Chicago Booth Review Podcast How Can We Have More Meaningful Conversations with Our Kids?

Ariel Kalil: It was totally organic because unlike many interventions, we didn't start with a big educational intervention, "Did you know that if you talk to your children, they will learn words?" We just gave them the messages. They arrived at the conclusion, "If I talk to my child, they will learn something."

Hal Weitzman: How was school today? What did you have for lunch? Any parent who's asked these questions consistently has probably been met with a single-word response or even just a grunt. How do we make those conversations better? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman, and today, I'm talking with Ariel Kalil of the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. Kalil thinks many of us have been thinking wrong about how to encourage parents to talk and read with their children. Do parents just need better conversation starters? Ariel Kalil, welcome back to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Ariel Kalil: Thank you for inviting me.

Hal Weitzman: Well, we had to have you back because it was such fun last time talking about how parents spend time, or don't spend time with their kids, or they spend time with them even though they're not really enjoying it. So we wanted to have you back to talk about some of the frictions that are involved. And you've done research that suggests that the kind of conventional ways that we've addressed helping parents to talk with their kids and read with their kids is flawed, particularly how it focuses on kind of changing beliefs and boosting motivation. What have we been getting wrong?

Ariel Kalil: We have been getting wrong that parents with more limited income and education are holding the wrong information or the wrong motivations or incorrect beliefs about how their kids' skills will develop and about whether the efforts that parents themselves might make would relate to growth in children's skills. We have assumed that parents have no idea that reading to their kids is good for boosting kids' language skills. We have assumed that parents with lower incomes and education are way more stressed than more advantaged parents and are not capable of devoting time to boosting their kids' skills in routine ways.

We have assumed that they don't have the resources to spend on their kids. For example, that they don't read to their kids because they don't have any books in the house. So we've assumed that they don't have any time at all to talk or read to their kids because they're busy as a single parent doing all the things in the household and child rearing.

Hal Weitzman: And all of those assumptions are wrong?

Ariel Kalil: In my opinion, yes.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. All right. So you're going to tell us how, but part of this is that parents actually do want to do some of these things, but there's something, there are frictions in the way. This is not about training people, it's about removing the frictions. Explain that a little bit.

Ariel Kalil: We've seen in lots of time diary evidence in the U.S., around the world, in Western developed countries, that college-educated parents spend more time with their kids in skill-building activities. And we're worried about that because this gap in time use, we think, predicts a gap in child skills and is a way that inequality gets transmitted across generations. So we have, as researchers and practitioners and policymakers, thought, "Well, it would be a good idea if we could increase the time that parents with more limited income and education spend with their kids. Then, we could close the gap in child skills and reduce inequality. Okay, how should we do that?" We have thought about, "Well, we should give low-income parents cash because then they could go buy more books." We have thought that we should give parents a tutorial in how children's brains work and teach parents with some sort of education component that if you read your kids, that will help them read.

We've done a whole variety of things. And frankly, none of them has really shifted the needle on parent time use in kids' skill development. The thesis we are working from in our research lab is that parents have all those ingredients. So, for example, less educated parents do not have zero books in their home. They have fewer books than rich parents, but they don't have no books. If you ask those parents in a survey, as we do, "Do you like reading to your child?", the answer is overwhelmingly, "I love it. It's my favorite time of the day."

If you ask those parents, many of whose children go to a subsidized childcare center, "Have you ever heard that reading is a good thing to do for kids' school readiness?", "Yes, I've heard it many times because that's the one thing that the subsidized childcare says over and over and over again, and they will send me home with a backpack full of books to do this." So we ruled out all these usual suspects and landed on a thesis that said that good intentions don't always translate into actual behavior change and that there must be some other bottleneck standing in the way, this set of frictions that we've identified as being the real culprit.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So tell us more.

Ariel Kalil: Well, we-

Hal Weitzman: What are the frictions?

Ariel Kalil: ... so these frictions have to do with really why does anybody not follow through on the thing they said they wanted to do? What I love most about working on this question is that it has turned into something that is universal. So I happen to ask, because this is a subject matter that I care about, why do parents not do these things that sound positive and aspirational? Which is the same as my asking you, "Well, why didn't you go to the gym when you paid for the membership?" Or, "Why did you eat the [inaudible 00:06:36]?"

Hal Weitzman: That's a sore topic, actually, you [inaudible 00:06:38] yeah.

Ariel Kalil: That's a store topic, but each one of us can have his or her own example. So-

Hal Weitzman: The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Ariel Kalil: ... exactly. "And what did you do on Wednesday night when you were thinking about reading to your kid?" "Well, the child was cranky or the evening got sort of disorganized and life got in the way." And you said to yourself, "I'm going to skip it tonight because it kind of run out of the day tonight, but I'll do it tomorrow because tomorrow is going to be a brand new day." And the problem is you got distracted with all the life's distractions and you just didn't do it. You postponed until some future point, which surely looks more promising than this moment right now. You had a hard time. "Why didn't you talk to your child?" "Well, I would love to talk to my child, but I had a hard time coming up with a conversation topic because actually talking to a five-year-old is not always easy." Some people are not great conversationalists with adults and having a good conversation with a five-year-old is that many more times harder. So-

Hal Weitzman: So does that mean... I mean, so this is fascinating because you talk about people lacking what you call a practical infrastructure for execution. As you say, they want to do these things, they just haven't got a methodology-

Ariel Kalil: They haven't-

Hal Weitzman: ... or it's not built into their day.

Ariel Kalil: ... that's exactly right. They haven't got a routine. They haven't got a cue in their environment that just... It's not a habit. Why is something not a habit? I mean, this is going to sound tautological, but it's not a habit because you haven't made it a habit.

Hal Weitzman: You don't do it, right.

Ariel Kalil: Because you don't do it, and maybe that's not how you grew up. Maybe when you were growing up, you were not in the habit of having your parents ask you an open-ended, interesting conversation. Maybe your parents asked you how was school and what did you have for lunch? And maybe that was about it instead of talking to children a way that might produce a greater range of vocabulary or a more sophisticated way of thinking or that got children to think about ideas beyond the here and now.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. I want to dig into the books thing because I think that a lot of people would be surprised to hear you say that because they will think, well, they've heard, we've probably all hear people aren't surrounded by books and the kids aren't surrounded by books and that makes a difference. So talk about that, sort of the gap. And is it significant? Is being surrounded by high-quality reading material important?

Ariel Kalil: Yes, it is. And as I said, it is surely the case that advantaged parents have more books, but having books is not the same as reading the books that you have. And being in the habit of reading the books that you have can be accomplished with few books.

Hal Weitzman: You reminded me of COVID where people used to organize their books by color or whatever, just for show, put on the Zoom.

Ariel Kalil: Yeah, that's right. So books are more than decoration.

Hal Weitzman: Decoration, right.

Ariel Kalil: And so, again, our thesis is it's not just about giving you books. So there are interventions in the world that send books home to households and stop there. And I think there has to be something more, something that is a nudge or a reminder or makes it so easy to pick up the book and read it. Maybe we did an intervention where we gave families a tablet that had a digital library on it, and it had over several hundred books in Spanish and English with words, without words. And we randomly assigned some households to get that digital library and other households didn't get the library. And the treated families who got the library read more and their kids' language skills improved significantly more. Now, maybe you're going to come back to me and say, "But wait a second. You just told me that everybody had books, so why should a digital library be superior to all the books you just told me everybody had?"

What I can say is that these were super well-curated books. They were tailored to households with a whole variety of literacy levels so parents could easily... It's much easier to look through a curated collection of books all in one place, figure out which one is well-matched to your reading ability, your child's receptive language ability, a topic that interests you both, the language. These books we had in Spanish and English for our population in Chicago. So I'm going to argue that that's more than just bringing a giant bag of 200 books and leaving it on the front step for families.

Hal Weitzman: So we've been too much concerned with supply and not enough with behavior.

Ariel Kalil: Exactly.

Hal Weitzman: Okay.

Ariel Kalil: Yeah, and what I would say is that maps on perfectly to my view of most interventions, which just are information interventions. And we think that supplying information is going to change parents' behavior and not about what we do with the supply we deliver.

Hal Weitzman: If you're enjoying this podcast, there's another University of Chicago podcast network show that you should check out. It's called Entitled, and it's about human rights. Co-hosted by lawyers and law professors, Claudia Flores and Tom Ginsburg, Entitled explores the stories around why rights matter and what's the matter with rights.

Ariel Kalil, in the first half, we talked about your research about frictions and how removing some of the frictions for parents could help them to do things like read with their kids, giving them an iPad, giving them something to use, and turning their aspirations into habits, things that they're actually doing all the time. I'm interested in this kind of you talked about the tablet you gave people without any internet, no apps except the books, right? What did you actually find, then? Tell us, break down the results of that experiment for us.

Ariel Kalil: Yeah. So I'm going to actually tell you about the first study that we did with the tablet and the reading. It was actually the very first randomized control trial we did in our research lab, which is the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab. In this study, we actually gave everybody a tablet. We gave control group parents a tablet, and we gave the treatment group parents a tablet with the digital library. The treatment group, in addition, got a whole bundle of text messages designed to manage their behavior, designed to incentivize them through various messages framed in various ways to use the material that they got. And-

Hal Weitzman: What kind of nudge did you give them or gamified?

Ariel Kalil: For example, so it wasn't gamified. It was really about a behavioral message. Something we're quite interested in is present bias, so this notion of procrastination and this notion of you don't do a thing in the moment because you have a weak connection with your future self. So my skipping the gym tonight or my eating pizza for dinner tonight is only weakly connected to my future self as a out-of-shape person who's eaten too much pizza for dinner. And so we had a thesis that if we could somehow connect the act of book reading to children's future skill development, that would boost parent reading. We had a bundle of messages all centered around that overcoming procrastination. And in that first experiment, we found that, lo and behold, the treated group read more than the control group. They both had the tablet. They both had access to the information.

And what really was the major insight from that analysis, however, was that that was not true for every parent in the treated group. The treated parents for whom that was true were those parents who were initially the most likely to be procrastinators or the most present biased. How do we know that? How do you know? How do I look at you and decide you must be a procrastinator? We have survey questions that basically ask parents 10 different times in 10 different ways, "Do you want $5 today or are you willing to wait for $10 next week?" And once we ask this in this very canonical way, we can just divide parents into those who are impatient and want the money now or those who are willing to wait a little bit for a much bigger reward. We have an equal number of parents in the treatment group who fit those descriptions.

And the treatment was wildly successful for the most impatient parents. It added very little to the initially patient parents because they didn't need our treatment. They were already patient. They didn't need our scaffolding, our nudges, our prompts to think about the future a little bit. They were already doing that and they were already reading more.

Hal Weitzman: So impatience equals procrastination?

Ariel Kalil: Well, the way I'm thinking of it is that you're impatient for the reward or the temptation in front of you and you procrastinate-

Hal Weitzman: I see.

Ariel Kalil: ... on doing the thing that you set out-

Hal Weitzman: So-

Ariel Kalil: ... to do.

Hal Weitzman: ... YouTube looks more attractive than reading-

Ariel Kalil: Exactly.

Hal Weitzman: ... with the kids or whatever.

Ariel Kalil: Yeah. So I'm distracted in the moment. I lose my focus. There's a great show on TV and I'm just going to go over and watch it now because this leisure in the moment is more attractive to me than the thing that I said I wanted to do.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Now, you referred in the first half to people not really having the ability to talk to a child.

Ariel Kalil: Aah.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, I'm interesting in that. And you talk about the content problem. So what is that and how do you overcome it?

Ariel Kalil: So this is solving a different friction, which is helping to supply some content, helping parents learn about the possibilities that they might not be aware of. So here I'm interested in the fact that children who are exposed to rich back-and-forth conversation, varied language input from a parent or a caregiver, develop a bigger vocabulary. And developing a bigger vocabulary in early childhood is a strong correlate of a whole lot of skills later in life. And as we've discussed, some parents know how to ask their child or anybody an open-ended question that doesn't have one, this is your forte, ask a question that doesn't have one correct answer. Ask a question that leads to a conversation. But not everybody has this skill. And what we wanted to do was give parents conversation prompts and try to determine what if we just gave you the prompt? What if we sent you a text message that was a conversation starter? Would you even read it? And if you were [inaudible 00:18:25]-

Hal Weitzman: Designed for conversation with the child.

Ariel Kalil: ... exactly. Although, I have to say, I present this paper in seminars and everybody wants it for their teenagers.

Hal Weitzman: So give us an example of the question.

Ariel Kalil: So a question for a five-year-old might be something like, "If you had a superpower, what would it be? Where do you think birds fly when they're flying up in the sky? Where do you think the stars go to sleep in the morning when the sun comes out?" These are wonderful questions with no right answer that in principle could lead to a super interesting conversation. Something not focused on the here and now. Again, what did you have for lunch today has got one answer. How was school has got exactly one answer. It's fine.

Hal Weitzman: Right. I was going to say there's nothing else to say.

Ariel Kalil: There's nothing else, so the child can learn the word "fine" and grilled cheese, but it doesn't get much deeper than that. And we firmly believe that this kind of enriching conversation can be learned. It can be practiced. It can be made into a habit, but not always obvious where to start.

Hal Weitzman: So in this case, parents say, "I want to have these deeper conversations," but they end up falling into the, "What did you have for lunch?"

Ariel Kalil: Exactly. We're assuming that they want to talk to their child. So hopefully that's not an incorrect assumption. We're assuming that it's not hard to talk. It's not hard to talk and have a conversation while you're doing something else. You can either... So in one experiment that we ran, we brought families into our lab conference room. And this is very canonical developmental psychology kind of experiment. We bring families into a space. They could come with the kids' backpack or with their phone, whatever they might have with them. And we say to the parents, "Could you just wait here for 10 minutes? We have to go do something. We'll be back in 10 minutes." And the control group, we leave and we leave them to their own devices. And the treatment group, we leave them with one of these conversation starters and it lives on a tablet.

And, by the way, it has a beautiful bespoke illustration. So the superpower question has... We hired an illustrator to hand draw these wonderful illustrations for us. The treatment group, we say, "You know, there's a tablet. It's right there on the table. And if you want to take a look at, it's got something you can do while you wait." Then, we leave, we videotape what the interaction is, and then we come back in 10 minutes. So it turns out that the treatment group parents will pick up the tablet, they'll read the prompt, and they and their child will have a short conversation about it. And sometimes it leads to even more conversation and another question. They get it right away. The control group parents, in contrast, sit there with a lot more silence. Many more instances of the parent will take their phone out and either look at their phone themselves or hand the phone to their kid to start using.

And our thesis is, "Well, why did they do that?" Because that's just they're bored. That's their habit. Well, you stand there, you've got 10 minutes, you're waiting in line, you're waiting for something. Your default is to just stare at the wall or stare at your phone or talk about the here and now and tie your shoes, whatever. And our thesis is if we could just give parents the content, help them get started, see for themselves that maybe it's more fun and not as hard as they though it might be, that that can become a habit. And that's an entirely different way of thinking about interacting with a child that we think could be super productive in producing child skills.

Hal Weitzman: Mm-hmm. Now, last time you were on the podcast, we talked about parents getting tired. We're all tired, fatigue, cognitive load. How much is that what's... I mean, the phone is a symptom of something perhaps, as you say, boredom. How much is that what's holding us back from having these more productive interactions?

Ariel Kalil: I don't think it is, and let me tell you why. We did another study where we had 700 families in a randomized experiment that was a lot like the one that I just told you about, but it ran over six months where we texted language conversation starters to one group of parents and not another. And we measured kids' vocabulary at the end of six months. Again, kids' vocabulary increased in the treatment group. So one thing is parents are obviously able to do it. They're not so fatigued and distracted that they can't do it when they get content as a prompt. Number two, we asked parents, "Are you more fatigued and unhappy? Did you like this program? Are you willing to pay for it?" And every answer in the treatment group was positive, not all significant, but parents in the treatment group did not say, "This was wildly fatiguing and you've just exhausted me by making me be in this treatment." That's not true at all.

And number three, and this was really the most exciting finding to me, parents in the treatment group after six months reported to us a much stronger belief in the idea that their children could learn. And it was totally organic because unlike many interventions, we didn't start with a big educational intervention, "Did you know that if you talk to your children, they will learn words?" We just gave them the messages. And totally unprompted, they arrived at the conclusion, "If I talk to my child, they will learn something." That's maybe the most exciting finding.

Hal Weitzman: So that actually changed their-

Ariel Kalil: It actually changed.

Hal Weitzman: ... perspective, their beliefs.

Ariel Kalil: So this is learning by doing, which we are big fans of the idea that what we need to do to change behavior is remove the frictions and just help people get started. So the Just Do It Nike mantra has already been taken, but I'm a big fan of the idea that if you want behavior change, just get started. I don't have to try to change what you think. If I want you to go run a marathon, I don't spend a whole week with you convincing you why that would be a good idea. I tell you to go run a quarter mile, and then two days later you're supposed to run half a mile. And then, pretty soon you're running 10 miles and you think, "Wow, I'm a runner and it's not that many more miles until I get to a half marathon." That's really our perspective on behavior change among parents.

Hal Weitzman: Fascinating. And very briefly, I know you're experimenting now with AI.

Ariel Kalil: Yeah. So we are integrating AI into some of these apps, mostly so that we can automate some of the content provision, so we can remove even more of those frictions. So if a parent does one of these conversation starters and then they're stuck, maybe you're really good at reading the prompt, but then, what do you do after you've read one prompt? We are automating the app so that you can very easily ask for another one or the app will learn. You can enter-

Hal Weitzman: So it listens to the conversation?

Ariel Kalil: Well, no, because that would be a privacy concern that we don't want to get into. But you can ask it for another one on the same theme. You can enter into the text box what your child answered. So if the child... You can enter a few keywords and then the AI can generate a new question based on those keywords. So it's not eavesdropping. It requires the parent to actively report back to the app. "What did we talk about? What did we like?" With just a keyword or two. And it just, again, because I'm not there to deliver you the new, we just want the scaffolding of a continued conversation to be automated as much as possible.

Hal Weitzman: Fascinating. Well, Ariel Kalil, thank you so much for coming on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast to talk to us about this important topic of removing frictions for how we talk to our kids.

Ariel Kalil: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis, and insights, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.