079: What is RIE?

What is – WHAT? Resources for Infant Educarers, or RIE (pronounced like Rye bread) is the parenting approach that we use with our daughter Carys which is grounded in respect for the child.  I’ve wanted to do an episode on this topic ever since I started the show but at first I didn’t want you thinking I was all California-granola-hippie-crazy and stop listening.  Now I figure there are enough of you that have been listening for quite a while that you’re willing to at least listen to this ‘respect for children’ idea. Because it’s no exaggeration to say that it has literally transformed my parenting, and underpins every interaction I have with my daughter.  I’m so proud of the relationship we have that’s based in our respect for each other. In this episode we’ll cover a brief history of how RIE came into existence, Magda Gerber’s eight qualities of a good parent, and how to encourage your child to play independently… And I’ll be honest and say that this is probably the first episode in the entire show which is not grounded in scientific research because I wanted to give you an overview of RIE first – and also discuss the parts of it we didn’t/don’t practice, before we devote an entire upcoming episode to what aspects of RIE are supported by scientific research – so stay tuned for that!   References Gerber, M., & Johnson, A. (2002). Your self-confident baby: How to encourage your child’s natural abilities – from the very start. Nashville, TN: Turner. Gerber, M. (2003). Dear Parent: Caring for infants with respect. Los Angeles, CA: Resources for Infant Educarers. Karp, H. (2004). The ‘fourth trimester’: A framework and strategy for understanding and resolving colic. Retrieved from https://www.drdefranca.com/the-fourth-trimester-and-colic.html Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re going to talk about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and that is what is known as Resources for Infant Educarers, which is abbreviated to RIE, which (for reasons I’ve never understood) is pronounced “Rye.”  Now I’m guessing that those of you listening to this right now are dividing yourselves into two groups: those of you in one group are saying “finally!” and those of you in the other are thinking “Resources for Infant – what???.”  So this episode will really be for those of you in the second group to learn about RIE, and those of you in the first can listen along and nod your heads and email me afterward if I got any of it wrong.  This will probably be the first episode in this entire show where we really don’t discuss much in the way of scientific research, because I actually have an entire episode lined up that delves into what aspects of RIE are supported by the literature, so we’re not going to do that here.  And I should also acknowledge that I’m going to tell you about the core principles of RIE but I’m also going to tell you about the parts of it that I didn’t or don’t practice, because I really don’t follow any approach dogmatically. So where did RIE come from?  Well, I was surprised to learn that it actually originated in the work of Dr. Emmi Pikler, who worked in Austria and Hungary in the middle of the 20th Century.  She had seen that working class children who played on the street had lower rates of injuries than middle class children who played inside under a governess’ watchful eye.  She also studied with two doctors who focused on treating children as people, rather than just as an illness that needed to be fixed, and who believed in the importance of being outside, playing a lot, and following the child’s lead regarding food – so not forcing the child to eat even a single spoonful more than they wanted. In 1930, Dr. Pickler married a high school math teacher who held progressive views, including that children should study at their own pace of development.  When they had a daughter, Anna, in 1931, they agreed that they would follow her developmental lead – they wouldn’t prop her to sit or steady her to walk, and that they would allow space and time for her to develop at her own rate.  She also began to make the connection between the physical and the mental, asking whether propping children to sit and leading them to walk communicates to the child that what the child is doing is not good enough, and that the child should be doing something that he isn’t actually yet capable of doing. In 1932, Dr. Pikler opened a private practice in Budapest where she put all these elements together for her clients, and anecdotal evidence from Pikler’s daughter Anna notes that the children in her practice seemed healthier than other children. Around 1937, a woman named Magda Gerber who was living in Hungary had a daughter who got some kind of mild illness; the family’s regular doctor was out of town and Gerber’s daughter remembered that her classmate Anna’s mother was a pediatrician so they gave her a call.  Pikler came over to their house and Gerber was just about to describe Anna’s symptoms when Pikler asked her to be quiet, and instead asked Anna herself about her symptoms and invited her cooperation with a physical exam.  Gerber was absolutely struck by the revolutionary nature of this approach, and began studying closely with Dr. Pikler. Dr. Pikler stayed in Europe and after the second world war, she was asked by the local authority to set up a residential nursery in Budapest to take care of the orphans the war had left behind.  If you’ve heard of orphanages it might be the ones in Romania in the 1980s that you’re more familiar with – the children were confined to their beds for many hours a day, did not have caring relationships with adults, and many experienced cognitive delays due to the inadequacy of their care.  The children in Pikler’s orphanage, by contrast, were supported physically and emotionally, spent much of their time playing, and also allowed Dr. Pikler to test her ideas about the natural evolution of gross motor development.  A study conducted by the World Health Organization in the 1960s and 70s found that the children who had been in the orphanage didn’t differ from children who hadn’t in any meaningful way. In the 1950s, Gerber’s family moved to Austria and then the U.S., where she worked as a translator in Boston and then with children in Los Angeles.  In 1978, she co-founded the non-profit Resources for Infant Educarers with an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford named Tom Forrest, who strangely disappears from the RIE story pretty much immediately after that.  Gerber continued to work at the RIE organization in Los Angeles until her death in 2007. So as we move into the meat of what RIE is, let’s start with a definition: what is an “educarer”?  Gerber coined this term to refer to “who educates children in a caring manner.”  She didn’t want to use “caregiver” or “caretaker” because a carer neither gives nor takes, although I would argue that she might not have used the word “educate” to me either if she’d thought a little more closely about that word too – to me, learning is something a child does; education is something that is done to another person.  So a carer, who can be a parent, grandparent, or paid childcare provider, puts love into action: the way the carer cares for a child is how she experiences your love.  And the ways we typically care for a child are in everyday activities like feeding and diapering, which Gerber transforms from chores that need to be gotten through as quickly as possible so you can get to the interesting stuff, to the really important part of caring for a child. So let’s talk about what this looks like at the earliest stages of your baby’s life, and we’ll go forward from there.  The RIE approach to infants seems to me to be in contrast to the theory of the ‘fourth trimester’ that has been popularized by Dr. Harvey Karp.  Dr. Karp argues that unlike many animals who emerge at birth ready to run around, human babies are more like fetuses than infants.  They don’t really become alert until about three months of age, they cry a lot, especially in the evening, possibly due to a gradual accumulation of stress throughout the day, and this crying is apparently absent in cultures where babies are carried all day long with constant holding and rocking and frequent nursing.  For this reason, Dr. Karp recommends swaddling, calming a baby by putting them on their side, shushing loudly, swinging, and allowing the baby to suck as a calming mechanism. Magda Gerber acknowledges, with a rare biblical reference, that “the newborn baby, up to about three months old, is between heaven and earth, not quite here yet…a parent’s job is to help the newborn make this transition into the world.  How can this be done in a respectful manner?  There are several keys in doing this.  The most important ones include observing your baby in order to understand her, helping her form attachment by talking to her and telling her what you are going to do, being slow and gentle with her, and waiting before intervening.”  There’s a lot here, so let’s break it apart a bit. Observing the baby can be one of the hardest things for Westerners to do, since we are so accustomed to needing to *do* something, instead of just watch.  But it is by watching that you understand her body language and can begin to read her signals, which will enable you to do what attachment researchers like Dr. Arietta Slade, whom we talked to a few weeks ago, would call ‘sensitively responding’ – in other words, respond appropriately to her needs, not just guess blindly at what she needs and do...