Late January thoughts: Children's worries (plus: save the date for an SRCD post-conference)

[Kara Weisman]

Hello all,

We really enjoyed everyone’s candor and openness in sharing their stories about Santa. It was so fun and intriguing to learn about the many ways different experiences and beliefs children are exposed to—as well as some of the common threads running through our diverse experiences. If anyone is interested in thinking more about this topic, please feel free to reach out to each other by posting to this group!

For our next topic of discussion, we wanted to hear about what kids are worrying about. This is a truly unprecedented time in human development, and we wanted to present a forum for open sharing of the concerns our children and teenagers share with us. What are the kinds of things are the youth in your life asking about these days? What worries them the most? How would you make sense of where these worries are coming from, what beliefs (true or false) they might be rooted in, and how the adults in children's lives might be trying to address them?

On another note: The DBN is planning a (virtual) "post-conference" to be held on April 9, 2021, directly after the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD). This post-conference will showcase the work of research team PIs/co-PIs as well as our four postdoctoral fellows, and will serve to introduce the DBN to a broad audience of developmental psychologists and education scientists, with a special focus on including early-career scholars. This event will be open to the public, so please invite your students, collaborators, and friends!

All the best,
Kara & the DBN leadership team

The Developing Belief Network

PIs: Rebekah Richert, Ph.D., & Kathleen Corriveau, Ph.D.

Website: developingbelief.com

Email: developi...@gmail.com

[Erin Smith]

HI everyone! I didn't jump into the Santa discussion but was watching it unfold in my house with a near 8-year-old, a 5.5-year-old, and a 20-month-old (and a husband, who does not agree with me on which kinds of presents Santa is allowed to take credit for). I enjoyed reading all the thoughts and experiences that were shared.

Regarding the question here: I know that the kinds of worries that my children have are fundamentally different than many as a function of our privilege. Yes, my kids are worried that they won't be able to go back to school ("will it always be on the computer?!"; "why can't we just go back?"), but these thoughts don't overwhelm them because we have other affordances for social interaction and educational enrichment. We count ourselves lucky for this. Although my oldest (almost 8) does worry about death, this is usually not connected to COVID and, as I see it, it is developmentally normal. Her biggest worry, lately, is riding her bike (a frustratingly slow exercise in parental patience and trying to turn a challenge into play...She seems to be afraid of not feeling in control of her physical body in space...I'm open for suggestions!). 

As a parent, I am thankful that my kids don't have to worry about many things at this age. They live a relatively shielded life, moreso because of lockdowns. But I don't know how to reconcile their reality to the reality of so many others, including some of our own black and brown friends who are already having conversations with their kids/parents about systemic racism, policing, etc. 

My two cents.

Erin Smith, California Baptist University

[Lucas Payne Butler]

Hi Kara and everyone,

What an important topic! Luckily (as with Erin and her family) our kids are in a position that they're not that worried about getting COVID, and they understand a lot about all sorts of epidemiological things I wish they didn't need to. But I've been thinking a lot of about childhood memory. The last larger social event we did was our 8-year-old's birthday last February. He's now about to turn 9. That's an entire year of life, and a formative one at least based on my own memories of that age, and it's just . . . gone. Meanwhile our 6-year-old probably has only fuzzy memories of pre-COVID times. So I guess if I had to identify a worry, it's something along the lines of "will this ever end?" Which, let's be honest, is probably all of our primary worry, provided we're safe and healthy. 

I did have a really interesting conversation with Jacob, our 6-year-old, the other day, who was crying at bedtime because "it's all too much" and "it's unfair." We talked about how that's absolutely, 100% true, but we should also be grateful for everything we have -- a house to live in, food to eat, reliable internet, our loved ones healthy, a new baby brother to dote on, etc. And we talked about how some kids don't have enough to eat, or don't have a way to connect to Zoom school. He was energized to try to do something about it, and find organizations that are helping others in DC who are less fortunate. It was heartwarming and encouraging that that's where he went so quickly, and I hope we can find a good way to follow through on that. 

Not sure if I have a point here, just musings. Hope you all are hanging in there. 

Luke

_________________________________

Lucas Payne Butler

Assistant Professor

Department of Human Development & Quantitative Methodology

University of Maryland

3942 Campus Drive 

College Park, MD 20742

Phone: 301-314-1815

Email: lpbu...@umd.edu

Lab Website: cogdevlab.umd.edu

Personal Website: www.lucaspbutler.com

he/him/his (why am I telling you this?)

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[Jocelyn Dautel]

Hi all,

 

Thanks for the interesting thread! I’ll add in an anecdote from my family. I second the feelings stated by others that we are very lucky that our kids are young (2 and 4) and don’t seem to have too many worries. But, my just about 5-year-old is ‘concerned,’ and even mad, about the invisibleness of ‘the germs.’ He often says he wishes they were just bigger so that he could see them and do something about them (i.e. fight them because he is a ninja). This makes me wonder about invisible versus visible fears, do children worry about them in the same or different ways?

 

When Covid was newer and we had more news on the TV and radio in the house, he also started asking many more questions about death, e.g. ‘How do people die?’ even though we hadn’t explicitly talked to him about the virus causing people to die. I think we need to be aware of the multitude of sources children are learning from due to the impact of the pandemic, and perhaps a greater media presence for some.

 

Stay well,

Jocelyn

 

 

 

From: developi...@googlegroups.com <developi...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Lucas Payne Butler
Sent: 31 January 2021 13:30
To: Kara Weisman <ka...@ucr.edu>
Cc: Developing Belief Network <developi...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Late January thoughts: Children's worries (plus: save the date for an SRCD post-conference)

 

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[Sara Lumbreras Sancho]

Hi everyone,

My daughter (3yo) is behaving somewhat similarly to Jocelyn's boy. She thinks a lot about death and asks numerous questions every day. It started when she suddenly realized that there were "people missing": If her mother's mother is her grandmother, and everyone has parents, where is her grandmother's mother? 

I can see that she still cannot grasp it, but she is trying to collect more information by asking questions. "Is he/she dead?", for instance, while watching any movie.

She is also processing the idea of marriage and couples, asking if she can marry me or my husband, and why some people she knows are not married.

It is very interesting to see how the questions evolve as her understanding grows.

Kind regards and have a good afternoon,

S.

 

---

De: developi...@googlegroups.com <developi...@googlegroups.com> en nombre de Jocelyn Dautel <Jocelyn...@qub.ac.uk>
Enviado: lunes, 1 de febrero de 2021 17:22
Para: Lucas Payne Butler <lpbu...@umd.edu>; Kara Weisman <ka...@ucr.edu>

Cc: Developing Belief Network <developi...@googlegroups.com>

Asunto: RE: Late January thoughts: Children's worries (plus: save the date for an SRCD post-conference)

 

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[Amanda Tarullo]

Hi everyone,

Very interesting reading these responses. My 10 year old got very worried when he saw a photo of people climbing over the walls of the U.S. Capitol, which he said looked like it should be in a video game, not real life, and he then worried a lot about the potential for violence at the U.S. inauguration. His teacher tried to talk to the class about the attempted coup at the Capitol and my son walked away from his Zoom class saying, "My teacher is trying to be calm and act like it's not a big deal, but he doesn't believe what he's saying to us. He isn't giving us enough facts." Lately he has demanded more information about many alarming topics, from white supremacy to climate change to the virus - he has caught glimpses of scary things and is worried about what other information adults might be withholding from him. He's been learning about climate change in school, and keeps asking why we are not doing enough about this and whether the world will end in his lifetime. I think it is part of a broader realization that adults in charge are not always reliable protectors. I have to say, I miss the days of worrying about monsters in the closet and the potential for tsunamis in Boston.

Amanda

Amanda Tarullo, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Director, Graduate Program in Developmental Science
Boston University
64 Cummington Mall
Boston, MA 02215
atar...@bu.edu
www.bu.edu/cdl/bee

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[David Menendez]

Hi Everyone!

I have really enjoyed reading these responses. I am not a parent, so I have no anecdotes to share. My advisor (Karl Rosengren) and I have been collecting children’s questions and parental responses for the last year (first in April, then in July, and last in December). These were MTurk surveys, so predominantly the participants are mostly white (sigh), but I wanted to share some of what we have been finding! We have a couple thousands of questions and answer to code, so this is very much preliminary. 

Like Jocelyn’s and Sara’s kids, we have seen more children ask about death as the pandemic continues. We had some questions about death in the April data, but we have a lot more in the July data. It also appears that parents are directly answering these death-related questions more than we have previously seen (we had done a couple of surveys of children’s questions about death and death in movies and parents often avoided the questions). We also have found that, at least in the beginning of the pandemic, children were asking more about lifestyle changes (why they can’t go to school, why they can’t go to the park, why the parents are not leaving the house to go to work) than about topics related to the virus (what it is, where it came from, protective measures). Asking about lifestyle changes seems to be more common among younger kids (older kids seem to be asking more about whether other people around them are going to be safe).

There is also a lot of interesting explanations in parents' answers (who admits that they don’t know when the pandemic will be over, do they say that they should social distance because it keeps the family safe or because it is their responsibility to slow the spread of the virus?), but I’ll stop myself from writing a paper over email :)

Also, it is super exciting about the post-conference! See you then!

David Menendez

Graduate student

University of Wisconsin-Madison

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[Kara Weisman]

Wow, David, this sounds like such interesting work.  I can't wait to hear/read more about it as it continues.

My toddler's biggest concerns seem to be centered on whether our neighbor's holiday decorations are still up and whether he still has his star sheets on his crib mattress... ah, to be 20 months old!  

On a more serious note, I do wonder about how the trajectory of "stranger danger" and separation anxiety might be shifted for toddlers and babies born in the last couple of years... in fact, I've been curious about all sorts of "delayed" exposures (relative to the typical timing in a given social-cultural setting) -- to peers, to older children, to extended family, to time away from parents, to new physical environments, to people whose race, ethnicity, language, and religion differ from the family's.  I've found the work of Janet Werker and colleagues on language development among babies born pre-term to be an interesting foundation for thinking about this: How might the impact of a child's initial exposure to some aspect of the environment vary depending on the age of the child?  I realize this is a little outside of the questions raised in our initial post, but I do think it picks up on the theme of how the current context for development might shape the developmental trajectories of children's anxiety and worry.

All the best,

Kara

[Developing Belief Network]

Way back in February, David Menendez shared with the group that he was working on collecting children's questions about COVID and parents' responses (see this exchange). Some of this work is now out in PLoS: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0256692. I figured that many of you must be as curious about this as I am, so I thought I'd pass it along here.

Congrats, David (and co-authors), for this interesting and important work!

- Kara & the DBT core leadership team

On Thursday, February 4, 2021 at 11:09:51 AM UTC-5 dmen...@wisc.edu wrote:

[Elizabeth Bonawitz]

Very cool paper -- thanks for sharing!  

Happy to add on to the discussion to share that Vanessa LoBue, Lauren Leotti, our trainees and I also recently published a related paper in Cognitive Development finding that parents frequently discussed germ transfer and the potential impact on children's learning about Germ transmission during the Covid Pandemic. You can find it here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088520142100085X?casa_token=sGJdf95NyPsAAAAA:yrb4Wzy-KVbgLAqF6BCbOyOv-vCCwxNq_TWMUBgj_geMpGeEZg89IBPKpm6xOg3s5i7OHB3BmAw

Warmly,

Elizabeth

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Elizabeth Bonawitz

Associate Professor Learning Sciences

Harvard University Graduate School of Education

Computational Cognitive Development Lab

(Previously at Rutgers - Newark)

(she/her)

[Frankie Fong]



Thanks for sharing! Cool work. 

Just thought I would share this book which might be of interest- it’s written/illustrated to help families explaining the pandemic to children, supported by the state government here in Queensland, Australia. 

https://www.childrens.health.qld.gov.au/covid-19-birdie-virus/

Thought it would be interesting to study the impact of such book and/or its relevant materials (e.g., songs, video clips) on children’s understanding and preventative behavior? 

Hope everyone is staying well.

Frankie