The Science of Whining
Why kids do it and how to put an end to it.
I hope all of you had a lovely Thanksgiving. It was just the four of us this year, and we didn’t go anywhere. We ate fried chicken instead of turkey because three out of four of us don’t like turkey and we care more about enjoying ourselves than abiding by Thanksgiving rules. But even though our celebration was small, casual and relatively easy, there were moments yesterday when things certainly didn’t feel easy. Even when you scale things down, the holidays still elicit plenty of feelings and emotional labor.
If your kids are home and you’re managing various family stressors this weekend, you are probably looking for ways to make your life easier. You may, among other things, be asking yourselves, “Why the hell does my kid whine all the time and what can I do to make it stop?”
I’m here for you, folks. I read as many papers as I could find about whining earlier this week (yes, I now have a work folder titled “whining”) so that I could share some tips with you today.
Whining is extremely common and peaks between the ages of 2.5 and 4. We all know the sound of a whine when we hear it, but researchers describe it as a vocalization that is typically higher in pitch and louder and slower than normal talking. It often has elongated vowels, exaggerated pitch contours and is sometimes excessively nasal. (I have found from my own personal experience that whines usually include the words “But moooom!!”)
As for why kids do it, that part is easy: Whining is extremely effective at getting our attention. In a 2010 study, researchers asked subjects to ignore various noises, some of which included the sound of people whining. They found that listeners had a very hard time ignoring the whining sounds and tended to remember what was said in a whiny voice far more than they remembered words said in a neutral voice. They even found that whining was more attention-grabbing than the sound of a loud table saw catching on wood.
So even though we hate our kids’ whines, they get the job done. Whines get us to listen to and respond, which is exactly what our kids want — and which is why they continue to whine over and over and over and over again until we want to stab ourselves.
How do we get them to stop, then? One common bit of parenting advice is to ignore whining, but I haven’t found this approach to work very well. My kids just come back with louder, more aggressive whines. (Plus, based on the study I just mentioned, it’s very, very hard to ignore whining, so even if you can successfully do it on occasion, you may not be able to do it consistently.)
Thankfully, when I dug into the research, I uncovered a few helpful tips, including one surprising evolutionary insight with implications I had never considered. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, you can take advantage of my 30% off flash sale (it ends today!) and keep reading.