How to Raise “Smart” Kids

An interview with Dr. Rina Bliss, the author of Rethinking Intelligence

Source: Katerina Holmes/ Pexels

This newsletter/podcast is an interview with Dr. Rina Bliss. Dr. Bliss is a Sociology professor at Rutgers University, award-winning author, and mother to three children. In this interview, she discusses what it really means to be “smart” and how to raise “smart kids.” Her new book called Rethinking Intelligence challenges how we view intelligence and provides tips for optimizing our children’s learning.

You can listen to the interview through the link below or read the transcript of the interview in this newsletter.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Parenting Translator newsletter and podcast. I’m so excited because this week I am here with Dr. Rina Bliss. Dr. Bliss is a professor of sociology at Rutgers University and she has a fascinating new book out called Rethinking Intelligence. Today we’re going to talk about what it really means to be smart and how to raise “smart kids”.  Dr. Bliss, if you could please just first introduce yourself and let us know a little bit about your areas of expertise and what inspired you to write this book?

Dr. Rina Bliss: My name is Rina and I am a researcher, a scientist, an author of books mostly on genetics thus far.  I have been teaching for the last couple of decades on health and illness and the relationship between our genes and our environments. Through the course of my research, I came to really focus in on a few really interesting topics. One of them being intelligence, and another one is learning and how we learn best. 

I’m a mom of three kids. I’ve got two kindergartners and one child in pre-K. Everything I learn, I’m always looking at my kids, my relationship to them, my role as a parent, and all of that stuff through the lens of what I know and what I’m learning from that experience of being a mom. I actually came at this topic of intelligence and learning, not just from my role as first a student and then an educator, but from my past growing up as a kid in a world in which we really were defining smarts as being something based in our genes, as being something completely inherited and almost set in stone. Coming from that perspective, I was always interested in what the science really would say about intelligence if I were to look at it from a scientific standpoint and not just from whatever the culture was saying about intelligence.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: That is so interesting. I like how you said that, I always apply what I am doing to my everyday parenting as well. I’m always watching my kids and seeing how they learn, and I think it’s so fascinating. To get us started, can you tell me what the research finds— what does it really mean to be “smart”? Why do you think that the conception that many people have about intelligence might be wrong?

Dr. Rina Bliss: I’m going to start by just saying what’s wrong with our common-sense notion of intelligence and smarts and then I’m going to go from there and explain what the research says. We’ve really thought of intelligence up until now, and being smart, as something that’s fixed, something that you can score someone on. You can just give someone an IQ test and just say, this is how smart they’re going to be for the rest of their lives. We’ve been doing this for centuries. This isn’t a new thing. In fact, even though in the last, I’d say, about 50 years, there’s been a lot of pushback against scoring kids and branding them as being only this smart. Nothing’s really changed. In fact, people really invest and not just people, but schools, education systems here and around the world, really invest in tests to find out that. The basis of all of that is to rank and compare.  I’m going to say something about this pool of people, American children, or whatever the pool is, this is how my kid compares to these other kids. That’s been this dogma about intelligence and smarts that we’ve inherited from centuries of bad science. A lot of the ideas, and even the very format of the test, came about in a time when we didn’t have that much knowledge about our brains, not that much knowledge about our bodies, and we didn’t actually know almost anything about DNA. So for all these centuries we were just doing this. This is what we did. When I was a kid, genomics the field, this field of our genomes and telling us what is it really like in those little nuclei of our cells, what does our DNA really tell us? All of that was just in its infancy, so we didn’t know any of this stuff yet. 

But since then we’ve learned that, genomics really tells us the opposite. Our genes give us a really basic neural architecture or brain architecture in order to learn from our environments.  I like to define intelligence as learning from our environments. It’s something that we all do, right? Another thing about our genes is that they give us the brain architecture or the brain structure to be neuroplastic. What that means in a nutshell is being able to create new connections in our brains and in our minds around new information, being able to really grow ourselves and go in any direction that we find interesting, being able to learn new things and learn from our mistakes.

All of that is really what we learn from science. I could go into epigenetics but that’s in my book. I’m not going to go there unless you feel like your readers really need a little one-on-one on epigenetics. But basically the idea is just that we’re all primed and set up. No matter how neurotypical or neurodivergent we seem, we’re all primed and set up to learn something from our environments. Whether you have dyslexia or dyscalculia or you have dysgraphia or you have autism, or anything else, you are going to learn something from your environment in your own way. 

The science tells us that learning is really us using our intelligence. The science does not back up the idea that we need to rank and compare each other. I think that the really important thing for us to glean from the more recent science is that we all have potential. That’s something that we need to see in our children, no matter what they seem like, no matter what their behavior looks like on the outside. It’s something that we need to accept for ourselves and value in ourselves as well.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: That’s a lot of great information. It sounds like you’re saying that the research is really showing that our intelligence is not this fixed number or something that’s coded into our DNA that we have no control over, but that it’s a lot more complicated. It has a lot to do with how we are responding to our environment and that all of our brains are neuroplastic, meaning they can change based on different environmental inputs and different things that happen. So if intelligence is learning from our environment, how do we set up our environments for optimal learning?

Dr. Rina Bliss: That’s a great question. That’s where I went with it. I had been studying the genetic side of things for a while including the relationship between the brain and our genes and stress levels. That’s the epigenetics piece.  Basically one of the things that we’ve learned from studying our genes is that there are parts of our strands of DNA that actually control whether our genes are turned on or off. Those are responsive to our environments and to things like stress. When we are very stressed, or when a child is stressed, or our children are stressed, usually what happens is their genes don’t turn on. It’s like these genes that they’re so lucky to have, we pass them on and they’re saying like, go to work, get to learning, do your thing. Then they can’t because stress is hampering their abilities to think. 

One of the things that we can do in order to set up the environment for optimal learning is to think of ways to reduce stress in our environments and in our kids’ environments. That can be through the learning environment at school. It could also be through the learning environment at home. Our kids are also home with us and learning from us. Schools have different classroom cultures, so we can tackle it in terms of what the classroom culture is. And we can also tackle that at home.

One of the things that I write a lot about and talk a lot about whenever people want to know about parenting is how do you get your kids to learn best at home.  I advocate for having them learn together, doing what I call connected learning. It’s a way of learning through play, through curiosity, through creative thinking, but in a way that your kids can learn from each other, whether that is having them read to each other or having them read parts of books or pages. I have identical twins, so they’re literally learning at the same time, all this material. They’re also in the same classroom, so they’re just really kind of neck-and-neck at the same place with reading at this moment. So having them bounce off of each other and as much as possible, learning through interactive play and focusing more on that kind of interaction and social-emotional investment rather than these kind of academic milestones that get you to that point where you can take one of those tests and then the next test and the next test, and then your PSATs and then your SATs, and then your GREs. 

In our lives, we’re so focused on setting them up for acing tests that we sometimes forget about setting up our home environment, which we absolutely do have control over. We often think they have to do their homework. They have to do this or that. These are those moments where they can actually get outside of that paradigm and just get into a completely play-based, social-emotional learning-based way of learning together. And that is synergistic.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Okay. That is so helpful. I think a lot of us want to have “smart kids.” When we think about the environment, we think about having ABCs and numbers around. We don’t think about these bigger picture things like reducing the stress in our home, thinking about how can I reduce the stress for my child in their classroom. I feel like we think about what curriculum does the school use, but we don’t think about, does this classroom environment reduce stress for children? I think that is so helpful for us as parents to think about. Also this idea of social interaction, which is such a positive experience for most humans, is such an important way for us to learn. For a lot of us, the social-emotional stuff feels like play and that’s not as important as getting down to the academic work. But it’s so important, especially with young children, to remember that social-emotional work is important for building academic skills and it is a key way that young children learn.

Could you talk a little bit more about this concept of neuroplasticity? Because neuroplasticity is the idea that the brain is always changing and responding to the environment. I think it’s such an important concept for parents. Can you explain how parents should think about neuroplasticity and how it impacts our children’s learning?

Dr. Rina Bliss: Definitely. Our brains, from the moment we’re born, they’re just constantly forming these connections. They call them neural networks. Basically these connections form every time that we gain new information, gain new skills, especially in the early months of life and then through early childhood, we’re really forming a lot of neural networks as we get into adulthood. We’re still doing this. There’s still new brain cell growth and all kinds of new pathways forming and connections forming. We also do this thing where we prune back the things we don’t need including skill sets, information that we’re not using, ways of thinking even. We prune that stuff back to make room for even more new stuff. So the brain is thriving and growing and changing through our whole entire lives. It’s really important in childhood because that’s when we first make these connections. That’s why people say if you can have your children either learn a language or just have a lot of that social-emotional interaction, that’s a great time. 

Part of that is wrapped into how we parent them and how much care and love and really unconditional love we give them. All of that is helping build their brains in these really beautiful ways. How that really connects to learning and also to parenting is through establishing their awareness of this, through teaching them about it. One of the things I advocate is having your kids establish a growth mindset early on. That is just having them know about their neuroplasticity. You can do that by reading books about the changing brain, about neuroplasticity. There are actually books that are about that very topic. I’ve read them with my kids. I actually started reading neuroplasticity books with them when they were toddlers. They really can grasp this. There’s all different levels of communication about neuroplasticity. But getting them to have that growth mindset, really establishing that young is helpful because then they see that our brains are just hungry for new knowledge. We want new information about our environments. We actually naturally want to improve our situation in life. If you give them the love and that unconditional love, then they will also want to improve it. Not just because they’re trying to be selfish or narcissistic or something, but actually because they want to improve it for everybody, improve it for the family, for mom and whomever is in their lives. 

Just giving them that sense that you’re always growing is important to becoming an adult who is a contributing member of society. That’s one way of approaching telling our kids that’s why they’re in school. Another way is just to say, look, this is your chance to get a lot of really interesting information that I’m not giving you and that you’re not getting at home. And even better, you get to do it with your friends. So this is really cool. And you get to do it with your teachers who hopefully love you and who you hopefully feel love for as well.

Teaching them that they’re always learning, and part of that is teaching them that knowledge and learning happens at that very edge of what you don’t know. So getting them comfortable with seeing that there are always unknowns, there’s always uncertainty. If they can feel good about that and see their goal is to actually reach that limit of what they know, then they will be better at recognizing where they’re making mistakes, where they’re making errors and they’ll actually learn material with a lot greater facility than if we give them the sense that, you were born this smart, and sorry, this is just who you are.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: That’s amazing. So I love that idea of talking to our kids about neuroplasticity— talking about how the brain is like a muscle. The more you work it, the stronger it gets. Reading them books to fully understand this concept, I think that this really helps children to grasp the idea of a growth mindset. Like you said, it’s the idea that our intelligence is based on effort and hard work and persistence. I think that’s such an important concept for young children to learn and for parents to really accept that this is how our brains work. I have a post I did on Instagram that was actually pretty controversial about why you shouldn’t call your children smart.  I know we’ve all slipped up and done it. I know all this research, and I still sometimes slip up and do it. And I ask myself, why did I do that? But research finds that calling your children smart negatively impacts motivation and persistence and may even make children more likely to cheat. Can you explain, based on the research, why parents should avoid calling children smart or praising their intelligence? Why is that important?

Dr. Rina Bliss: It’s exactly an example of the old notion that you are only as smart as has been revealed through some kind of test and that your intelligence is fixed. It’s something that you were born with. It’s something like you’re the lucky smart one. What does that imply about all of the other kids that don’t get called smart?  It just sets your kid up to think, I need to compare myself with others who are not smart. I am the smart one, they’re the not smart ones. It’s just absolutely not true.

Also one area of my research is into racial inequality, and this is very racialized language. It’s unfortunate that in this day and age, with all that we know that there are still a lot of educators, a lot of parents, a lot of people in our communities who praise and give that kind of accolade of smartness to kids who are raised as White versus kids who are raised as Black. And our schools do it and the tests end up doing it as well. It's just a way of rewarding kids for being supposedly endowed, genetically endowed, as smart, but it is really harmful to them.

It gets them away from thinking about the growth mindset, thinking about what they are capable of as they grow and change. Not like you are smart, end of story. But how can you learn more? What are we going to do as we move forward from here? What are the challenges? What don’t you know? That’s what we want to be telling them. Or asking them, actually.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Yes. I love the idea that focusing on intelligence is something that’s always building. It’s something we’re all working on, even as adults. It’s something that we should be modeling to them that they are always learning more and always trying to improve upon something that they are working on.

As a parent of three young children yourself, how has it actually changed your day-to-day of how you act and interact with your children?

Dr. Rina Bliss: As soon as I started writing this book, I was more concerned about doing the growth mindset work with them and reading the books. I also began loosely teaching them another thing I write about in Rethinking Intelligence–mindfulness as a way of stress reduction. For the epigenetics piece of it, but also as a way of getting them to tune better into the environment, to learn more from it.  I had already been using different breathing techniques with them and also their caregivers did that.  I guess they get some of that at school, but I started to do it a little bit more and to be aware of my own sense of being in the moment. Reflecting with them and giving them the language and helping them work that muscle so that they could really get outside of thinking of the past or thinking of the future, but actually thinking what is in our present environment that we can learn from. Kids obviously naturally do this. They actually teach us how to do this better. It doesn’t take much of a push. But definitely as they’ve moved out of the nice little womb of preschool into public school and the kind of academic treadmill, they don’t get as much of that throughout the day. We actually has them home with us until their pre-K year, so their last year of preschool. We had a fake home school thing that we made where we just do projects with them for a couple of hours in the morning and then it was just playtime the rest of the time, unstructured. During that time they were able to just be themselves, be kids and not even think about milestones and achievement.

Now, even though we ourselves would rather be in a system where they didn’t even have any reading or writing or math until they were a little bit older, we don’t have that choice. We’re in a great public school system, so we’re grateful for what we have. But there’s a lot of pressure already in kindergarten and so just working on that mindfulness piece when I have them home, that’s something that has really been a big thing for me since writing the book.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Amazing. My kids also do a lot of mindfulness practice at their preschool and I just think it’s so incredible. What they’ve learned about being present, being mindful. Being mindful is just being present in the moment, noticing your breathing. Kids do it naturally. It’s kind of like life that takes that away from you. So just tapping into that natural instinct that they have. Do you have any specific books or resources that you use to practice mindfulness or growth mindset with your children?

Dr. Rina Bliss: I have to look back and look at the titles so maybe I’ll give them to you and then you can put them in the show notes, because off the top of my head, I can’t remember exactly the names of the titles because some of the things that I’ve used have been we’re starting to phase a little bit out of the preschool/toddler stuff and moving. I think it’s because we have two that are in kindergarten and so the one who is in preschool is just kind of along for the ride with the older ones. At this point, he just wants to be a part of everything that they learn and do. So he’s just, like, trying to count and trying to read, but not really reading, of course. I’ll look over the specific titles and give them to you.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: I just have to do a plug for my kids’ preschool teacher who wrote a book on mindfulness for kids, which has mindful activities that you can do with your kids. So it’s called Mindfulness for Kids by Robin Albertson-Wren. I would really recommend that. Another one of my kids favorite books on growth mindset is called The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes, which is a funny story about a girl who never makes mistakes, and then she makes this huge mistake. I love talking to my kids about the importance of making mistakes, and they love when I talk about a time that I made a mistake and just talking through that it’s okay to make mistakes. This is how we learn and that can be part of talking about growth mindset.

So as parents, how do we advocate for this? You talked a little bit about your kids are in a public school system, and a lot of us, we only have so much control over our kids actual education. Unless you have the ability and the resources and the desire to homeschool, we don’t really have that much control. So what can we do as parents within these systems to help promote some of these ideas that we’ve been talking about? Do you opt out of testing? I know my first grader is doing a ton of testing this week, and she was telling me about how much she hates it, and it was kind of sad.  I think the teacher is doing her best to make it as engaging as possible. This is just the reality in most educational systems that there’s regular testing. So do you opt out of testing? Do you just talk to your children about the testing? How do we approach this with our children within these school systems that we might not have control over?

Dr. Rina Bliss: It’s such a great question. We’re in it, too. in the state of New Jersey, supposedly you’re not standardized testing until you’re in the third grade, but actually they’re standardized tested even before they get to kindergarten. Then they’re tested in a bunch of very low stakes ways to see where they’re at and then figure out how to teach them through the year and then test it again at the end of the year. With your daughter, who’s first grade, and there’s a whole bunch of testing that’s going on for all of the younger grade kids, right? So it’s something that you have to deal with from the get go. And for me, I can’t say what each parent should do in their own particular situation, but I can tell you what we’re doing, which is that we will opt out of testing as soon as we can. Another thing is that I know so many of the educators in my community that I talk to, teachers and even principals, even everyone that I talk to pretty much is almost depressed by the level of testing that they have to do. They are not happy about it. They don’t support it. They don’t think that’s the right way to do things, but they also have to do what the state requires them to do. So we’re in this kind of impasse where almost nobody wants it, but somebody wants it, and who knows if they have any connection to the particular community that you live in. 

I am voicing to my kids’ teachers that I don’t support it and that I don’t want it for them. I’m just letting them know that I support their critical mindset about it and that if they need to know or have a parental voice say on the record that we want to change this, I’m that person. I’m your person. I also am extremely busy with my own work and my own teaching. I’m a teacher, too, and so I don’t have the time to be on the premises.

I actually have been trying to get rid of standardized tests in higher education at both of the places that I’ve worked since finishing my post-docs. In both places, I was the main person in my department to say, you’ve got to get rid of these, and then we got rid of them. At the graduate level, I’m definitely very vocal in my own work about this. In terms of the schools, I just am telling the teachers and the principal, this is how I feel. If you need anyone to corroborate your criticalness of this method, I’m your person. One thing that happened in the last few days as they’ve been doing the testing for the third graders and above, is that the kids have not had outdoor recess and they’ve also had a curtailed lunch. So they’ve come home with full lunch boxes. They’ve also been out of sorts because they’ve come home without having run or done any climbing or anything. Already there is a difference between their preschool forest school life and this kind of recess on a one place structure. It’s already really bad for them. It’s just kind of like now they’re just doing absolutely nothing with their bodies and then they are coming home all kinds of crazy in a sense and not feeling right and then not having eaten and stuff like that. My husband was like, I want to say something, but I don’t want to be pushy or make people feel bad because they don’t like this either. Nobody is enjoying this. But I think that if you feel comfortable, it’s good to say something. If you feel comfortable at least saying that you are critical of it, it’s going to help more than just having the system just go on with no one ever saying hey wait, we don’t like this.

Dr. Cara Goodwin:I love that because that acknowledges that the teachers probably don’t like it either. Rather than being like, “How dare you do this to our children?” to the teachers. They probably don’t like it either. And they’re just having to respond to higher level policy but they can see for themselves that it maybe is not optimal for children. So what about grades? I know some schools are changing their policies now in terms of not giving young children grades. So what do you think about grades? And if you do have no control over it, how do you talk to your kids about grades?

Dr. Rina Bliss: We haven’t had to go there yet because our kids have gotten progress reports which we have not shared with them. We have not talked to them at all about evaluations. But when I was in college, my college didn’t have grades. When I was in my postdoc, I did it at Brown University, which is another university that doesn’t have grades. I am really happy with that kind of model and that kind of system.  I think that we think that everything’s going to fall apart if we don’t have these numeric ways of identifying how well people are performing. When your kid was in a preschool environment and they were learning so much and they were forming all those neural networks and that was without having any grades. Think of how much better your kids will feel in terms of stress and how much better they’ll do if you remove that. We’re going to just put a number on you at the end of this and then we’re going to decide whether to give you more education or send you over to this other place where we don’t work so hard with you.

It’s just really bad for the kids. To me, grades is part of that. Now, I know a lot of educators who are like, I don’t know what I would do without test scores, and I definitely don’t know what I would do without grades. Grades are how we communicate and pass the torch to the next teacher. But if I had it my way, my kids would not be evaluated like that. They would just be doing projects, learning together in that synergistic way. The teachers would be sensitive to them as individuals, not based on if they passed some kind of test or not, but rather if they need help with something, they would get extra help.

Actually, one of the things that frustrates me the most about the numerical score-based.  Imagine if one of your kids got the gifted treatment and then one of your kids got the remedial treatment? How unfair and how upset you’d be as a mom, as a parent. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. You don’t love one of your kids more. You don’t want to give them more resources, better education.  You want everyone to get the help they need wherever they’re at. The  paradigm that we live in is that it’s actually the kids who score lower that need more help, they need more resources. But we always take the kids who are marked as gifted, and we always give them more help. So what’s up with that? 

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Yes. So that’s so interesting. I think it’s like this gifted education, remedial education model actually fits the fixed intelligence which research finds is not how intelligence actually works. It’s like our educational systems are operating on this idea that intelligence is this fixed thing, and from kindergarten or even earlier, you’re assigned to the gifted track or the remedial track, and you do not move tracks. That’s not really how the brain works. That’s not how we understand intelligence. I think that’s really interesting. And also I love your idea that our goal should be to reduce stress in order to optimize learning. Grades assigning people to different tracks of education— this increases stress.

I think all of us from our own experience can remember even in elementary school stressing about grades, stressing about what reading group am I in, for example.  I remember being little and you totally know if you’re in the higher reading group or the lower reading group, even if the teacher doesn’t say it. You stress about that, and you’re like, why am I not in the highest reading group? All of this stuff causes stress in young children, which is then going to get in the way of learning. I think that’s such an important reframe for all of us as parents and for educators, too.

Finally, I want to talk about how does this apply to neurodiverse children? So just for the listeners, neurodiversity is this idea that all of our brains work in different ways, and neurodiverse children can include children with ADHD or autism or really any sort of learning difference. So how does this research apply to these neurodiverse children in particular?

Dr. Rina Bliss: I hope that it helps for those children to be seen and to be treated better in the classroom and also to be valued in a more equal way.  I know that parents love their kids and often feel that I wish my kid was being valued for the amazing individual learner that they are. But all too often, our schools don’t treat our kids that way. They really just like to say, okay, here’s this kid. They’re having these problems. We’re going to put them in this type of classroom, or here’s this other kid, they’re doing really well. We’re going to give them this again, like, extra advanced, accelerated kind of learning because we are not attuned to the individuality of each learner and to the value of each way of learning. We miss how valuable it is to have neurodivergent kids with our kids who are not labeled as such. Also we are less aware of the potential for us to have synergistic learning, all of us together as a community of learners. 

I feel like neurodivergent kids are devalued in our present education system. I know, again, like so many educators, principals, like administrators, who are trying their hardest to kind of give extra help and give extra love and attention to kids who have ADHD, kids who are on the spectrum, kids who have just different ways of learning. But because the system itself isn’t set up to even really see those kids as valuable learners, it’s like everyone has to just work that much harder to make that happen, and they have to take time away from all of the other work that they’re doing for the school in order to just individually pull out the extra measures to help those students. If the system were less based on these kinds of rigid scores and fixed notions of intelligence, and rather we’re just seeing all of us as completely unique learners, because we’re not all the same. We’re all different, right? We all have things that we’re working towards and all have things that we’re a little bit really good at at this moment present time, things that we’re in flux with, and things that we can improve upon. If we all were treating every kid as individuals and saying, you need a little bit of help with this thing, and you need a little bit of help with this thing at this very moment, then I think that neurodivergent kids would have a lot easier time getting their needs met. 

I really want this new way of defining intelligence that I’m offering, this seeing intelligence as learning from our environment— I am hoping it will help neurodivergent kids get seen and really render them visible so that people can, the whole community and all of their school, classroom, and  education kind of systems can change and conform to a new way of treating all of us as diverse. Neurodivergent is a kind of difficult word for us because it implies that there’s a norm and that there’s a pathological divergence from the norm. We are all diverse. Neurodiverse, right? We are all diverse. That to me is where I want us to go with this.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: I love that conceptualization, I feel like that helps parents of all children thinking about all of our brains as neurodiverse. Rather than thinking, “Is my kid smart or not smart?”  Focusing on seeing your child for their unique qualities and what are their individual strengths that I can celebrate and I can encourage.  Seeing it as how do they learn from their unique environment, not based on a test score. Those measures seem so inadequate when you think about what intelligence and learning really is. So I think that’s so helpful for all of us as parents to recognize our children’s individual strengths and see those rather than focusing on are they smart or are they not smart.

Dr. Rina Bliss: Yes, exactly.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: This has been beyond fascinating and I feel like we could keep talking about this forever, but I want to wrap up because I know all of our listeners are busy parents. Can you tell parents if they want more information about some of your ideas, where can they find more information about you if they’re interested?

Dr. Rina Bliss: Definitely. You can go to my website www.drrinabliss.com. You can also follow me on socials, any of the socials.  I’m @drrinabliss with no punctuation.   You’ll find me all around. If you go to my website, you’ll definitely see links to all of that. The book itself, Rethinking Intelligence, you can get it at any bookstore. You can get it on Amazon, you can get it at the HarperCollins website. That’s another way to get into all of this material that I’ve been sharing and these ideas. It’s been really a pleasure being here with you and talking to you. Being a parent is really, for me, the most magical and important part of my life. So this is the kind of place where I want all of this science and knowledge, and all of this experience to go– towards parenting. It’s really my deepest love and priority.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. I think this research is so applicable to parents and can really help us to re-frame how we think about learning and intelligence and how we see our kids.  I think this is so helpful. Thank you so much for being here and to all the listeners, please tune in next week to the Parenting Translator podcast for more research-backed tips for parents.

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Welcome to the Parenting Translator newsletter! I am Dr. Cara Goodwin, a licensed psychologist with a PhD in child psychology and mother to four children (currently a newborn, 3-year-old, 5-year-old, and 8-year-old). I specialize in taking all of the research that is out there related to parenting and child development and turning it into information that is accurate, relevant, and useful for parents! I recently turned these efforts into a non-profit organization since I believe that all parents deserve access to unbiased and free information. This means that I am only here to help YOU as a parent so please send along any feedback, topic suggestions, or questions that you have! You can also find me on Instagram @parentingtranslator, on TikTok @parentingtranslator, and my website (www.parentingtranslator.com).

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