wanting adults to speak to them as though they're adults. But they often go as soon as they—if they change their language to a more adult style language, they move back too far and they stop really following and attuning. And so the concept—let me just underline the concept of attunement. Every child has a unique need for how they should be approached. And you have to kind of follow that. Some kids like a more lively face, but kids on the spectrum, if you use too much facial language, it makes them uneasy. It's too much information for them to process. They like things that are predictable. So changing your voice, tone, and changing your facial attitude in a more predictable way for a kid on the autistic spectrum is really important. And keeping your tonality more narrow. A high tone or too much loudness will really hurt them and send them backwards and then they'll be afraid of you. So kind of keeping that sort of attunement. Other kids, like a Down's kid, might be more capable and interested in high emotional attunement and the interplay between the facial affect—how people are expressing themselves with their face—is really much more important. So each kid has their own kind of optimal zone of how they want to interact nonverbally. And understanding that and kind of moving with that helps communication and helps kids to acquire receptive language.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think what you're saying is it's important to know your kid. And if your child is non-verbal, it sounds like it may be pretty important to have an understanding of why that's the case, because, like you said, there are these generalities about kids on the spectrum versus kids with Down syndrome and whatever. Do you feel like a big part of your work is helping parents understand how to tune into their kids so that they can learn those specific communication skills for their kids?

P.S.: I think it's really important in my work to work with parents to see how easily they can kind of adapt to what the kid's need is. And some parents are really good at that. Some parents could be good, but they're not taking the time for that. And then some parents really have a very different style than their kid's style and need to really learn how to adapt to their kid's style. And that could take some working out. And so I think every parent can learn something more about how to work with their kids, especially from their kids, to ask a kid, "When I use that tone of voice, does it make you feel happy or does it make you feel worried?" That kind of thing. Parents often don't slow down enough. And this is really key for good nonverbal communication to be present and be aware.

In other words, when you're talking to your kids, put down your phone, focus your attention, and practice listening in an engaged way. And this can be tough to do. We've got a lot going on. Parents are humans with their own needs, and especially for those of us who have been at home for the past year, it can feel like our personal space boundaries are stretched paper-thin.

P.S.: It's always tough. And it's also tough because you have to remember kids will come at you when you're in the middle of something else. And that's what they're most likely to really actually engage with you and, setting the stage for that, if you can create mutual activities together where that's all you focus on, when kids are very young, that helps you to remember and helps the kid to get into the zone with you faster.

Patricia believes that these moments are among the most crucial times for us to drop everything we can and really focus on our kids.

P.S.: Because it's in that moment when they're talking to you, when you have the best chance of actually helping them learn something, teaching them something, and being with them. If you're talking to them, the buy-in's lower.

Jeremy: Yeah, that's so interesting. It sounds like you're saying that your listening response is maybe more communicative than your "response" response.

P.S.: Exactly. Every kid has a hard time listening when they hit later years. Early on, there's a hunger to get the parent's attention and to hold the parent's attention, especially around something that's of interest to the child. So it's important to kind of develop your curiosity as a parent. "Where is my child going to lead me? What new thing am I going to learn from them today? What new thing can we mutually explore?" So getting that kind of back and forth motion between a child and a parent when they're young makes it easier when the kid enters their latency age, their eights and nines and tens, when it's really all about their social world, or their teens, where their independence pushes them away from being able to talk to the parent.

Or as Topher Payne notes in our episode, Bodies Part two, if you think those are conversations that...

Topher Payne: ...you're having with them when they're 12, no, you did the work on that eight years ago and the foundation's already laid. And what it is, it is. 

P.S.: It's amazing how much you set the stage in the early years. And during that time, this is where kids' receptive language, what they hear, gets inside them the best. And you really want to create as many nonverbal cues during those years as you can so that you can call upon them in the later years. You also want to be able to talk about—I think of them as proto-conversations. They ask a good question. You can open up a field of discussion about something, about sex or about drugs. 

Things that a lot of parents wouldn't dream of having a conversation with a three-year-old about.

P.S.: But they're going to ask you a question that leads into sort of the beginning of a conversation that then you're going to think you can link to when they're six or seven and when they're nine and 10, and then hopefully when they're a teen.

And not just are you creating those links about those certain topics, but you're setting the stage for the trust that they're going to have in communicating with you in those later times. If they bring something up. And your response to that is pushing away this topic or making it feel like this is not something that we talk about, then when you get to those teenage years and you are wondering why they're not listening to you or talking to you, again, it's because. 

Topher Payne: The foundation's already laid. And what it is, it is.

P.S.: Yes. And, you know, nonverbal communication—the primary thing you're trying to help establish is trust and empathy. Kids' moral development is really intense in the first five years of life. And we want to show them that trust is really possible so that they can feel like their moral development has a foundation. Values are really instilled in those little moments of looking at each other eye to eye and having time to deal with sadness is really huge and underestimated in modern life. When a child is sad about something, to be able to be there with the child is really huge or when they're hurt in any way, when they're angry, to be able to modulate that non-verbal, it is really profound in helping a child be able to tolerate their own emotions over life. And different kids have a different capacity for that early on. Some children are really good at understanding and working their own emotional states. Other kids have a really hard time with that. And so this is where I work the most with parents who are having kids, who are having a hard time dealing with their own emotional states. And the parents have to bear their own emotional states as well as the child and communicate that nonverbally to the child. It's huge.

Jeremy: When kids are sad or angry, some things that we would sometimes frame as negative emotions, there's a really common response to that "Don't cry, don't be sad, don't be angry." And clearly, these are kinds of damaging ways of telling kids that they should be dealing with those kinds of emotions and then to put the non-verbal thing on top of it. What are alternative either scripts that you give to parents or ways of, like you said, sitting with children during their sadness or anger or things like that?

P.S.: Well, there's an optimal way to work with most feelings states with anybody, actually. The feeling state has to be adequately acknowledged. 

But it shouldn't be done in a way where the child gets the idea that it's going to be overwhelming for the parent.

P.S.: So the child has to see that if they're sad, the parent's sad, but the parent is able to bear it. And then the parent has to, after really acknowledging the sadness, tell the kid in some way, especially nonverbally, that it's going to be all right. They did this—Fonagy, a great researcher in how people mentalize, how they think about thinking, he did a study of kids who are vaccinated to find out what was the best outcome for kids. And they showed parents who were like stiff upper lip, "You can get through this, don't cry" kind of nonverbals were really strongly given. And then parents where the parents fell apart and cried with the kid. And then parents who are able to hold the sadness but communicated, "But you're going to get beyond it and it's going to be OK." And this was done both nonverbally and verbally. And the parent who was able to do both had the kid who came out of it the fastest. The stiff upper lip parent actually did better with the kid than the parent who kind of fell apart with sadness. 

If we are able to be with the sadness, show that it's bearable, and then say "We can get beyond it,"

P.S.: The child feels hopeful.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of "The Talk". Thanks to Yolanda Williams and Dr. Patricia Speier, my guests for this episode, and to Mel and Eli, whose voices you heard at the beginning of the episode. You can find "The Talk" on the Web at TheTalkThePodcast.com and on Instagram and Facebook @TheTalkThePodcast. If you'd like to support us, you can do so by visiting Buymeacoffee.com/coffeetalks or by purchasing one of our beautiful tote bags which are available on our website. If financial support isn't an option at the moment, but you'd still like to help, leaving a rating or review of the show on Apple podcasts or just telling a friend how much you're enjoying "The Talk" is a great way to do so. Dana Gertz created all of our original artwork, Mackenzie Yaddaw is our post-production assistant and a big thanks goes to my wife Jenny and to our kids for allowing me countless opportunities to practice using my vocal tone, eye contact, and body language to communicate better. 

Goodbye.