Parents are coming to us parallelized with fear almost because they are scrutinizing every little thing they are saying to their kids and doing with their kids and fearing that if they do or say the wrong thing, it's going to cause a quote unquote trauma response that they're going to traumatize their kids or in the case of praise they're going to ruin their child intrinsic motivation or reduce their achievement in some way and I mean, there's just such as you mentioned, it's really a lack of nuance

and a gross misinterpretation of the research.

Welcome back to the Piedstock Talk podcast. This show's success is largely due to you and the way you share the podcast with others and leave reviews. So thank you so much for tuning in each and every week.

I'm just so grateful to have the most amazing guests to guide you in your parenting journey topics about all things parenting, child health, child development and parental health and mental health.

Today's guest is a repeat guest. She was on my show talking about reward systems and if they're harmful in children, they're not.

And her name is Dr. Jenica Engler. She is a developmental neuropsychologist, clinical scientist and mom and my social media friend. Thank you so much for joining me today, Jenica.

Thank you for having me always a pleasure.

So obviously we spoke on my show when we talked about reward systems, particularly with potty training, which both you and I did use reward systems with potty training our children.

But I'm so happy that we can connect today to talk about praise and is it ruining our children because there is a lot of misinformation or maybe lack of nuance out there on social media, especially about praise.

And so before we get into this topic, tell everyone who may not be familiar with who you are more about yourself and what you do as a developmental neuropsychologist.

So I am a licensed psychologist with a subspecialty in developmental neuropsychology, meaning I have additional training and expertise and the assessment of child development neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as in evidence based treatment for various types of pediatric and adult therapies.

And more recently, I've actually been doing primarily research work as I have been balancing motherhood.

So I get to sort of have a nice purview of all the clinical aspects of things as well as the research side of things as well.

So I sort of get this really unique perspective that I think both well when there's just so much misinformation out there now on social media.

And it's really hard to weave through even as a pediatric expert sometimes really difficult to weave through what actually is legit.

Well, also, I mean, speaking both on social media, doing very similar things trying to obviously make sure that people understand nuance, which is so not common on a lot of the large social media accounts, especially in the parenting space, right.

This is like kind of loss. It's like, you do.

Nothing selfless, exactly emotional.

Yeah, middle ground never sells. I can I totally get that, but it's so frustrating and also just trying not to scare parents, but also trying to pick up the pieces.

I mean, as a neuropsychologist, and especially for me as a pediatrician, I get so much of that, right.

Like, hey, I read on this big account or I read online that I can't tell my child that they make me feel bad.

I mean, that's a whole other conversation, but I'm like, we know like there's new ones there. Like we could talk about that too, but it's like,

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