Dr Sam Wass talks about filming for The Secret Life of 4 Year Olds

1 November 2016

Why do you think the show is so popular?

It speaks to everybody from a really, really wide range of backgrounds and there’s just so much to recognise at so many different levels.  Like the scene from the last series where the girls were leaving Tia out and she was so upset, we all felt absolutely awful for her. I identified with her massively because she was so 'heart on sleeve'. But also, there's that urge that so many of us have had when someone is alpha and popular and gets what they want and you think, 'Let's do her down'. Everyone has felt that at some point.

As adults, you have layers of inhibition that stop you from doing anything that's not socially appropriate. These children have the same urges, but not the layer of inhibitions.

A lot of super bright, super academic Cambridge neuroscientists have said to me that they really loved the show because it's so recognisable. The breadth of people it appeals to is amazing.

Why is this age range so interesting to you as an academic?

We're very keen to target this age range because they are going through this very, very rapid phase of learning. What we call 'brain plasticity' is very high in these children and it goes down as you get older. So the four year olds walk in on the first day and they're terrified and they completely ignore each other at first. But the five year olds walk in and go, 'Hi, I'm Sam', and shake hands with everyone. That's a massive difference.

The pilot and the first series often looked at the way children are beginning to learn adult behaviours. Does this series build on that?

Yes. So we look at behaviours like sensitivity, leadership and compassion, which they are just beginning to learn. Another one is over-confidence: one boy in particular says, 'I'm really good at that' before he's even tried it. And we've been looking at where that comes from. And the more you watch him, the more you realise it's the opposite of that. With this child it's under-confidence that drives him to boast, and that's why he needs the approbation of the group. And when haven't we all worked with someone like that in the office? It's interesting to see a version of that in a five year old.

Do our personalities ever fundamentally change, or are they fairly set in stone by this point?

I don’t know, so this is something that we’ve talked about a lot as well. We do see these children make big changes within a week or two. They can go from shy and withdrawn to being open. And they have rapid socialisation at this age and learn a lot from each other. But how much change is brought about by circumstance, we're not really sure.

Do you look at the differences between the genders?

Yes. When we started filming, I was very reluctant to talk about gender, because I wasn't sure how helpful it was. But it's impossible to avoid. Just a simple conversation about how often the word 'friend' is used. Girls are very aware of who's friends with who, and who isn't, much more strongly than the boys. In the nursery, we have stereotypically male and associatively female play objects, and you can often predict who's going to gravitate to which areas, but it’s always lovely to see those kinds of things being subverted.

For example, we've got a bunch of very tearful boys who really throw their toys out of the pram a lot.

The children often compete against each other in tasks that you set. Do you think competition is good for children or does it depend on their personality type?

It’s a very interesting, complex question; they definitely learn a lot from competition.

Children react very differently to it, so we talk a lot about emotional regulation: whether you’re very calm or very up and down in terms of your mood. If you think of children as being like a speedboat with a very powerful engine and a very small rudder, they tend to steer off very unpredictably in random directions. Some children have a bigger engine and a smaller rudder than others, so they will get more upset than others at losing at task, and will have to work harder to regulate their own emotions. For the children who consistently burst into tears on losing the task, it's harder, because they haven’t yet learnt to regulate. But you can’t go through life without losing from time to time, so those children do have to learn not to burst into tears all the time. It is tough on them but they potentially have the most to learn from competing and it's a good life lesson for them. People, who shy away from competition because they're scared of losing, miss out on so much.

Have you had a favourite task?

So, there’s something called the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, where you give adults a brick, a piece of string and a piece of cotton wool and you say how many different uses can you come up with for that? I've been desperate to try it out on our kids since the pilot, and we finally gave them a dustpan, a glow stick, and a piece of orange pipe. Adults can dry up on these tests very quickly but these kids take an object and one moment it's a frog and the next minute it's a shield, and they've really built a whole big story around these objects. That's lovely because it's a capacity that we’ve almost all of us lost by the time we’re adults. I kind of almost feel jealous of what they can do. They never stop coming up with ways to play. I hate this idea that you've got to make children more adult-like. Of course we have to teach them adult skills, but also I love to celebrate this playfulness that we innately have that fades out as we get older. We also did some tasks based around identity.

We had a bunch of children with some quite atypical identifies where what they felt like inside clashed with the way people were viewing them from the outside.

So for example, we had a disabled child who often had carers with her because she couldn't do certain things herself. So she was kind of forced into a dependent role, but that wasn't really her natural personality, so it was really interesting to try to understand how she was struggling to reconcile that. And then we had a boy who's got long hair, the other children often assume he's a girl, but he's actually a real boy's boy.

And there's another boy who seems super confident and is massively clever and speaks three languages but actually there's a lot of insecurities there. So we talked a lot about identity and that threw up some really interesting things. As part of that, we got the boys to dress up as their mums and the girls to dress up as their dads. And the girls were almost all talking about their dads being farty and smelly and giving discipline, whereas we got much more warmth with the boys talking about their mothers being nurturing.

How do you get on with the other experts?

It's lovely. We see things quite differently and we tend to explain things at very different levels. It's always a really fascinating dialogue to have. Elizabeth’s a clinician so she tends to think much more in terms of what people ask her when they’re worried about a child: is this a problem behaviour or not?

I’m a research scientist, an academic. . I'm all about understanding a child's behaviour at their own level. It's just different ways of understanding the same thing.

I also tend to think a lot in terms of the child's body biologically and how that's affecting their behaviour; Paul tends to be more psychological. I always get laughed at because when a child does something particularly off-putting, I always say 'I remember doing that'.

I never want to criticise a child. I can understand the state they’re in when they’re engaged in that kind of behaviour so I really am a big cheerleader for this role of chief empathiser with the children.

How helpful is your work on Secret Life for your day to day job?

Fantastically. I’m just starting a project that was directly inspired by watching the kids last year. I work mainly in terms of stress defined in a biological sense: how excited your body is, how fast your heart is beating, how much you’re moving and that kind of thing.

We do experiments in the lab where we bring children in and give them a standard stress reactivity measure, like watching a video of another child crying and measuring their physiological responses to that. But watching the children last year just made me realise you can’t just take one snapshot of a child and measure what they are.

What we do in Secret Life is watch how their excitement levels change throughout the day. When they are outdoors and it's quieter and they have more space, they can calmly interact really well, share, and behave socially appropriately. But indoors, in a noisy classroom environment, for some children that's stressful to the extent that their behaviour spirals out of control. Those manners fall away and they're more likely to go up and snatch something. Watching all of that last year directly inspired a grant that we’re just starting now, looking at the levels of background noise in the home environment and in the classroom environment and looking at how children’s excitement and arousal levels change in the course of the day. And we are looking at the idea that some children are more sensitive to this kind of thing than others.

Did you learn anything new from filming this series?

So, following on from this idea that children have different levels of sensitivity, we are looking at some quite recent research suggesting that children are all somewhere on the spectrum between 'orchid children' and 'dandelion children'. 

Orchids are sensitive and up and down in terms of mood, and dandelions are more even, stable children. There is research suggesting that orchid children tend to learn better.

In this series, we have a Wendy House and a lot of the children gang up and exclude another child from the Wendy House, which is classic behaviour. One way we cement a new friendship is to exclude other people. Some children react to this by wailing and getting upset then five minutes later, they're fine again.

But we had one girl who went away and thought about it a lot, and over the course of the next few hours you could see it had made a very big difference to her behaviour.

So we would guess that she is an orchid child, a very sensitive child, who registered this social setback very strongly and had a big reaction to it.And the research suggests that the people who feel these social setbacks very strongly are more likely to learn well from them. That's the kind of area I'm really interested in exploring.

Can parents at home learn anything about their children by watching?

Definitely. One area that we talk endlessly about in science, but haven't explored enough, is the importance of understanding what it feels like from a child’s point of view when they’re being oppositional, or not doing what they’re told to. This is what this programme is really uniquely positioned to give some more insight into. When a child doesn’t do what you want them to do, your reaction instinctively is to say, 'That must be because they don’t intellectually understand that it's kind to share' or whatever.

But what this programme does fantastically is to say, actually it's not because they don't understand they're supposed to share. Any four year old will parrot that it's kind to share.

If they don't do it, it's likely to be due to the emotional ups and downs of being a four or five year old, and just how exhausting it is to be in this kind of situation. From the child's point of view, they are going through a million new situations and constantly learning and developing, and they know the correct behaviour but it just slips sometimes. It's massively stressful for them to be in these new environments with these new people and actually these kids are so brave.