Jess Moyer and her metaphors from our first episode still have me thinking. Tilling the soil for social change. Not persuading, not convincing, but rather creating the conditions for new ways of thinking to grow. But what exactly are we tilling? What lies beneath the surface that needs turning over? What happens when individualism tells us that a child's outcomes are solely about their parents' choices? When "care matters most" shrinks what children need down to the walls of a single home? And if narratives are patterns in stories, and framing is about the choices we make in telling those stories, how do we actually make those choices? What does it look like to be intentional about the soil we're preparing? Understanding these concepts is just the beginning. Today, Jessica Moyer, Senior Principal Strategist at the FrameWorks Institute, joins me in studio as my co-pilot on our journey to go deeper into the mechanics of narrative change. How do we actually do this work? What are the communication traps that keep us stuck? And how can we make strategic choices in our framing that shift culture and policy? If you've been wondering how to apply these ideas in your work, your conversations, or your community, this is the episode where we dig into the how. Welcome to Episode 2: "We Need Both": The Science and Stories of Strategic Communication
Overloaded: Understanding Neglect Season 4
Show Notes: Episode 2: “We Need Both”: The Science and Stories of Strategic Communication
Today’s episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):
Host: Luke Waldo
Experts:
00:00-04:22 – Luke Waldo - Jess Moyer and her metaphors from our first episode still have me thinking. Tilling the soil for social change. Not persuading, not convincing, but rather creating the conditions for new ways of thinking to grow.
But what exactly are we tilling? What lies beneath the surface that needs turning over?
Introduction to Jess Moyer and her bio.
I'm honored that Jess has joined us again to serve as my copilot for breaking down and analyzing some of the powerful narrative change efforts that we are hearing this season from many of our other guests. But before we get into some of that conversation, let's start again with what Jess and FrameWorks Institute do and why it's so important in this moment we are living in.
4:22-6:26 – Jessica Moyer – “FrameWorks is a social science research and advocacy organization. We study the relationship between culture and communication, how each of those things kind of shapes and is shaped by the other. And we are really interested in how we can use our communications to engage with how we think as a culture in our sort of shared cultural practices. Our mission is about framing the public discourse and building public will for positive social change.”
6:26-8:03 – Luke Waldo – Could you elaborate on the difference between a story or an anecdote about a family, for example, and a narrative that pattern of stories? And how does a strategically framed story interrupt an entrenched, harmful narrative?
8:03-10:07 – Jessica Moyer – “Each of those stories, it fills in the details in their own particular ways, but there are common patterns across those stories, and that that commonality is the shared narrative.”
The “Bootstraps” narrative and The Pursuit of Happyness.
10:07-10:40 – Will Smith - “and don't ever let somebody tell you you can't do something, not even me. All right. You got a dream. You got to protect it. People can't do something themselves. They want to tell you, you can't do it. You want something. Go get it. Period.”
10:40-11:52 – Jess Moyer – “I think an important takeaway here is that it's an insight of the work of narrative change, that we can make some choices. It sometimes seems inevitable that a story gets told in the way that it does, but actually we can tell the same story in so many different ways, and the different ways that we tell it have different implications for how we think in general and can bring about different effects.”
11:52-12:25 – Luke Waldo – I'm going to use an example that I just heard from Claudia Rowe, who wrote a book called Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care. And she talks about a similar Pursuit of Happiness and bootstraps story in which a young man in foster care enters foster care when he's 11,12 years old…
12:25-15:13 – Claudia Rowe and Luke Waldo – The story of Jay and the mentor
15:13-16:10– Luke Waldo – But I'm curious, why do we either ignore that part of the story, right, that that in many ways, our success is as much an outcome of the other people in our lives that believe in us, that invest in us, that lift us up, that pick us back up, right? That, that they, they, they help us put those boots on so that we can pull ourselves up by those bootstraps, right? Why is that part of the story often times ignored, or, for that matter, in some cases, just not told?
16:10-20:03 – Jessica Moyer – “The individualism mindset is so strong and so dominant, it's really easily activated.”
“I think it's also, I mean, it's interesting to think about that person's story and the alternative tellings that are, that maybe require a little bit more work, because we have to get we have to first recognize what the default thinking is, and then actively choose to take a different approach, to try to understand what are the other mindsets that are available that we might want to work hard to to queue up and to build on.”
20:03-21:10 – Luke Waldo – We have to be cognizant of the fact that there are many dominant narratives oftentimes at play in the same moment.
We're put in a position where we if we want to get to curious, we have to really start to ask ourselves, why all of those particular narratives are being triggered in the first place, right?
21:10-22:01 – Claudia Rowe and Luke Waldo – “And as Claudia Rowe, again, said quite a bit in our conversation, is she wanted to tell this story because she was continuously struggling with, she's always been struggling with these, you know, these monikers, these, these frames of she talked about the monster…”
22:01-22:57 – Luke Waldo – So what is the single most common and harmful framing choice you see advocates make when talking about issues like child welfare or family well-being, and what specific framing choice or choices could or should replace it?
22:57-27:02 – Jessica Moyer – “…some framing choices are harmful, but they're actually a whole lot more of them that are just maybe not actively harmful, but kind of get us stuck, or kind of fail to get us unstuck.”
Communication traps.
27:02-29:24 – Luke Waldo – So in the season, we've heard from Dr Bruce Perry. He talks in in his conversation, and again, hear this whole conversation at The Shift, but he does talk at one point about how people have really connected when he talks about about the brain, the brain feels like science…
29:24-29:46 - Dr. Bruce Perry – “…because the brain's interesting, and for many people, it feels and this is probably not fair, but it feels more like science than when you talk about social science or psychology, which a lot of people have weird biases about. We're saying the same thing. But if you use kind of brain examples, people go, Oh, the brain.”
29:46-30:23 - Luke Waldo – Building off what you just said from a FrameWorks perspective, what is the value of kind of explanatory metaphors, again, like tilling the soil for social change, while also really pairing it or supporting it with concrete science or research or evidence? And do you feel like either the kind of metaphors, the storytelling or the concrete science is more powerful in changing culture and mindsets?
30:23-34:11 – Jessica Moyer – “That's a great question and a fun one to answer, and I'm I think the short answer is that we need both. We absolutely need both to bring science into our communications. And metaphors are a natural way of thinking and talking. We use them all the time, oftentimes without even realizing that we're using them. But also, an interesting thing is, like you sort of alluded to, metaphors are really, are an effective explanatory tool, and that makes them really well suited to translating science. In fact, the earliest work that FrameWorks did was to translate the science of early childhood development the science of brain development, you know, starting in in the earliest days and weeks of life.”
34:11-35:07 – Luke Waldo – So how do you recommend communicators, or how do you recommend that communicators practically do this without losing kind of the human element of the story? And what specific details or contextual factors should we always put in and never leave out?
35:07-37:17 - Jessica Moyer – “I think of it as being about telling a fuller story about people and about our lives and experiences, because we we don't, we don't exist in a vacuum, right? We interact with our surroundings, and we're influenced by our environments, and we influence our environments, and we're shaped by our relationships and the spaces that we occupy. So that's part of putting parents or putting anyone in context is sharing the full kind of experience of their being and everything that they come in contact with and are in relationship with.”
37:17-37:49 - Luke Waldo – What are a few examples of policies or programs that become kind of legible or good examples of forms of caregiving when framed this way? And you know, for one instance, one that we talk about a lot in our work. How do we reframe a discussion about, say, housing assistance as a form of care?
37:49-40:48 – Jessica Moyer – “I think just by making the connection explicit, and that doesn't have to be a complicated framing choice. Oftentimes really subtle, kind of seemingly very minor, framing choices can have big impacts. In this case, it really matters if we name that there's a connection between, for example, housing policies and the well-being of children, and it's not that hard for folks to see. And also that that lexicon of care, the language of caregiving, is an effective way to do that gives us some tools for doing that.”
40:48-41:42 – Luke Waldo – Desmond Meade in particular speaks really powerfully about how narratives of the other or them can lead to the dehumanization or demonization of groups of people. He then talks about reframing and building a narrative to activate a sense of us, and he does that through this idea of love.
41:42-42:00 - Desmond Meade – “How I push it up is having people see a reason to love someone. No, I think the key is, if we can get people to love who, what they despise the most, or who they hate the most, then they're capable of loving everyone.”
42:00-42:31 – Luke Waldo – First, what do you believe is the strategic risk of telling a story that is too focused on the problem, on tragedy or even deep pain and suffering? And then you know, is there well, by focusing too heavily on need rather than possibility, does that inadvertently reinforce this harmful us versus them or other narrative?
42:31-43:27 – Jessica Moyer – “So the first thing is that when I mean I actually am really inspired by Trabian Shorters, who you may know, and I'm guessing lots of listeners know, who says this part much more beautifully than I'll be able to right now…”
43:27-43:59 - Trabian Shorters – “I don't run around believing I'm an at risk this, or a low income that, or a high poverty, high crime, like no one carries around those labels, thinking that's how I'm going to face the world. Right? People think about is I want to maybe go to school. I want to maybe someday own a home. I want to maybe possibly get out of this neighborhood, or come back to this neighborhood and build. Whatever that person's aspiration is, if you haven't bothered to acknowledge that aspiration before you engage them, then you've made them an object in the sentence. They are a thing to be dealt with, to be moved, to be manipulated. They are not a person.”
43:59-47:15 – Jessica Moyer – “Even when it is well intentioned, and even when it taps into kind of a sense of concern or sympathy, it also reinforces that idea that there's an us and there's a them, and there's a critical distinction between those two things. It has a way of kind of making us feel different and apart and as if our interests are conflicting rather than shared.”
“That's an easy mindset to queue up and a really, really unhelpful one. There are alternative mindsets, though, and and the good news is there are ways to navigate around that thinking and to kind of push it into the background and to build understanding about our interconnection, our interdependence, the how well being is shared and mutually reinforcing.”
47:15-49:39 - Luke Waldo - How do we tell stories?
What stories do we tell when we see someone struggle?
Do we see a bootstraps story, a lone individual overcoming odds, or do we see the mentor who showed them a different path to school? The program that made that mentorship possible? The design of the neighborhood that made one route dangerous and another safe?
Do we focus on problems until people feel fatalistic, or do we till the soil for something new to grow? Do we play in someone else's frame, or do we set the terms of the conversation ourselves?
I would like to again thank Prevent Child Abuse America for their partnership and the opportunity to co-host their podcast, The Shift: Voices of Prevention, at their 2025 national conference. If you’d like to hear the full episodes where the many voices and clips that you heard today came from, find The Shift wherever you listen to this podcast or you can find the links above.
In our next episode, we turn inward to examine those internal scripts. We'll hear from the powerful thought leaders and changemakers that you heard in episode 1 from my collaboration with Prevent Child Abuse America and interviews from The Shift. And we'll explore how these personal stories scale up to become the very foundations of our systems.
49:39 – Luke Waldo – Closing Credits
Join the conversation and connect with us!
Luke Waldo 00:14
Welcome to season 4 of Overloaded: Understanding Neglect, where we explore how stories and narratives shape what we believe and how we act, and how we might tell different stories that change the narrative so that all children and families can thrive.
Hey everyone, this is Luke Waldo, your host for this podcast series and the Director of Program Design and Community Engagement for the Institute for Child and Family Well-being, our partnership between Children’s Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.
Jess Moyer and her metaphors from our first episode still have me thinking.
Tilling the soil for social change. Not persuading, not convincing, but rather… creating the conditions for new ways of thinking to grow.
But what exactly are we tilling? What lies beneath the surface that needs turning over?
What happens when individualism tells us that a child's outcomes are solely about their parents' choices? When "care matters most" shrinks what children need down to the walls of a single home?
And if narratives are patterns in stories, and framing is about the choices we make in telling those stories, how do we actually make those choices? What does it look like to be intentional about the soil we're preparing? Understanding these concepts is just the beginning.
Today, Jessica Moyer, Senior Principal Strategist at the FrameWorks Institute, joins me in studio as my co-pilot on our journey to go deeper into the mechanics of narrative change. How do we actually do this work? What are the communication traps that keep us stuck? And how can we make strategic choices in our framing that shift culture and policy?
If you've been wondering how to apply these ideas in your work, your conversations, or your community, this is the episode where we dig into the how.
Welcome to Episode 2: "We Need Both": The Science and Stories of Strategic Communication
Jessica Moyer is an environmental sociologist and geographer who has been a member of the FrameWorks team since 2017. As Senior Principal Strategist, she combines her experience as a civic-minded researcher with her passion for teaching and commitment to social justice advocacy.
Prior to joining FrameWorks, Jess worked with several social, environmental, and community arts organizations, including The Race Equality Centre, where she provided advocacy support to Black, minority ethnic, immigrant, and asylum seeking communities; The Mighty Creatives, where she matched aspiring young artists from underserved communities with job placements in the culture scene; and the Center for Marine Resource Studies in the Turks and Caicos Islands, where she coordinated conservation, education, and community-building initiatives. Jess has also conducted research in Costa Rica and the Philippines, as well as taught at universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. In 2019, she co-produced two short-length films, entitled Our Home and The Saving Tree, both of which highlight Filipina women’s relationships to the environment and were shortlisted for Research in Film Awards by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Welcome. Jess, thank you for joining us today. It's wonderful having you again on the podcast.
Jessica Moyer
It's great to be here.
So, Jess, we open this season with your expertise and the work that you do at the FrameWorks Institute by clearly defining the essential parts and the roles of narrative change, from stories and narratives to mental models and framing, before diving into some dominant narratives and how we might till the soil for transformational narrative change. I'm honored that you have joined us again to serve as my copilot for breaking down and analyzing some of the powerful narrative change efforts that we are hearing this season from many of our other guests. But before we get into some of that conversation, let's start again with what you and FrameWorks Institute do and why it's so important in this moment we are living in.
Jessica Moyer 04:22
Sure. So FrameWorks is a social science research and advocacy organization. We study the relationship between culture and communication, how each of those things kind of shapes and is shaped by the other. And we are really interested in how we can use our communications to engage with how we think as a culture in our sort of shared cultural practices. Our mission is about framing the public discourse and building public will for positive social change. So we do that work with lots of different social justice advocates on a range of issues, and long term social and cultural change is really the goal. I guess I would say that that work is always important.
It's, you asked why it's especially important in this moment. And I think we are, we're sort of in a inflection point in our history. In a lot of ways, there have been others in the past too. We can think about, you know, the civil rights era or the World War Two era. We're in a moment right now where culture is kind of changing at a pace that's a little bit faster than normal. A lot of things are happening within the span of just a handful of years. We've experienced a global pandemic. We've experienced a kind of heightened attention to how many people of color die at the hands of law enforcement, and the kind of racial reckoning that's gone along with that. And we're seeing kind of an overhaul of a lot of our social structures with the current administration's kind of questioning of norms that have been accepted by both parties for a very, very long time.
So there's a lot that's in flux, I guess, to put it in a nutshell, so it's a real opportunity to be analyzing our culture, thinking about our culture, and how we communicate and make sense of it, both in the present and also how doing that sense making has implications for where we go from here and what happens in the future.
Luke Waldo 06:26
I really appreciate that kind of historical perspective, right, and the and the urgency in this particular historical moment, right? Because I it resonated with me as I was conceptualizing this season of the podcast, and it was just, I just continued to come back to the urgency of real narrative change and challenging some dominant narratives that have caused real harm, or if they haven't caused harm, they've led to us being stuck in a way that that, I guess in many ways, made it very difficult for us to make the progress necessary to ensure that all children and families can thrive, right? And that's really at the heart of this podcast, and the underlying initiative that really drives this podcast. So I appreciate you naming that right at the beginning of this conversation.
So as we kind of level set moving into the rest of this season that has moved really from this kind of opening narrative arc of confronting dominant narratives, which you lent your voice very powerfully, to really kind of define what narrative is, what its power is, and what the potential is for narrative change. And in those early episodes, you say narratives are kind of patterns in stories, and that stories are the building blocks of our reality. Could you elaborate on the difference between a story or an anecdote about a family, for example, and a narrative that pattern of stories? And how does a strategically framed story interrupt an entrenched, harmful narrative?
Jessica Moyer 08:03
Sure, it's a great question, because there's so much to unpack there, and also so much that we can do with those two concepts and the relationship between the two of them. Here's how we think about it, at FrameWorks, narrative is the general template, and story is a particular telling. It's, I think, helpful to kind of parse out those concepts with an example. Examples are always kind of illustrative and help explain.
So if we take a really well known narrative, the narrative the bootstraps narrative, that's a really familiar one, and it goes something like this. There's a person who's, you know, down on their luck. They're facing a various obstacles or barriers, but they kind of, they push through, they find a way to overcome, and in the end, they succeed. That's the sort of gist of the bootstraps narrative that is a really well-established pattern in our public discourse, and it's reinforced and kind of reproduced through a whole host of lots of different individual stories. Each of those stories, it fills in the details in their own particular ways, but there are common patterns across those stories, and that that commonality is the shared narrative.
So you can probably think of, off the top of your head, some of those stories that sort of reinforce the bootstrap narrative. One that I is kind of a go to for me, that I think makes the point really well is, have you seen the movie The Pursuit of Happyness, starring Will Smith? Oh, yeah, yeah. So that's, that's one. It's a story about a for those who haven't seen it a story about a man. It's based on a true story, actually, but Chris Gardner, who's a single father and struggling door to door salesman for a while, and over the course of the movie, we see him face lots of different obstacles and kind of hardships, but he is committed to building a better life for himself and son, and he does that…
Pursuit of Happyness 10:07
… and don't ever let somebody tell you you can't do something, not even me. All right. You got a dream. You got to protect it. People can't do something themselves. They want to tell you, you can't do it. You want something. Go get it. Period.
Jessica Moyer 10:40
In the end, he lands a really kind of lucrative position with a financial institution, I think, and becomes this famous, you know, motivational speaker and multi-millionaire and philanthropist. So that that's one story that reflects and also reinforces the bootstrap narrative. So narrative is the template that particular story is one telling, and it's really the way that stories get told that determines which broader narrative it reinforces and kind of belongs to, more so than the content of the story itself, so we could pick apart kind of the different framing choices within that story.
I think, I think an important takeaway here is that it's an insight of the work of narrative change, that we can make some choices. It sometimes seems inevitable that a story gets told in the way that it does, but actually we can tell the same story in so many different ways, and the different ways that we tell it have different implications for how we think in general and can bring about different effects.
Luke Waldo 11:52
So yeah, so it's really interesting, and I did want to dive into this a little bit further. So you used The Pursuit of Happyness example. I'm going to use an example that I just heard from Claudia Rowe, who wrote a book called Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care. And she talks about a similar Pursuit of Happiness and bootstraps story in which a young man in foster care enters foster care when he's 11,12 years old…
Claudia Rowe 12:25
…who is Jay and he's in New York City…
Luke Waldo 12:28
…very shortly thereafter, ends up running with gangs, ends up becoming very violent in those gangs, primarily out of survival, is assaulted within inches of his life,
Claudia Rowe 12:39
…beaten so bad he thought he was going to die. He woke up in the hospital. He thought he would be…
Luke Waldo 12:43
…is 17 years old. Is in his fourth High School.
Claudia Rowe 12:47
Fourth High School. He's 17 years old, and, you know, nobody thinks he's even going to graduate high school. I mean, this is his fourth High School. It's not looking good, right? But just kind of by happenstance, there's a 23-year-old youth advocate at this last chance High School. She's 23 she's not some seasoned professional. She doesn't have degrees or years of training, nothing. It's her first job out of college. She's from a totally different world. She comes from a world of, you know, comparative privilege, especially compared to Jay, right? She's an educated young woman you know in her first job. So Jay is on her caseload, and she finds out in talking to him, that he never goes to school because he's afraid of being jumped by a rival gang set on the way to school. So that's their connection.
They go, they sit in her office. Her name is Anna. They sit in Anna's office with other staff all around, it's not some cushy therapy room, it's a tiny office in the last chance High School, and they sit, and they look at Google Maps and they devise new routes for Jay to get to school so that he can vary his path and not be a target. That's it. They work together for nine months. It's not even that long and it's not that deep, right? She knows Jay has told her about his fears, about foster care, about all of it, but that's it.
And she says to him, you know, I think not only are you going to graduate, I think you could go to college because your test scores are actually quite good, especially considering you never go to school. So I think we could do something here. And Jay is like, Well, yeah, anything to get me out of New York City, that's his primary interest. He's just gonna go. He doesn't really believe her. He's just gonna go along with it, because get out of New York City, try to escape this gang life.
In fact, yes, Jay does graduate. Jay does go to college. Right before Wards of the State was published, a month before it came out, just this past spring, I watched Jay defend his dissertation and earn a doctorate. He got a PhD! It's only 10 years later. This is the narrative of the kid that's irredeemable. You can't do anything. You can't connect with them when they've had so much trauma, it's too late. He's 17 years old already. No, not true. And it's not me saying this. It's Jay who told me the change happened with her in that office,
Luke Waldo 15:13
…that there is, that's what I'm talking, there is a different story. And why? Why is it that we, one, Because oftentimes these stories, by the way, are told right? If you watch The Pursuit of Happyness, there are people that believe in Chris Gardner. There are people that give him a chance, that give him right, give him an opportunity, open those doors and say, We believe in you. We're going to let you show up each and every day to prove yourself. And now, of course, he has to prove himself. But I'm curious, why do we either ignore that part of the story, right, that that in many ways, our success is as much an outcome of the other people in our lives that believe in us, that invest in us, that lift us up, that pick us back up, right? That, that they, they, they help us put those boots on so that we can pull ourselves up by those bootstraps, right? Why is that part of the story often times ignored, or, for that matter, in some cases, just not told?
Jessica Moyer 16:10
Yeah, that's, that's a million dollar question. I think there are lots of answers to it, and I think here's one, one place to start. We've talked, you and I have talked about the fact that we hold cultural mindsets. That doesn't mean we all despite sharing a culture that we all think in the same ways, but there are kind of models of reasoning that we all have access to, that we're all influenced by in some way, and that shape our kind of collective thinking, and some of those mindsets are so much stronger, much more dominant, much more easily activated than others.
The individualism mindset is so strong and so dominant, it's really easily activated. It's activated even when we're kind of thinking about our own stories and processing our own, you know, the reasons for our own outcomes. Sometimes, when we're telling our own stories, that's a mindset that's being activated. It's activated by cultural content producers and entertainers and artists when they're producing content. It's activated in us as audience members when we're receiving content and making sense of it and incorporating it into our understanding of the world and how it works. So it kind of gets activated by lots of folks in lots of different ways, at multiple different steps in this process of communication and storytelling.
I think it's also, I mean, it's interesting to think about that person's story and the alternative tellings that are, that maybe require a little bit more work, because we have to get we have to first recognize what the default thinking is, and then actively choose to take a different approach, to try to understand what are the other mindsets that are available that we might want to work hard to to queue up and to build on. So I'm just thinking about other, other kind of components of the story, other other tellings, other possible tellings of the same person, story and journey.
And you, one thing you, you already mentioned, is this mentor, this other person in his life who made a huge impression and who helped him in these really tremendous ways. There's, there's another story, like, if we zoom out even one a little bit more, we can think about, like, mentorship programs. What does that look like if we kind of scale up and make that kind of thing available to lots of different folks and and put some resources and some funding behind it? And, or even, like, the the two different paths that he walked to school, the one that he he was trying to avoid, and then the new one that she kind of introduced him to. There's, I think, an interesting story to be told there about how places are designed, and what the what those two different routes looked like, what was along them, what determined how they ended up having the different sort of, you know, physical features that they had, or what made it one dangerous and the other one less so? Or whatever there's, there's a whole story about place to be told there that would again, give some kind of broader relevance to the story that the real hazard is.
And we've seen this because we've tested sort of individual versus kind of wide angle lens stories in lots of different ways, and telling those individual stories has a certain resonance. There's something familiar about it, in part, because it's queuing up those mindsets that we hold so strongly, but they tend to lead us to draw conclusions about that particular person, rather than about the context more broadly, or the policies more broadly, or the rather than understanding what's happening at a societal level in ways that feel relevant in a collective sense, rather than just to that specific person and their specific journey of kind of beating the odds, yeah.
Luke Waldo 20:03
So what I'm hearing from you, and, well, there's a number of things I'm hearing from you, but one is, we have to be cognizant of the fact that there are many dominant narratives oftentimes at play in the same moment, right? And that that is one kind of reinforcing some preconceived notions, right? Like I see, I see this young man, he may be of a particular race, or he may be living in poverty, and so I've got some dominant narratives that are triggered when it comes to that type of person, one, but then also the situation they be maybe living in, or the experience they may have, he's been involved in gangs and so on. So that triggers another set of dominant narratives and so on, and so it right?
We're put in a position where we if we want to get to curious, we have to really start to ask ourselves, why all of those particular narratives are being triggered in the first place, right? And as Claudia Rowe, again, said quite a bit in our conversation, is she wanted to tell this story because she was continuously struggling with, she's always been struggling with these, you know, these monikers, these, these frames of she talked about the monster…
Claudia Rowe 21:10
…monster. This person is a monster.
Luke Waldo 21:12
She did a lot of reporting on crime for many years, and always used these, this language around…
Claudia Rowe 21:17
monsters, sociopath, psychopath, sort of used very casually…
Luke Waldo 21:20
and she it was just never good enough for her.
Claudia Rowe 21:23
What does monster mean? That is not explaining anything to me.
Luke Waldo 21:27
She wanted to understand why somebody would commit the crime they would commit. And there, as you pointed out, right, there are lots of different ways people come to that moment in their life.
Claudia Rowe 21:36
Why does a girl on the run shoot a guy in his car on a cold night in Seattle? Exactly why? Because this narrative of monster or sociopath is, to me, so limiting, it doesn't tell me about sort of a human and their history and how we got here, so that we maybe don't have to be here again.
Luke Waldo 22:01
And it just requires that we push ourselves to to be curious, right, to try to to understand how we've come to these dominant narratives and what alternatives exist. And so I want to get into how we get that, because a lot of that we've already talked about right in the the opening episodes, we've talked a lot about dominant narratives, I do want us to kind of spend a lot of our conversation moving forward on reframing right, on building new and better narratives, right that have better outcomes for children and families in particular.
So the concept of framing, as I just mentioned involves, as you said, lots of different choices in how we communicate. So what is the single most common and harmful framing choice you see advocates make when talking about issues like child welfare or family well-being, and what specific framing choice or choices could or should replace it?
Jessica Moyer 22:57
I like how you earlier talked about how some framing choices are harmful, but they're actually a whole lot more of them that are just maybe not actively harmful, but kind of get us stuck, or kind of fail to get us unstuck. That's another way to think about it, too. So there, there are lots that come to mind. I am trying to narrow it down.
So, I mean, I think one that won't surprise folks is just the focus on problems, and that's maybe something we will circle back to. There's a lot to say about that, but it's when we're wanting to create social change, it's really hard not to be focused on what needs changing and what's wrong. And that sort of makes sense in one sense. In fact, a lot of the things, a lot of the kind of framing choices that that get us stuck make sense on some level. They sort of they we sometimes refer to them as communications traps, because they don't work in the way that they seem like they should. There's it's sort of intuitive that we should talk this way, and it'll have this intended effect. And they're kind of a set of practices that just don't work the way they seem like they ought to, but that's one of them. Focusing on problems is something that lots of folks do, but, but backfires. It tends to lead folks to feel fatalistic or to disengage from issues, to sort of come to an acceptance that they are entrenched or or whatever the case may be.
Another one that I'll just mention briefly is a sort of ”less is more” approach to communications, or this is this particularly comes into play when folks are wanting to report out statistics, and there's kind of a tendency to think, let's just stick to the facts, we'll just give people the data, and then they'll be able to arrive at the conclusion for themselves, which never works the way we might think it should or would like it to. Numbers always require interpretation, and if we're not helping folks interpret the numbers, they're gonna make sense of them in ways that rely on their kind of current understanding to do that. So raw data tends to reinforce current thinking, whatever that may be.
I have one more that comes to mind, which is, I've seen maybe an uptick in it recently too, and I think it's kind of the tendency to I think of it as communicating from a defensive position when we sort of we know what we're up against, or we know what myths are out there that we want to bust, or we know where there's harmful thinking and we kind of want to we're tempted to get in there and kind of rebut or argue or persuade or challenge. That way of communicating, a colleague of mine, Dr. Julie Sweetland, has done a lot of thinking about this, and the way she talks about is it's playing in someone else's frame. But it has this, it’s unhelpful, because engaging in a conversation on terms that have been given to you means it has a way of giving oxygen to the wrong focus and sometimes even elevating the very points that you're wanting to refute or dismiss, or, you know, counteract.
So we say don't repeat the things that you would prefer people forget. Instead, kind of set the terms of the conversation. Think about what, what is it that's missing from the conversation currently that we want to introduce or to put on the radar to give some more oxygen to? Or what's more important than where the debate currently is that we want to draw attention to and shift towards thinking about? Knowing what we're up against is important, but returning to what it is that that our goals are and what we know deserves more attention, and kind of continually reminding ourselves to foreground that, I think, is a way to avoid that particular trap.
Luke Waldo 27:02
Well, I can't tell you how helpful already this conversation today, but just this, this entire journey on this season has been for me. I, you know, I've long been a communicator in my work, whether it's right, directly with the people that I've served early in my career, in, you know, in more of a mentor type role, right? And the impacts of of communication and inspiring others to see the best version of themselves to the work that I do now, whether it's on this podcast or just in presentation and so on. I am so guilty of the last, the last communication trap, especially in this kind of very polarized, a very politically charged, kind of socially charged environment that we live in. I'm often playing into somebody else's frame.
And the other piece that I've taken away from you thus far in these conversations is this kind of reframe around the tilling the soil metaphor is super powerful for me, because I've always thought of so much of my communication being rooted in persuasion, right? And especially in this moment, people are stuck, for better or worse, people are oftentimes stuck and trying to push them out of it from a place that lacks curiosity is or is starting with their frame and kind of, in many ways, reinforcing their frame is something that I fall into often.
The less is more is definitely not my problem, because, as you've already seen, I tend to struggle with concision and keeping things short and sweet, but points very well taken, right? And I think we'll hear that throughout this season, is that data is important at the Institute for Child and Family Well Being, which is where I work. You know, we root our work in data, in research, in evidence, but it cannot stand alone, right? People do not connect to, you know, raw data, but you can tell stories that reinforce that data, which I think is really important.
So, so I really appreciate that, and I do want to kind of build off that. So in the season, we've heard from Dr Bruce Perry. He talks in in his conversation, and again, hear this whole conversation at The Shift, but he does talk at one point about how people have really connected when he talks about about the brain, the brain feels like like science…
Dr. Bruce Perry 29:24
…because the brain's interesting, and for many people, it feels and this is probably not fair, but it feels more like science than when you talk about social science or psychology, which a lot of people have weird biases about. We're saying the same thing. But if you use kind of brain examples, people go, Oh, the brain.
Luke Waldo 29:46
Therefore it is, for some audiences, is just accepted more as as truth, right, when you root it in that. Building off of what you just said, right, from a FrameWorks perspective, what is the value of kind of explanatory metaphors, again, like tilling the soil for social change, while also really pairing it or supporting it with concrete science or research or evidence? And do you feel like either the kind of metaphors, the storytelling or the concrete science is more powerful in changing culture and mindsets?
Jessica Moyer 30:23
That's a great question and a fun one to answer, and I'm I think the short answer is that we need both. We absolutely need both to bring science into our communications. And metaphors are a natural way of thinking and talking. We use them all the time, oftentimes without even realizing that we're using them. But also, an interesting thing is, like you sort of alluded to, metaphors are really, are an effective explanatory tool, and that makes them really well suited to translating science. In fact, the earliest work that FrameWorks did was to translate the science of early childhood development the science of brain development, you know, starting in in the earliest days and weeks of life.
And it turned out, you know, we developed and tested a range of different metaphors and came up with a handful that really effectively do that work they, you know, metaphors work because they take something that is unfamiliar or really complex or abstract and then compare it to something that is much more familiar, much more accessible, simpler maybe. And when we can kind of map this new, abstract, complicated thing onto something that we understand really well and are already familiar with, then we it sort of makes the process of understanding the new thing and learning about it much more efficient. We can map the different features from one onto the other, and that works with, for example, the metaphor of brain architecture.
It's a really simple metaphor we all kind of understand when you build a house, you start with the foundation, and that has to be stable and secure so that you can build the walls on top of that. But that that metaphor has proved really effective in talking about brain science, talking about the early childhood development and how important early the fact that early matters, the fact that what we do first, really early on, has implications for everything that comes after that, for helping to explain that it's an active process, that there are multiple steps to it, that it's sequential. It's not just a thing that kind of happens on its own, that there's maintenance required, that repair is possible, that upkeep is a thing we need to think about, that you know that lots of different folks with different areas of expertise, different skills need to be part of that process anyway. It's a
Luke Waldo 32:49
I've always loved that, that metaphor. It's a great metaphor.
Jessica Moyer 32:53
Yeah, it's really effective and really, really resonant and easy to use too, because there's so many different kind of adjectives and verbs and nouns and kind of imagery, even symbols that we can pull out of it to to understand the much more complicated and also like, like you said like Dr Bruce Perry said, much more universal aspects of the science.
And I'll just say our research corroborates what he has said about how it is easier when we're when we shift the narrative away from an effort to kind of pull at folks' heartstrings or to talk about vulnerable children, and instead, we're talking about the brain science. We're making it a brain story that's something that's universal. It's something that nobody can kind of tap out or check out of that story or feel like it doesn't it's not about us, because it's we all have brains. We all went through that process. There's something that that makes it clear that this is about everybody, and it does have a way of kind of making the topic less politicized, but also more inviting we all kind of see ourselves in this story of how the brain develops and how our entire lifespans are shaped by those early years of brain development.
Luke Waldo 34:11
So I would like us to start shifting now from kind of the dominant, dominant harmful narratives that we discussed early in the season to again those better, better narratives, right, building those better narratives. And so in our opening episode, you discussed the “care matters most”, kind of mindset, right, which consequently frames negatively, framing it frames parents as the problem. And you suggest the effective narrative strategy is to really put parents in context right that parents are are many things and do many things. So how do you recommend communicators, or how do you recommend that communicators practically do this without losing kind of the human element of the story? And what specific details or contextual factors should we always put in and never leave out?
Jessica Moyer 35:07
I like how you framed the question here, because we don't want to lose that human element of the story that's really important. It's not about, you know, broadening our thinking beyond individual actions. It's not about pulling people out of the story. It's about, I think of it as being about telling a fuller story about people and about our lives and experiences, because we we don't, we don't exist in a vacuum, right? We interact with our surroundings, and we're influenced by our environments, and we influence our environments, and we're shaped by our relationships and the spaces that we occupy. So that's part of putting parents or putting anyone in context is sharing the full kind of experience of their being and everything that they come in contact with and are in relationship with.
So one more sort of like to get a little bit more concrete. One way to do that is, instead of talking about the particular behaviors or choices or decisions that an individual, in this case, parent or caregiver, makes. We can talk about the decision-making context. Like what made a particular decision so difficult, or what were the easier choices that were available? What were the choices that weren't available to that particular person? Why are different choices available to or not, or easier or more difficult for different folks in different places?
I think there's something about that incentive structure or in disincentive structure that is is really important, and it doesn't take anything away from the fact that we we do have individual agency, we do have collective agency, but there's a context in which we make the decisions that we make and engage in the behaviors that we engage in. And understanding that context is part of understanding who we are and why we do what we do and also diffuses some of that, that tendency to blame because we understand more of the causes that led to the consequences or outcomes.
Luke Waldo 37:17
So if we are to shift from this kind of individual level blame to the collective context, right or more of a collective caregiving reframe. What are a few examples of policies or programs that become kind of legible or good examples of forms of caregiving when framed this way? And you know, for one instance, one that we talk about a lot in our work. How do we reframe a discussion about, say, housing assistance as a form of care?
Jessica Moyer 37:49
Yeah. I mean, I think once we start thinking about this, the kinds of policies and programs that become relevant are limitless. We sort of see that all the decisions we make have implications for for children and families. They are what shape how society looks, which leads to all kinds of different outcomes.
So I mean, one, one thing is, I think just by making the connection explicit, and that doesn't have to be a complicated framing choice. Oftentimes really subtle, kind of seemingly very minor, framing choices can have big impacts. In this case, it's it really matters if we kind of name that there's a connection between, for example, housing policies and the well-being of children, and it's not that hard for folks to see. And also that that lexicon of care, the language of caregiving, is an effective, an effective way to do that gives us some tools for doing that.
So we can say, you know, ensuring that quality affordable housing is available in every community is a way that we help, we care for kids, and, you know, increase the stability and security of the environments that kids grow up in. That was a little bit clunky, because it's off the top of my head, but it's making the point. It's making the point that that, like housing policies affect family stability, which affects children, and people get that, but it's it's not the default understanding. In fact, housing is a policy that isn't typically thought of as, you know, a children's issue. And part of just naming children and naming housing in the same breath, and using that word caregiving or some related word, conjuring up that idea is a way to remind us what we already know, which is that children are among just, just like adults, children are affected by those housing policies.
And it's, it's, it's helpful for getting kind of inserting kids into the policies like around issues like housing and transportation and gun violence prevention and climate change and a whole bunch of other things. So making the connection between housing policies and children both helpfully inserts children in that policy conversation, helps us see that housing is an issue that has implications for the well-being of children, but it's also we have sort of a shared sense of responsibility towards children in a way that we don't for each other as adults. So it's an effective kind of entry point into tapping into our sense of commitment to each other and to the common good. It's talking about kids in a way that hopefully leads to a broader sense of shared responsibility for all of us to each other. It's a little bit easier to get there more quickly when we're talking about children.
Luke Waldo 40:48
Oh, agreed, absolutely. So, if we are to, if we're to achieve, or at least drive towards this kind of aspirational goal of creating a more effective narrative of collective responsibility, of shared responsibility, then we really are going to have to be honest about the fact that we have many us versus them or othering narratives in our lives. All of us. And there's a lot of different examples throughout this season, but Desmond Meade in particular speaks really powerfully about how narratives of the other or them can lead to the dehumanization or demonization of groups of people. He then talks about reframing and building a narrative to activate a sense of us, and he does that through this idea of love.
Desmond Meade 41:42
How I push it up is having people see a reason to love someone. No, I think the key is, if we can get people to love who, what they despise the most, or who they hate the most, then they're capable of loving everyone.
Luke Waldo 42:00
So I'm curious. First, what do you believe is the strategic risk of telling a story that is too focused on the problem, on tragedy or even deep pain and suffering? And then you know, is there well, by focusing too heavily on need rather than possibility, does that inadvertently reinforce this harmful us versus them or other narrative?
Jessica Moyer 42:31
Yes, yes and yes, I there's so much to say there. It's maybe worth even coming back to but I I'll try to touch on both of those two parts of the question. So the first thing is that when I mean I actually am really inspired by Trabian Shorters, who you may know, and I'm guessing lots of listeners know, who says this part much more beautifully than I'll be able to right now. But he talks about how we, none of us see ourselves as you know, primarily, our identities are not, you know, I'm a member of a vulnerable group, or I'm an at risk youth, or I'm a, you know, marginalized whatever. We that's not how we see ourselves, and there's something dehumanizing about choosing to see other people primarily by according to that identity.
Trabian Shorters 43:27
I don't run around believing I'm an at risk this, or a low income that, or a high poverty, high crime, like no one carries around those labels, thinking that's how I'm going to face the world. Right? People think about is I want to maybe go to school. I want to maybe someday own a home. I want to maybe possibly get out of this neighborhood, or come back to this neighborhood and build. Whatever that person's aspiration is, if you haven't bothered to acknowledge that aspiration before you engage them, then you've made them an object in the sentence. They are a thing to be dealt with, to be moved, to be manipulated. They are not a person.
Jessica Moyer 43:59
Even when it is well intentioned, and even when it taps into kind of a sense of concern or sympathy, it also reinforces that idea that there's an us and there's a them, and there's a critical distinction between those two things. It has a way of kind of making us feel different and apart and as if our interests are conflicting rather than shared.
So and there's, again, there's lots more to say about that, including how us/them thinking can slide into zero sum thinking, where we actually feel like supports and good things for a group that we don't belong to is somehow threatening to us, kind of by definition, taking something away from me and my group, again, a really harmful, toxic way of thinking about groups and identity and it's not how well being works.
Luke Waldo 44:59
Right, yeah, winners and losers. Right?
Jessica Moyer 45:02
Exactly, right. That's an easy mindset to queue up and a really, really unhelpful one. There are alternative mindsets, though, and and the good news is there are ways to navigate around that thinking and to kind of push it into the background and to build understanding about our interconnection, our interdependence, the how well being is shared and mutually reinforcing.
One thing is you mentioned need. The one thing around the idea of certain groups being needy, or people having particular needs that that have to be met, it can be really helpful to remember and to communicate that needs are universal. We all have essentially the same basic needs. The difference is not in more or less neediness, it's in the uneven delivery of care that takes care of those needs. It's a shifting of the, of the focus on responsibility here.
It's, in fact, it’s shifting to responsibility we're thinking about, how do we meet needs, whose needs are being met and whose needs are not being met, and why is that happening, and who's responsible, or what policies need to shift to make that care to be able to provide care more evenly across the board? And also that the unevenness and the delivery of care explains disparities and outcomes, whereas if we don't have that explanation of the causes built into our communications, then we again, you know, are susceptible to those traps of folks being blamed for their own circumstances or kind of looking for individual, individual choices that are bad behaviors as the cause of poor outcomes. But yeah, there are universal needs for care that we all share, and then there are significant disparities in how those needs are met, and that's where we have work to do.
Luke Waldo 47:15
How do we tell stories?
What stories do we tell when we see someone struggle?
Do we see a bootstraps story, a lone individual overcoming odds, or do we see the mentor who showed them a different path to school? The program that made that mentorship possible? The design of the neighborhood that made one route dangerous and another safe?
Do we focus on problems until people feel fatalistic, or do we till the soil for something new to grow?
Do we play in someone else's frame, or do we set the terms of the conversation ourselves?
I'll be honest, I fall into these communication traps all the time. Playing in someone else's frame, especially. But today, Jess reminded us that framing isn't manipulation, it's stewardship. Every choice we make in how we communicate either reinforces old narratives or opens space for new ones.
So here's the question: In your next conversation, your next presentation, your next story, what will you choose? Will you offer raw data, or will you help people interpret it? Will you focus on the problems, or will you show possibility? Will you see individual needs, or will you ask whose needs are being met and why? And how might you choose both?
And this brings us to another challenging truth.
The narratives we've been discussing aren't just out there in public discourse. They live inside us. They are the scripts we recite about ourselves, whether we belong, whether our voices matter, whether we have power. And they are the scripts we tell about others, who deserves help, who is us and who is them.
In our next episode, we turn inward to examine those internal scripts. We'll hear from the powerful thought leaders and changemakers that you heard in episode 1 from my collaboration with Prevent Child Abuse America and interviews from The Shift. And we'll explore how these personal stories scale up to become the very foundations of our systems.
Because before we can change the systems that serve families, we often have to rewrite the internal scripts that tell us we can't.
You've been listening to Overloaded: Understanding Neglect.
Until next time, keep asking: What stories shape how we see the world, and how can we tell them differently?
Closing Credits - Luke Waldo 49:39
If you enjoyed today's episode, please share with friends, family and colleagues. Also leave us a rating or comment so that we can see your reaction and reach more people.
This podcast would not have been possible without the support and talents of Nathan Fink, who is responsible for our technical production. I can't express my gratitude enough to Nathan.
I'm also grateful to my team at the Institute for Child and Family Well-being at Children's Wisconsin, who drive the Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative and contributed to the ideas behind this podcast.
Finally, I would like to thank all of our speakers that you have heard today and throughout the podcast for their partnership, their willingness to share their stories and expertise with me and all of you, and their commitment to improving the lives of children and families.
I'm Luke Waldo, your host and executive editor. Thanks again for listening and see you next time you.