But, Mom! The Science of Whining

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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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, 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

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,

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, 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 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 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, 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

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, 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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

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

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, 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 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 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

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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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

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 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.

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 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 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 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

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? 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 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 other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.