084: The Science of RIE - a podcast by Jen Lumanlan

“Is RIE backed by scientific research?”

It’s a question that comes up every once in a while among parents who use the Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE) approach to raising their children, and then they all (virtually) look at each other kind of uneasily because no study has ever shown that children raised using RIE methods have any better outcomes than children who aren’t.

Given how much I focus on scientific research, you would think that I would have determined my overall approach to parenting through extensive reading of the literature – but actually I discovered RIE even before I started looking at research and I latched onto it because parenting in a respectful way just felt right. I knew that love was necessary but not the only tool I would to discipline (used in its original sense, meaning “to teach”) my daughter about how to live in our family. I knew immediately that respect was the tool I sought.

But it always niggled at me (and these other parents): Is RIE backed in any way by science? Naturally, I could find no expert who could speak to this. So I recruited the assistance of a fellow RIE-practicing parent to help us think through RIE’s basic principles, and whether (or not!) the research backs these up.

If you’re new to RIE, you might want to listen to this introductory episode on What is RIE first, so you’ll have the background you need. I actually recorded this Science of RIE episode first so it does have a very brief introduction to RIE, but then I realized it really wasn’t sufficient so I recorded the extra episode.

Have questions about RIE? Want to continue the conversation? Come on over to the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group and ask away, or join the Toasted RIE group which I help to moderate!

Read Full Transcript

Jen: 00:00:38

Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today, we are going to do something we have never done before in more than 60 episodes of the show. Someone else is going to interview me and what are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about a concept that has been absolutely foundational to my parenting. It's an approach to caring for children called Resources for Infant Educarers, which is abbreviated to RIE and pronounced rye. This episode has been a really long time in coming. I had actually thought of doing it when I first started the show, but I figured it would probably be a fairly new concept for a lot of people and I didn't want you all to think that I was some kind of crazy-granola-eating-Californian with really weird ideas about child rearing before you'd probably gotten to know me, but we're at 60 episodes into the show now and I feel like I've mentioned RIE enough times that it is starting to get silly that we actually haven't done an episode on it.

Jen: 00:01:29

So when I thought about who I could interview on this topic, I considered all the usual suspects that those of you who are somewhat familiar with who I might have considered, but I quickly realized that probably nobody was going to be able to talk about exactly the aspect of it that I wanted to discuss, which is how does RIE aligned with what science tells us about raising children? Because quite frankly, I've never seen anyone discussed this at all and given that we use scientific research a lot on this show, even though we're not slaves to the research, I couldn't think of anyone other than me to be interviewed on it, but I didn't want to just sit here for an hour and try and convince you about how great RIE is, because when people first learned about it, they tend to have a lot of questions, so I posted...

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