November 24, 2015 • 33 mins
Unless you've lived your life in a childless fortress of seclusion, you've likely encountered the maddening, high-pitched whine of a complaining child. But what is whining? Is it universal? Why is it so annoying and just what's being communicated between parent and child? In this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, Robert and Joe explore.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from house Stop
works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff to Blow your Mind?
My name is Robert Lamb Kianda. I'm Joe mcformer. You know, Joe,
I have a three and a half year old in
the house and uh and I and I grew up
with two younger siblings, so I'm pretty familiar with whining.
(00:27):
I imagine you're pretty familiar with whining as well. You know,
I don't have kids, but I was once a kid
myself and familiar with whining from a personal perspective, and
also I had a younger sister, and so I heard
some whining there, and of course whining from the other
kids I knew. I actually just heard some whining recently,
I think when it was Halloween and there were I
(00:49):
don't know, maybe you can judge whether this was whining
or not, UH listeners at home on on Halloween night.
It was a wonderful occasion when all the stuff to
Blow your Mind people got together at my house. So
Robert was there with his child, and Noel was there
with his child, and Christian was there with his serial
killer mask and UH, and at one point I remember
(01:11):
I think there was some disagreement between parents and children
about whether it was time to go or then you
definitely heard whining. Was there whining? I'm not sure how
to classify it. There's so much whining in my life
at this point it's hard for me to remember specific
incidents of whining unless it's unless the material being whined
about is is really you know, sets itself apart. But yeah,
(01:32):
I feel like I'm constantly saying, well, what's a nicer
way to say that? Or I can't understand you when
you talk in that whiny voice, which is one of
those things that I specifically remember hearing my parents say
to my younger sisters growing up. Now, of course they
were lying to you because they could understand you. They
just didn't want you to do it anymore. Right, It's
like the way that you were phrasing that is so
(01:52):
irritating and just so grating on my sanity that I
cannot acknowledge it. I refuse to listen to you while
you were talking in that whiny voice. So today we're
obviously going to be talking about the science of whining,
and whining actually does turn out to be a kind
of interesting feature of human communication. What is whining and
(02:13):
how is whining different from from talking, from crying from
all the other ways we communicate. Well, it's often described
as a combination of several different things, So there's an
element of pleading to it, demanding, pestering, and nagging that
escalates in pitch. It begins during infancy and peaks. Luckily,
(02:34):
it's good to know for me that there is a
peak to it between two point five and four years
of age. You know, it's funny because they say they
say it peaks, but I've read in some of the
studies that we're referencing in this episode that whining never
really stops, like you carry it into adulthood. Yeah. I
think it's just that most adults learned to curb it
and know that it sounds that they're ultimately humiliating themselves
(02:57):
and they're whining about something. And uh, for the most part,
it is a child whining at a caregiver, but ultimately
anyone is fair game. Well, usually I think whining goes
up right, you don't wind down. Parent doesn't whine at
the child, The boss doesn't whine at the employee. I mean,
maybe they would, but most of the time the whining
(03:17):
goes up. The superiority change. Yeah, so I've definitely heard
kids whining at other kids. I didn't want you to
take that, that sort of thing, I wanted to play
with that, etcetera. It comes from a from a perceived
position of disadvantage. You know, I say, like I've been
I've been taking advantage of I've got to wine at
the person who who, at least for now, is the
(03:39):
upper hand. Like a whining at another child is generally
immediately followed by whining at the nearest caregiver to point
out the slight that just took place. Yeah, yeah, she
took a sip out of my coke. I don't want that.
I don't like it. She has to give me hers now.
Oh yeah, I mean it's everything like I wanted to
be the one to get the fork out of the drawer,
(04:00):
or I wanted to be the one to do this.
I wanted to be the one to do that. It
just goes on forever. Yeah, I can't find my shoes. Yeah.
Uh So I was interested in how whining compares to
other methods of communication, and I actually found a study
from eleven that looked into this. It's sort of tried
(04:20):
to categorize different modes of attachment communication. That's something that
that often gets brought up a term, this attachment communication,
because it's not so much something that's likely to occur
between strangers. It's sort of a communication between child and caregiver,
or it plays on an existing relationship. But the paper
(04:40):
was called Screaming, yelling, whining and crying, Categorical and Intensity
Differences in vocal expressions of anger and sadness and Children's tantrums. Uh,
and so it was a two thousand eleven study that
tried to categorize the different types of noises young children
make while throwing tantrums. And they use high fidelity audio
(05:01):
sampling of natural emotional episode. So instead of having people
try to whine and then listening to what that's like,
they tried to say, okay, catch some kids whining in
the wild, and what does it sound like? And it
groups together under a couple of categories that they have
an anger category which includes screaming and yelling, and then
(05:25):
they have a sadness category that includes fussing, whining and crying,
and fussing, whining and crying ultimately end up being categorized
as three stages of escalating intensity and sadness. So you've
got a sadness episode that's mounting, and it starts with fussing,
which they describe as typically short, flat or falling melody,
(05:48):
relatively quiet and low pitched, so no, no, no. Then
you move up to whining, which they say typically contain
some verbal content with an up and down melody. May
also include relatively shrill, monotonous non verbal vocalization son, And
(06:10):
then of course you go to the old classic. Crying
is relatively loud and effort full, typically with up and
down melody. Breath may be interrupted, as in sobbing, similar
to an infant's cry. So they put whining here in
the middle of this spectrum of escalating sadness. I don't
know what you'd think about that as apparent yourself. I mean,
(06:31):
does that ring true to you? Um? Yeah, certainly. I
can see crying position making sense, but whining and fussing
is some Sometimes I feel like that's kind of a
toss up because it kind of comes down to can
I talk you down from a wine or down from
a fuss more easily like? Which? Which? Which is the shorter,
(06:52):
shorter route connecting it to normal modes of communication and
behavior and God, I feel like maybe whiny is easier
for me to to to deal with and fussy. Huh.
I don't know, but it's it's kind of a toss up.
I'm gonna have to think about it during my interactions. Uh.
From here hunt out take a scientific approach to your
(07:13):
child's low intensity distress. Yeah, and I even I have
to ask him as that it now is this a
fuss or whine? I need to know for the research.
Oh and another thing I just wanted to say was
that numerically in that study I just looked at across
the course of it, they recorded a thirteen different children
featuring multiple tantrum so there are a bunch of different
vocalization incidents recorded. They found that whining was by far
(07:37):
the most common of these five vocalizations yelling, screaming, fussing, whining,
and crying. There was way more whining than anything else.
That sounds about right. But surely somebody has tried to
come up with a sort of scientific theoretical explanation to
explain the nature of whining, where it comes from evolutionarily speaking,
(07:58):
and and how it fits into the broad or spectrum
of human communication and and caregiver to h caregiven communication
caregiv child. Yeah. Indeed, and there have been at least
a couple of good studies that we're going to discuss here. Um.
The first of which concerns mother ease. More mother ease
(08:19):
as in like Chinese like a language. Now well yeah, yeah,
essentially h. The more technical term is child directed speech
or cd S. Mother ease is the annoying way that
you might hear not only a mother, but a father,
any kind of caregiver speaking to a child in their charge.
So it's sort of a colloquial name like baby talk, right,
(08:42):
It's it's kind of like baby talk. Um the and
and it's it's similar in many ways, uh to whining.
The two modes of speech seemed to have a lot
in common, though, Mother Rea's plays a definite role in attachment.
So Motheria's an example would be like, hey, honey, I
really need you to see about getting your socks on. Hey, honey,
(09:02):
we don't actually wear socks like that in this house.
So those would be two examples of mother EA's um.
And and hopefully when you encounter it, you're not encountering
an adult speaking to you in this way, because then
that that can be even extra annoying. Okay, So I'm
trying to note the sort of acoustic or sonic characteristics
of what you just did. For for the child directed speech,
(09:25):
one of the things was that it was slower than
you normally talk. Yes, you put a little more space
in there, and it sounded a little bit higher, like
you're elevating your pitch. Yeah. What's the other thing, It
almost has kind of a melody to it, right, Yeah,
there's a there's a melodic aspect to it, and in
early development that it's believe that the melodic maternal speech
(09:47):
functions uh uh more to to elicit and maintain attention
by accommodating the the infants very limited auditory and cognitive capabilities.
So in a sense that just the melody is being
used as a way to modulate the infants effective state
without having depended as much on the actual language, like
(10:08):
really the languages as much there for the the the
parent that it's speaking as anything. Okay, So those things
we just mentioned in the in the scientific terms would
be what they call slowed production, So slower talking, increased pitch,
and then um they say quote often flows into smooth,
exaggerated pitch contours. That's the melodic nature of it, right, Yeah, yeah,
(10:31):
I mean it's also you think of nursery rhymes too.
In this case, nursery rhymes are even more melodic and
ultimately musical. But uh, but it doesn't in the nursery rhyme,
it doesn't necessarily matter for the young child what is
being said, which is why one of the reasons why
so many in nursery rhymes have horrific imagery in them
about animals pecking out each other's eyes. But but yeah,
(10:54):
the the idea here is that mother reason also serves
as a scaffolding for the early stag stages of lane
enguage acquisition. The actual words are irrelevant, but the melodic
tone is key. Okay, So they sort of use like
a parent would use this child directed speech pattern to
to manage or maintain the child's emotional or affective state. Yes, so, yeah,
(11:17):
it's about getting their attention and you know, thinking about
like in my home, we try as much as possible
to speak to our son more or less like he's
an adult. You know, not really do a bunch of
this mother ease, but you find yourself doing it, especially
if you need to captivate their attention, you just fall
back on it. But that's interesting. Then do you feel
(11:38):
like when you're when you're inexorably drawn towards using mother
ease or child directed speech, does that feel like a
cultural thing? Do you? Or do you? Do you feel
like that's in your bones, that's in your d n
A is at a function of your revolution? I mean
maybe both, because I because as I'm saying it, I'll realize, hey, this,
(11:58):
I remember my my my mom or my dad having
to talk like this with if not, if not with me,
then at least with my younger sisters. If I'm having
to say, hey, bash and I really need you to
get your clothes on right now and go, I really
don't like having to talk to you like this in
this crazy weird singsong voice. Uh. And it's you know,
(12:19):
I don't know it feel it feels as much part
of background as anything. But maybe it has evolutionary keys
as well. But you know, one of the things about
the child directed speech that I saw come up in
the literature was how you would use different types of
of melodies or sort of u uh tone contours or
pitch contours to signal different attitudes towards the child. Yeah.
(12:42):
So on one hand, there's consistently rising contours that are
all about just electing attention, and that would be like like, hey, buddy,
it's time for us to see about getting our shoes
on so we can leave for today. And then there's
parents up prohibiting something. And then you see faster rising
on tours, which would be again like now, bastition, we
(13:03):
really don't wear socks like that in this house. So
as you see, it's still that very much that signature
Mothery's style, but faster rising contours. Oh Man, as an outsider,
I give that a doctor spock. Fascinating. But so we
got to bring it back to whining. What is the
link between child directed speech and whining? Well, there's a
two thousand five paper titled Whining as Mother directed Speech, uh,
(13:27):
and this it explored this connection of the potential connection
and this was published in Infinitial Development and it's the
work of Rosemarrie I. Socle, Karen L. Webster, Nicholas S. Thompson,
and David A. Stevens. So what they did is they
took eighteen undergrad students, seven males and eleven females. They
were these were all non parents, because previous studies had
(13:49):
had demonstrated that there was an equal effectiveness of whining
on non parents, and we'll actually don't have to have
just still get your brain, it'll still get you. There's no,
it doesn't matter. So they exposed these individuals to stimuli
of six renditions of the sentence I want to go
to Boston, each spoken by both the male and female,
(14:11):
and the addition, these were the modes of each rendition.
There was wine, you want to go to Boston, all right,
I think that was good, and then there's just the
neutral I want to go to Boston, which I'll supply
I want to go to Boston. Oh, there you go,
you got it, you got it for me? Oh no, no,
I'm sorry, No, no, no realized, No, no, no, I'll
do the next one boasting, I want to go to
Boston someday I will, all right, now demanding, give me
(14:33):
a demanding I want to go to Boston. I want
to go to Boston, all right, And then the next
one question there would be uh, I want to go
to Boston, and then finally I want to go to Boston. Yeah,
there you go. That was a little whiny. Give me
more anger, I want to go to Boston. A little
(14:56):
very good at it, I guess, let me give it
a try. I want to go to Austin. Still a
little whiny on my part though, I don't know. Well,
we'll have to work that out in the actors studio
later on. But but so what they did is that
they yeah, they unleashed the different rendition. Now they are.
One of the funny things was they didn't actually have
(15:16):
kids doing it, right, it was young adult whiners. And
they said, quote, experience tells us that whining speech like
attachment relations does not disappear with the onset of adolescence
in adulthood, but continues to be used with intimates at
any age. Yichh. So yeah, so they said that it's
employed in any attachment partner or two superior figures in
(15:38):
a power relation. That's taying into the superiority thing we
were talking about earlier. Winding goes up the chain. But anyway,
they said adults were used because they could supply the
proper stimulus scripts better than children. So in each one
of these they also featured a stimulus sentence. So what
what is being said? What is happening that would it
elect this response? With its appropriate emotional flavoring UM and
(16:01):
then uh, the volunteers were asked to judge the similarity
of twenty two pairings UM again of the various the
various stimuli related to going to Boston, and sixty six
punt combinations of the twelve statements. So this at Following this,
there is a descriptive rating procedure in which the volunteers
had to rate the twelve statements in terms of various
(16:23):
qualities such as urgency, anger, loudness, etcetera. And then they
also took acoustic measurements of everything as well. And they
then they piled all this together into a three D
model of the resulting data UM. And this is what
they found that whining speech shared with Mothery's exaggerated pitch contours,
(16:44):
specifically of a rising pattern, increased pitch, and slowed production
in relation to adult directed or neutral speech. Okay, so
that sounds like it. It matches the main things we
observed earlier when talking about child directed speech. Yeah and interesting.
So in a way, Huh, I don't hear it in
(17:05):
my head, though I can see how it would be true,
I don't. I don't equate when an adult talks to
a child in child directed speech. That doesn't sound like
whining to me, but I can see how it shares uh,
how it shares physical similarities. Yeah, well, because the parent
typically has order and reason on their side and the
child almost exclusively does not. The child, the parent is saying,
(17:30):
I need you to get dressed so we can go
to this thing that we go to every day at
the same time, and you inevitably have to go to
and the child is claiming, no, I want to eat
ice cream first before breakfast. The child is making the
particular statements, Yeah, it's fussing. Was whining about something that's
completely pointless and it has no reason or order on
(17:54):
the side of their argument. Now, one of the things
we talked about earlier was why it's it's hypoth decized
why mother mother ease or child directed speech sounds this way,
And originally one idea was to accommodate the infants underdeveloped
auditory system. But they talk about how whining is directed
at adults with fully functioning hearing. You know, adults wine
(18:17):
at each other sometimes. So the authors speculate that if
we toss out this older hypothesis and just say that
both whining and mother's exploit inherent sensitivities in the human
nervous system. That might make sense. Yeah, that makes sense
to me. I mean it's it's about what what mode
of communication is going to elect the most response. Yeah,
(18:37):
and it's gonna in A whining child cannot be ignored.
Um or whining child can be ignored, but at great difficulty. Yes,
it certainly cannot be ignored. I mean I have had
the experience being out in public and hearing somebody else's
child wine, and it's just uh, I mean, it's utterly
(18:57):
attention stealing. You can't think about an anything else while
it's happening, you know. And here's something interesting. It's easy again,
the parent is coming from a side of reason and order,
and the child is generally speaking on behalf of chaos
and uh and and just unreasonable nonsense. And yet, according
to a two thousand twelve Max Plaque Institute for Evolutionary
(19:17):
Anthropology study published in the American Psychological Association, children as
young as three can distinguish between pure whining and a
legitimate need for assistance and or sympathy. So they can
they can deduce whether somebody's whining is justified. Yeah, like
one kid is whining, the kids standing next to them
can probably tell that it's b S. How did how
(19:40):
did they test this? Okay? They took forty eight children,
They split them easily between girls and boys from thirty
six to thirty nine months old, and then they recorded
reactions of each child as he or she witnessed an
adult acting upset in one of three contexts. When the
distress was justified, let's due to physical harm, material loss,
or unfairness, when it was unjustified, and when the cause
(20:02):
of the distress was unknown. Okay, So they had something
like um, an adult getting an unfair distribution of toys
like marbles exactly, Yeah, or I liked this one. An
adult getting their drawing cut in half with scissors. They
drew something and somebody cuts it up. Or an adult
getting getting a toy chest lid knocked, getting knocked on
(20:24):
the hands with it. So getting injured or losing a
balloon was another one. Newly acquired healing balloon floats up
and it's gone. Okay, So those are the justified ones,
but there were also unjustified things where nothing really bad
happened to the adult, but the children could tell the difference. Yeah,
they could, They could level the the amount of character judgment,
threat assessment, emotional assessment, and empathy necessary to say, Hey,
(20:49):
you're getting upset over nothing, or yeah, that's awful, your
balloon just totally floated away. That's a bummer man. So
let's say you've got a child with two balloons and
an adult with one balloon, and the adult loses the balloon.
Does the child give one of the one of the
one of his or her balloons to the adult? Well,
that might depend on whether they saw the adult overreacting
(21:12):
to nothing earlier, or whining in response to something legitimately
unfair happening to him or her. Yeah, and then in
the case of balloon related stress, the child would offer
a balloon more quickly to the adult if the child
had previously seen that adult upset due to true harm
rather than a near inconvenience. That that's interesting that that
(21:33):
a child has that level of judgment. But also this
makes a distinction between legitimate whining and illegitimate whining. And
I wonder about that because a funny thing I discovered
when I was trying to find scientific research on whining
is that a lot of the journal articles you can
find about whining seemed to be coming from a business
(21:54):
management or business philosophy perspective. If you came across I did.
I certainly came across a lot of uses for the
word whining that we're not related to to childhood development,
as in meaning that whining is a non productive expression
of distress, and that sort of fits with how I
would use it colloquially. Colloquially like if I'm not talking
(22:17):
about the way a child develops, but if I'm just
talking about an adult whining, it's a it's a person
who's just they're not getting anywhere that they don't have
a legitimate complaint, they're just, you know, they're just being
distressed for no good reason. Obviously, we all agree that
that a person, an adult or child, can cry to
(22:38):
signal a meaningful deprivation or violation, something bad has happened,
that that actually matters, and they will cry about that.
But can a wine signal the same or as a
wine fundamentally inherently unjustified, and if they there's a good
cause for it, do we call the wine something else? Yeah?
I found myself thinking back on various outburst from my son,
(23:03):
trying to decide Okay, I remember him whining about this,
was that justified? And I'm really having a hard time
thinking of a case where the wine was justified. The
only possible example I can think of, and and not
specific example, but there may have been times where there's
been a slight to him by accidents, sort of like
(23:23):
say I didn't give him a you know, a snack
when I'm handing them out, just because I overlooked him
and he catches onto that. He might have whined about it.
But for the most part, things that are legitimately worth
getting upset about, like the cat scratching him, are going
to instantly go to like a fuss level or crying
level of outburst. But if we go with the the
(23:46):
the escalation from earlier, the wine is in the middle,
So it's either lower as a fuss or higher as
a cry or do you not go with the same escalation.
I'm I'm not sure I completely buy that that escalation graph.
I feel like it might be a slightly different or
more complex roadmap, because yeah, like if the cat scratches him,
he's not gonna say the cat scratch me, He's gonna
(24:06):
outburst about it, or like he's going to be more
likely to whine and say something like like the cats
sitting in my spot on the couch and I don't
like that. So I don't know if that's helpful or not.
But anyway, you gotta stand up to that cat. Yeah,
you gotta look that cat right in the eye and
say you have four legs, the couch doesn't belong to you. Well,
(24:28):
good luck, because the cat has the clause. Okay, Well,
let's look at exactly how annoying whining is according to science. Yeah,
and I think this is a good one to hit,
uh last of all in this episode, because it really
helps us to underlie the raw power of whining. So
there's a two thousand and eleven study that came from
the psychologists from Sonny and Clark University published in the
(24:49):
Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology. And this is
this involves at least one of the same researchers for
that we've talked about earlier. Rosemarie so called it does,
and I believe Nicol says Thompson as well. Um. The
title of the article wines, cries, and motheries their relative
power to distract. So the researchers set out to see
(25:09):
if humans, including non parents, are hardwired to be more
attuned to whining. So isw it all broke down? Volunteers
were asked to try and complete a set of math
problems while wearing headphones, and six different soundscapes were pumped
into those headphones. You had toddler wines, you had baby cries,
you had mother ease, you had two adults in a
(25:30):
normal conversation. You had a screeching table saw. And then
you had the deep sound of silence, and you had
lew Reid's mental machine music. That would that would have
been an interesting addition. So and also just to drive
home to all, actual speech was in the was in
a language unfamiliar to the volunteers, So that way they
couldn't be semantically distracted, right, They had had to be
(25:52):
based in the pitch and and just the sound. The
acoustic qualities of the sample couldn't be that the words
the selves were captivating, right, So this is These are
the results. Volunteers completed the fewest problems and made the
most mistakes while trying to block out the sign of
a sound of a whiny infant. This was regardless regardless
(26:13):
of gender or parental status. The err rate was nearly
twice that of trying to work with a screeching table saw.
And it's also worth knowing that mother eas and baby
cries were also fairly distracting. The researchers positive that this
demonstrates an evolutionary importance of whining to attract attention of
a parent or caregiver. Well, that's interesting to compare because
(26:36):
so obviously whining commands our attention. But as the last
study showed, we can even children and probably much more
so adults can easily recognize the I don't know what
you call the the lack of importance or the lack
of justification behind lots of whining, if not all whining. Yeah,
And I feel like this is where it's important to
(26:58):
focus on something that psychologists in gear of evos pointed
out and that there's likely a naturalistic fallacy at play here.
So just because this is the idea that just because
something is a natural product of our evolution, it doesn't
mean that it's a good thing. Oh, this is this
is a common reaction I see to Uh, I don't know,
studies about human nature, human evolution, or speculations based in
(27:21):
evolutionary psychology is that they sort of point out humans
tendency to do something that we don't like as natural,
and then people react like, oh, so you're saying it's good.
I mean natural doesn't mean good. Lots of natural things
are bad. Yeah, So in this case, it was. This
is basically my my take home on it. If you're
(27:43):
looking at it based on the information we've discussed here,
based on the caveat that it it may be a
naturalistic fallacy, something that's that's a product of our evolution,
but not necessarily helpful in and of itself. It sounds
to me like crying, of course, is a necessary means
by which an infant, young child, or even an adult
alerts others to its dire need. And it whining and
mother ease, to a certain extent, are essentially crying poured
(28:06):
into the mold of language, becomes a mode of speaking
and a way to bait our words with the un
ignorable power of a crying infant left out in the cold.
So anytime you hear a caregiver and a child speaking
to each other, it's essentially two individuals crying at each
other with words. Man. That's that's my my take home
(28:29):
on all this. That's profound or disturbing. You know that
this is a grown up in a child just crying
at each other, but it's crying that's complicated by language. Well,
I imagine that's a lot of what's happening a lot
of the time in a in a household with children,
because I mean, the presence of children just ups the
(28:49):
stakes in every possible way, right, Like suddenly when you've
got a kid with you, things that would normally be
maybe a little bit frustrating can become dire. Suddenly this
is so important. Yeah, and then everything's just harder getting
out the door, harder to do. Yeah. I mean you
saw when I was over there for Halloween, Bastim just
(29:09):
getting back out of out of your house and leaving
for the evening. Is is this this whole ordeal that
has to be coordinated with with with with Noel and
his daughter leaving, and we're both leaving at the same time,
so that nobody's unfair. It's not unfair. Everybody's got a
completely equal shake. In the end of Halloweing, you know,
(29:30):
I was wondering about the question of why inherently we
find whining and crying so unbearable, Like you'll do anything
to make it stop. Uh, And you see this a
lot of times, parents just caving into what seemed like
ridiculous demands from their children just to make the whining stop.
And I wonder. I mean, one obvious thing is that
(29:51):
it's fear of social embarrassment. Right, Like you're out in
public and your kids starts whining, and you know you're
you're embarrassed. Everybody is looking at you. You feel like
you're annoying everyone, and and that's a problem. But it
seems like, uh, this would only make sense for whining
and crying in public. Public situations might sort of increase
the urgency of our need to stop the whining. But
I imagine it still happens in private. You're in the
(30:14):
privacy of your own home, and still the child is
whining and you need to make it stop. Oh yeah, yeah,
it didn't matter if anybody's listening. Just whine. You just
the whining must stop. Please stop the whining. Tell me
what you need to tell me in a normal voice,
and we'll discuss it rationally. One hypothesis that I know
I've read somewhere before. Before the episode, I was trying
to figure out where I had read this, and I can't.
(30:38):
I'm wondering if it was in um one of Richard
Dawkins biology books from years ago, you know, like if
it was in The Selfish Gene or The Blind Watchmaker.
But there there is an example of how sort of
the generational evolutionary arms race between parents and offspring. And
(31:00):
one of one of the examples to us there was
about piercing bird chirps. What's happening when a chick in
a bird's nest chirps with this piercing tone until it
gets fed or gets the attention it needs, gets the
help or whatever it wants from the parent. I know
(31:20):
one possible way you could think about this is that
the chick is threatening death. The chick is saying, I'm
going to keep getting louder and higher pitched until I'm
threatening to draw predators to the nest, and you must
give me what I want or I'm going to kill
us all. I I don't know if you can pourt
(31:43):
that kind of intuition to thinking about human crying, but
it makes a certain kind of intuitive sense. I mean,
I couldn't begin to say that that's actually the explanation.
It seems like there are a lot of factors involved there,
But is that sort of the deep biological feeling of
what's happening when when you're a parent and your child
is whining, do you feel predators approaching? Do you feel
(32:06):
doom looming in? Uh? Maybe a little bit. Maybe. I
often think about Corman McCarthy's The Road and uh, you know,
the father and son hiding in the bushes, hoping that
the villains don't discover them, the cannibals. And I'm thinking,
you know, if over there with my son, he might
start whining about something, and then what am I gonna do? Yeah?
(32:27):
Do I just got I have to give in completely
to the whining, otherwise the cannibals will eat us. That's
why you gotta carve those wood bullets. That's why you
gotta do it and put up a good bluff. So
we know this is a topic that almost all of
you're gonna have some feedback on. If you're a parent,
if you're you just had siblings, are you just around
kids at any point in the course of your life, Uh,
then you're gonna want to share your thoughts in this
(32:48):
so hey, and you can always finds stuff about your
mind dot com. That's where we'll find Our podcast episodes
are video or blog coast and Hey, if you want
to reach out to us via email, how can you
do it, Joe? You can let us know your thoughts
about the science of whining or your favorite personal whining
and crying story. It blow the mind. It how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
(33:17):
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from house Stop
works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff to Blow your Mind?
My name is Robert Lamb Kianda. I'm Joe mcformer. You know, Joe,
I have a three and a half year old in
the house and uh and I and I grew up
with two younger siblings, so I'm pretty familiar with whining.
(00:27):
I imagine you're pretty familiar with whining as well. You know,
I don't have kids, but I was once a kid
myself and familiar with whining from a personal perspective, and
also I had a younger sister, and so I heard
some whining there, and of course whining from the other
kids I knew. I actually just heard some whining recently,
I think when it was Halloween and there were I
(00:49):
don't know, maybe you can judge whether this was whining
or not, UH listeners at home on on Halloween night.
It was a wonderful occasion when all the stuff to
Blow your Mind people got together at my house. So
Robert was there with his child, and Noel was there
with his child, and Christian was there with his serial
killer mask and UH, and at one point I remember
(01:11):
I think there was some disagreement between parents and children
about whether it was time to go or then you
definitely heard whining. Was there whining? I'm not sure how
to classify it. There's so much whining in my life
at this point it's hard for me to remember specific
incidents of whining unless it's unless the material being whined
about is is really you know, sets itself apart. But yeah,
(01:32):
I feel like I'm constantly saying, well, what's a nicer
way to say that? Or I can't understand you when
you talk in that whiny voice, which is one of
those things that I specifically remember hearing my parents say
to my younger sisters growing up. Now, of course they
were lying to you because they could understand you. They
just didn't want you to do it anymore. Right, It's
like the way that you were phrasing that is so
(01:52):
irritating and just so grating on my sanity that I
cannot acknowledge it. I refuse to listen to you while
you were talking in that whiny voice. So today we're
obviously going to be talking about the science of whining,
and whining actually does turn out to be a kind
of interesting feature of human communication. What is whining and
(02:13):
how is whining different from from talking, from crying from
all the other ways we communicate. Well, it's often described
as a combination of several different things, So there's an
element of pleading to it, demanding, pestering, and nagging that
escalates in pitch. It begins during infancy and peaks. Luckily,
(02:34):
it's good to know for me that there is a
peak to it between two point five and four years
of age. You know, it's funny because they say they
say it peaks, but I've read in some of the
studies that we're referencing in this episode that whining never
really stops, like you carry it into adulthood. Yeah. I
think it's just that most adults learned to curb it
and know that it sounds that they're ultimately humiliating themselves
(02:57):
and they're whining about something. And uh, for the most part,
it is a child whining at a caregiver, but ultimately
anyone is fair game. Well, usually I think whining goes
up right, you don't wind down. Parent doesn't whine at
the child, The boss doesn't whine at the employee. I mean,
maybe they would, but most of the time the whining
(03:17):
goes up. The superiority change. Yeah, so I've definitely heard
kids whining at other kids. I didn't want you to
take that, that sort of thing, I wanted to play
with that, etcetera. It comes from a from a perceived
position of disadvantage. You know, I say, like I've been
I've been taking advantage of I've got to wine at
the person who who, at least for now, is the
(03:39):
upper hand. Like a whining at another child is generally
immediately followed by whining at the nearest caregiver to point
out the slight that just took place. Yeah, yeah, she
took a sip out of my coke. I don't want that.
I don't like it. She has to give me hers now.
Oh yeah, I mean it's everything like I wanted to
be the one to get the fork out of the drawer,
(04:00):
or I wanted to be the one to do this.
I wanted to be the one to do that. It
just goes on forever. Yeah, I can't find my shoes. Yeah.
Uh So I was interested in how whining compares to
other methods of communication, and I actually found a study
from eleven that looked into this. It's sort of tried
(04:20):
to categorize different modes of attachment communication. That's something that
that often gets brought up a term, this attachment communication,
because it's not so much something that's likely to occur
between strangers. It's sort of a communication between child and caregiver,
or it plays on an existing relationship. But the paper
(04:40):
was called Screaming, yelling, whining and crying, Categorical and Intensity
Differences in vocal expressions of anger and sadness and Children's tantrums. Uh,
and so it was a two thousand eleven study that
tried to categorize the different types of noises young children
make while throwing tantrums. And they use high fidelity audio
(05:01):
sampling of natural emotional episode. So instead of having people
try to whine and then listening to what that's like,
they tried to say, okay, catch some kids whining in
the wild, and what does it sound like? And it
groups together under a couple of categories that they have
an anger category which includes screaming and yelling, and then
(05:25):
they have a sadness category that includes fussing, whining and crying,
and fussing, whining and crying ultimately end up being categorized
as three stages of escalating intensity and sadness. So you've
got a sadness episode that's mounting, and it starts with fussing,
which they describe as typically short, flat or falling melody,
(05:48):
relatively quiet and low pitched, so no, no, no. Then
you move up to whining, which they say typically contain
some verbal content with an up and down melody. May
also include relatively shrill, monotonous non verbal vocalization son, And
(06:10):
then of course you go to the old classic. Crying
is relatively loud and effort full, typically with up and
down melody. Breath may be interrupted, as in sobbing, similar
to an infant's cry. So they put whining here in
the middle of this spectrum of escalating sadness. I don't
know what you'd think about that as apparent yourself. I mean,
(06:31):
does that ring true to you? Um? Yeah, certainly. I
can see crying position making sense, but whining and fussing
is some Sometimes I feel like that's kind of a
toss up because it kind of comes down to can
I talk you down from a wine or down from
a fuss more easily like? Which? Which? Which is the shorter,
(06:52):
shorter route connecting it to normal modes of communication and
behavior and God, I feel like maybe whiny is easier
for me to to to deal with and fussy. Huh.
I don't know, but it's it's kind of a toss up.
I'm gonna have to think about it during my interactions. Uh.
From here hunt out take a scientific approach to your
(07:13):
child's low intensity distress. Yeah, and I even I have
to ask him as that it now is this a
fuss or whine? I need to know for the research.
Oh and another thing I just wanted to say was
that numerically in that study I just looked at across
the course of it, they recorded a thirteen different children
featuring multiple tantrum so there are a bunch of different
vocalization incidents recorded. They found that whining was by far
(07:37):
the most common of these five vocalizations yelling, screaming, fussing, whining,
and crying. There was way more whining than anything else.
That sounds about right. But surely somebody has tried to
come up with a sort of scientific theoretical explanation to
explain the nature of whining, where it comes from evolutionarily speaking,
(07:58):
and and how it fits into the broad or spectrum
of human communication and and caregiver to h caregiven communication
caregiv child. Yeah. Indeed, and there have been at least
a couple of good studies that we're going to discuss here. Um.
The first of which concerns mother ease. More mother ease
(08:19):
as in like Chinese like a language. Now well yeah, yeah,
essentially h. The more technical term is child directed speech
or cd S. Mother ease is the annoying way that
you might hear not only a mother, but a father,
any kind of caregiver speaking to a child in their charge.
So it's sort of a colloquial name like baby talk, right,
(08:42):
It's it's kind of like baby talk. Um the and
and it's it's similar in many ways, uh to whining.
The two modes of speech seemed to have a lot
in common, though, Mother Rea's plays a definite role in attachment.
So Motheria's an example would be like, hey, honey, I
really need you to see about getting your socks on. Hey, honey,
(09:02):
we don't actually wear socks like that in this house.
So those would be two examples of mother EA's um.
And and hopefully when you encounter it, you're not encountering
an adult speaking to you in this way, because then
that that can be even extra annoying. Okay, So I'm
trying to note the sort of acoustic or sonic characteristics
of what you just did. For for the child directed speech,
(09:25):
one of the things was that it was slower than
you normally talk. Yes, you put a little more space
in there, and it sounded a little bit higher, like
you're elevating your pitch. Yeah. What's the other thing, It
almost has kind of a melody to it, right, Yeah,
there's a there's a melodic aspect to it, and in
early development that it's believe that the melodic maternal speech
(09:47):
functions uh uh more to to elicit and maintain attention
by accommodating the the infants very limited auditory and cognitive capabilities.
So in a sense that just the melody is being
used as a way to modulate the infants effective state
without having depended as much on the actual language, like
(10:08):
really the languages as much there for the the the
parent that it's speaking as anything. Okay, So those things
we just mentioned in the in the scientific terms would
be what they call slowed production, So slower talking, increased pitch,
and then um they say quote often flows into smooth,
exaggerated pitch contours. That's the melodic nature of it, right, Yeah, yeah,
(10:31):
I mean it's also you think of nursery rhymes too.
In this case, nursery rhymes are even more melodic and
ultimately musical. But uh, but it doesn't in the nursery rhyme,
it doesn't necessarily matter for the young child what is
being said, which is why one of the reasons why
so many in nursery rhymes have horrific imagery in them
about animals pecking out each other's eyes. But but yeah,
(10:54):
the the idea here is that mother reason also serves
as a scaffolding for the early stag stages of lane
enguage acquisition. The actual words are irrelevant, but the melodic
tone is key. Okay, So they sort of use like
a parent would use this child directed speech pattern to
to manage or maintain the child's emotional or affective state. Yes, so, yeah,
(11:17):
it's about getting their attention and you know, thinking about
like in my home, we try as much as possible
to speak to our son more or less like he's
an adult. You know, not really do a bunch of
this mother ease, but you find yourself doing it, especially
if you need to captivate their attention, you just fall
back on it. But that's interesting. Then do you feel
(11:38):
like when you're when you're inexorably drawn towards using mother
ease or child directed speech, does that feel like a
cultural thing? Do you? Or do you? Do you feel
like that's in your bones, that's in your d n
A is at a function of your revolution? I mean
maybe both, because I because as I'm saying it, I'll realize, hey, this,
(11:58):
I remember my my my mom or my dad having
to talk like this with if not, if not with me,
then at least with my younger sisters. If I'm having
to say, hey, bash and I really need you to
get your clothes on right now and go, I really
don't like having to talk to you like this in
this crazy weird singsong voice. Uh. And it's you know,
(12:19):
I don't know it feel it feels as much part
of background as anything. But maybe it has evolutionary keys
as well. But you know, one of the things about
the child directed speech that I saw come up in
the literature was how you would use different types of
of melodies or sort of u uh tone contours or
pitch contours to signal different attitudes towards the child. Yeah.
(12:42):
So on one hand, there's consistently rising contours that are
all about just electing attention, and that would be like like, hey, buddy,
it's time for us to see about getting our shoes
on so we can leave for today. And then there's
parents up prohibiting something. And then you see faster rising
on tours, which would be again like now, bastition, we
(13:03):
really don't wear socks like that in this house. So
as you see, it's still that very much that signature
Mothery's style, but faster rising contours. Oh Man, as an outsider,
I give that a doctor spock. Fascinating. But so we
got to bring it back to whining. What is the
link between child directed speech and whining? Well, there's a
two thousand five paper titled Whining as Mother directed Speech, uh,
(13:27):
and this it explored this connection of the potential connection
and this was published in Infinitial Development and it's the
work of Rosemarrie I. Socle, Karen L. Webster, Nicholas S. Thompson,
and David A. Stevens. So what they did is they
took eighteen undergrad students, seven males and eleven females. They
were these were all non parents, because previous studies had
(13:49):
had demonstrated that there was an equal effectiveness of whining
on non parents, and we'll actually don't have to have
just still get your brain, it'll still get you. There's no,
it doesn't matter. So they exposed these individuals to stimuli
of six renditions of the sentence I want to go
to Boston, each spoken by both the male and female,
(14:11):
and the addition, these were the modes of each rendition.
There was wine, you want to go to Boston, all right,
I think that was good, and then there's just the
neutral I want to go to Boston, which I'll supply
I want to go to Boston. Oh, there you go,
you got it, you got it for me? Oh no, no,
I'm sorry, No, no, no realized, No, no, no, I'll
do the next one boasting, I want to go to
Boston someday I will, all right, now demanding, give me
(14:33):
a demanding I want to go to Boston. I want
to go to Boston, all right, And then the next
one question there would be uh, I want to go
to Boston, and then finally I want to go to Boston. Yeah,
there you go. That was a little whiny. Give me
more anger, I want to go to Boston. A little
(14:56):
very good at it, I guess, let me give it
a try. I want to go to Austin. Still a
little whiny on my part though, I don't know. Well,
we'll have to work that out in the actors studio
later on. But but so what they did is that
they yeah, they unleashed the different rendition. Now they are.
One of the funny things was they didn't actually have
(15:16):
kids doing it, right, it was young adult whiners. And
they said, quote, experience tells us that whining speech like
attachment relations does not disappear with the onset of adolescence
in adulthood, but continues to be used with intimates at
any age. Yichh. So yeah, so they said that it's
employed in any attachment partner or two superior figures in
(15:38):
a power relation. That's taying into the superiority thing we
were talking about earlier. Winding goes up the chain. But anyway,
they said adults were used because they could supply the
proper stimulus scripts better than children. So in each one
of these they also featured a stimulus sentence. So what
what is being said? What is happening that would it
elect this response? With its appropriate emotional flavoring UM and
(16:01):
then uh, the volunteers were asked to judge the similarity
of twenty two pairings UM again of the various the
various stimuli related to going to Boston, and sixty six
punt combinations of the twelve statements. So this at Following this,
there is a descriptive rating procedure in which the volunteers
had to rate the twelve statements in terms of various
(16:23):
qualities such as urgency, anger, loudness, etcetera. And then they
also took acoustic measurements of everything as well. And they
then they piled all this together into a three D
model of the resulting data UM. And this is what
they found that whining speech shared with Mothery's exaggerated pitch contours,
(16:44):
specifically of a rising pattern, increased pitch, and slowed production
in relation to adult directed or neutral speech. Okay, so
that sounds like it. It matches the main things we
observed earlier when talking about child directed speech. Yeah and interesting.
So in a way, Huh, I don't hear it in
(17:05):
my head, though I can see how it would be true,
I don't. I don't equate when an adult talks to
a child in child directed speech. That doesn't sound like
whining to me, but I can see how it shares uh,
how it shares physical similarities. Yeah, well, because the parent
typically has order and reason on their side and the
child almost exclusively does not. The child, the parent is saying,
(17:30):
I need you to get dressed so we can go
to this thing that we go to every day at
the same time, and you inevitably have to go to
and the child is claiming, no, I want to eat
ice cream first before breakfast. The child is making the
particular statements, Yeah, it's fussing. Was whining about something that's
completely pointless and it has no reason or order on
(17:54):
the side of their argument. Now, one of the things
we talked about earlier was why it's it's hypoth decized
why mother mother ease or child directed speech sounds this way,
And originally one idea was to accommodate the infants underdeveloped
auditory system. But they talk about how whining is directed
at adults with fully functioning hearing. You know, adults wine
(18:17):
at each other sometimes. So the authors speculate that if
we toss out this older hypothesis and just say that
both whining and mother's exploit inherent sensitivities in the human
nervous system. That might make sense. Yeah, that makes sense
to me. I mean it's it's about what what mode
of communication is going to elect the most response. Yeah,
(18:37):
and it's gonna in A whining child cannot be ignored.
Um or whining child can be ignored, but at great difficulty. Yes,
it certainly cannot be ignored. I mean I have had
the experience being out in public and hearing somebody else's
child wine, and it's just uh, I mean, it's utterly
(18:57):
attention stealing. You can't think about an anything else while
it's happening, you know. And here's something interesting. It's easy again,
the parent is coming from a side of reason and order,
and the child is generally speaking on behalf of chaos
and uh and and just unreasonable nonsense. And yet, according
to a two thousand twelve Max Plaque Institute for Evolutionary
(19:17):
Anthropology study published in the American Psychological Association, children as
young as three can distinguish between pure whining and a
legitimate need for assistance and or sympathy. So they can
they can deduce whether somebody's whining is justified. Yeah, like
one kid is whining, the kids standing next to them
can probably tell that it's b S. How did how
(19:40):
did they test this? Okay? They took forty eight children,
They split them easily between girls and boys from thirty
six to thirty nine months old, and then they recorded
reactions of each child as he or she witnessed an
adult acting upset in one of three contexts. When the
distress was justified, let's due to physical harm, material loss,
or unfairness, when it was unjustified, and when the cause
(20:02):
of the distress was unknown. Okay, So they had something
like um, an adult getting an unfair distribution of toys
like marbles exactly, Yeah, or I liked this one. An
adult getting their drawing cut in half with scissors. They
drew something and somebody cuts it up. Or an adult
getting getting a toy chest lid knocked, getting knocked on
(20:24):
the hands with it. So getting injured or losing a
balloon was another one. Newly acquired healing balloon floats up
and it's gone. Okay, So those are the justified ones,
but there were also unjustified things where nothing really bad
happened to the adult, but the children could tell the difference. Yeah,
they could, They could level the the amount of character judgment,
threat assessment, emotional assessment, and empathy necessary to say, Hey,
(20:49):
you're getting upset over nothing, or yeah, that's awful, your
balloon just totally floated away. That's a bummer man. So
let's say you've got a child with two balloons and
an adult with one balloon, and the adult loses the balloon.
Does the child give one of the one of the
one of his or her balloons to the adult? Well,
that might depend on whether they saw the adult overreacting
(21:12):
to nothing earlier, or whining in response to something legitimately
unfair happening to him or her. Yeah, and then in
the case of balloon related stress, the child would offer
a balloon more quickly to the adult if the child
had previously seen that adult upset due to true harm
rather than a near inconvenience. That that's interesting that that
(21:33):
a child has that level of judgment. But also this
makes a distinction between legitimate whining and illegitimate whining. And
I wonder about that because a funny thing I discovered
when I was trying to find scientific research on whining
is that a lot of the journal articles you can
find about whining seemed to be coming from a business
(21:54):
management or business philosophy perspective. If you came across I did.
I certainly came across a lot of uses for the
word whining that we're not related to to childhood development,
as in meaning that whining is a non productive expression
of distress, and that sort of fits with how I
would use it colloquially. Colloquially like if I'm not talking
(22:17):
about the way a child develops, but if I'm just
talking about an adult whining, it's a it's a person
who's just they're not getting anywhere that they don't have
a legitimate complaint, they're just, you know, they're just being
distressed for no good reason. Obviously, we all agree that
that a person, an adult or child, can cry to
(22:38):
signal a meaningful deprivation or violation, something bad has happened,
that that actually matters, and they will cry about that.
But can a wine signal the same or as a
wine fundamentally inherently unjustified, and if they there's a good
cause for it, do we call the wine something else? Yeah?
I found myself thinking back on various outburst from my son,
(23:03):
trying to decide Okay, I remember him whining about this,
was that justified? And I'm really having a hard time
thinking of a case where the wine was justified. The
only possible example I can think of, and and not
specific example, but there may have been times where there's
been a slight to him by accidents, sort of like
(23:23):
say I didn't give him a you know, a snack
when I'm handing them out, just because I overlooked him
and he catches onto that. He might have whined about it.
But for the most part, things that are legitimately worth
getting upset about, like the cat scratching him, are going
to instantly go to like a fuss level or crying
level of outburst. But if we go with the the
(23:46):
the escalation from earlier, the wine is in the middle,
So it's either lower as a fuss or higher as
a cry or do you not go with the same escalation.
I'm I'm not sure I completely buy that that escalation graph.
I feel like it might be a slightly different or
more complex roadmap, because yeah, like if the cat scratches him,
he's not gonna say the cat scratch me, He's gonna
(24:06):
outburst about it, or like he's going to be more
likely to whine and say something like like the cats
sitting in my spot on the couch and I don't
like that. So I don't know if that's helpful or not.
But anyway, you gotta stand up to that cat. Yeah,
you gotta look that cat right in the eye and
say you have four legs, the couch doesn't belong to you. Well,
(24:28):
good luck, because the cat has the clause. Okay, Well,
let's look at exactly how annoying whining is according to science. Yeah,
and I think this is a good one to hit,
uh last of all in this episode, because it really
helps us to underlie the raw power of whining. So
there's a two thousand and eleven study that came from
the psychologists from Sonny and Clark University published in the
(24:49):
Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology. And this is
this involves at least one of the same researchers for
that we've talked about earlier. Rosemarie so called it does,
and I believe Nicol says Thompson as well. Um. The
title of the article wines, cries, and motheries their relative
power to distract. So the researchers set out to see
(25:09):
if humans, including non parents, are hardwired to be more
attuned to whining. So isw it all broke down? Volunteers
were asked to try and complete a set of math
problems while wearing headphones, and six different soundscapes were pumped
into those headphones. You had toddler wines, you had baby cries,
you had mother ease, you had two adults in a
(25:30):
normal conversation. You had a screeching table saw. And then
you had the deep sound of silence, and you had
lew Reid's mental machine music. That would that would have
been an interesting addition. So and also just to drive
home to all, actual speech was in the was in
a language unfamiliar to the volunteers, So that way they
couldn't be semantically distracted, right, They had had to be
(25:52):
based in the pitch and and just the sound. The
acoustic qualities of the sample couldn't be that the words
the selves were captivating, right, So this is These are
the results. Volunteers completed the fewest problems and made the
most mistakes while trying to block out the sign of
a sound of a whiny infant. This was regardless regardless
(26:13):
of gender or parental status. The err rate was nearly
twice that of trying to work with a screeching table saw.
And it's also worth knowing that mother eas and baby
cries were also fairly distracting. The researchers positive that this
demonstrates an evolutionary importance of whining to attract attention of
a parent or caregiver. Well, that's interesting to compare because
(26:36):
so obviously whining commands our attention. But as the last
study showed, we can even children and probably much more
so adults can easily recognize the I don't know what
you call the the lack of importance or the lack
of justification behind lots of whining, if not all whining. Yeah,
And I feel like this is where it's important to
(26:58):
focus on something that psychologists in gear of evos pointed
out and that there's likely a naturalistic fallacy at play here.
So just because this is the idea that just because
something is a natural product of our evolution, it doesn't
mean that it's a good thing. Oh, this is this
is a common reaction I see to Uh, I don't know,
studies about human nature, human evolution, or speculations based in
(27:21):
evolutionary psychology is that they sort of point out humans
tendency to do something that we don't like as natural,
and then people react like, oh, so you're saying it's good.
I mean natural doesn't mean good. Lots of natural things
are bad. Yeah, So in this case, it was. This
is basically my my take home on it. If you're
(27:43):
looking at it based on the information we've discussed here,
based on the caveat that it it may be a
naturalistic fallacy, something that's that's a product of our evolution,
but not necessarily helpful in and of itself. It sounds
to me like crying, of course, is a necessary means
by which an infant, young child, or even an adult
alerts others to its dire need. And it whining and
mother ease, to a certain extent, are essentially crying poured
(28:06):
into the mold of language, becomes a mode of speaking
and a way to bait our words with the un
ignorable power of a crying infant left out in the cold.
So anytime you hear a caregiver and a child speaking
to each other, it's essentially two individuals crying at each
other with words. Man. That's that's my my take home
(28:29):
on all this. That's profound or disturbing. You know that
this is a grown up in a child just crying
at each other, but it's crying that's complicated by language. Well,
I imagine that's a lot of what's happening a lot
of the time in a in a household with children,
because I mean, the presence of children just ups the
(28:49):
stakes in every possible way, right, Like suddenly when you've
got a kid with you, things that would normally be
maybe a little bit frustrating can become dire. Suddenly this
is so important. Yeah, and then everything's just harder getting
out the door, harder to do. Yeah. I mean you
saw when I was over there for Halloween, Bastim just
(29:09):
getting back out of out of your house and leaving
for the evening. Is is this this whole ordeal that
has to be coordinated with with with with Noel and
his daughter leaving, and we're both leaving at the same time,
so that nobody's unfair. It's not unfair. Everybody's got a
completely equal shake. In the end of Halloweing, you know,
(29:30):
I was wondering about the question of why inherently we
find whining and crying so unbearable, Like you'll do anything
to make it stop. Uh, And you see this a
lot of times, parents just caving into what seemed like
ridiculous demands from their children just to make the whining stop.
And I wonder. I mean, one obvious thing is that
(29:51):
it's fear of social embarrassment. Right, Like you're out in
public and your kids starts whining, and you know you're
you're embarrassed. Everybody is looking at you. You feel like
you're annoying everyone, and and that's a problem. But it
seems like, uh, this would only make sense for whining
and crying in public. Public situations might sort of increase
the urgency of our need to stop the whining. But
I imagine it still happens in private. You're in the
(30:14):
privacy of your own home, and still the child is
whining and you need to make it stop. Oh yeah, yeah,
it didn't matter if anybody's listening. Just whine. You just
the whining must stop. Please stop the whining. Tell me
what you need to tell me in a normal voice,
and we'll discuss it rationally. One hypothesis that I know
I've read somewhere before. Before the episode, I was trying
to figure out where I had read this, and I can't.
(30:38):
I'm wondering if it was in um one of Richard
Dawkins biology books from years ago, you know, like if
it was in The Selfish Gene or The Blind Watchmaker.
But there there is an example of how sort of
the generational evolutionary arms race between parents and offspring. And
(31:00):
one of one of the examples to us there was
about piercing bird chirps. What's happening when a chick in
a bird's nest chirps with this piercing tone until it
gets fed or gets the attention it needs, gets the
help or whatever it wants from the parent. I know
(31:20):
one possible way you could think about this is that
the chick is threatening death. The chick is saying, I'm
going to keep getting louder and higher pitched until I'm
threatening to draw predators to the nest, and you must
give me what I want or I'm going to kill
us all. I I don't know if you can pourt
(31:43):
that kind of intuition to thinking about human crying, but
it makes a certain kind of intuitive sense. I mean,
I couldn't begin to say that that's actually the explanation.
It seems like there are a lot of factors involved there,
But is that sort of the deep biological feeling of
what's happening when when you're a parent and your child
is whining, do you feel predators approaching? Do you feel
(32:06):
doom looming in? Uh? Maybe a little bit. Maybe. I
often think about Corman McCarthy's The Road and uh, you know,
the father and son hiding in the bushes, hoping that
the villains don't discover them, the cannibals. And I'm thinking,
you know, if over there with my son, he might
start whining about something, and then what am I gonna do? Yeah?
(32:27):
Do I just got I have to give in completely
to the whining, otherwise the cannibals will eat us. That's
why you gotta carve those wood bullets. That's why you
gotta do it and put up a good bluff. So
we know this is a topic that almost all of
you're gonna have some feedback on. If you're a parent,
if you're you just had siblings, are you just around
kids at any point in the course of your life, Uh,
then you're gonna want to share your thoughts in this
(32:48):
so hey, and you can always finds stuff about your
mind dot com. That's where we'll find Our podcast episodes
are video or blog coast and Hey, if you want
to reach out to us via email, how can you
do it, Joe? You can let us know your thoughts
about the science of whining or your favorite personal whining
and crying story. It blow the mind. It how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
(33:17):
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
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