Art Creativity & Wellbeing

Today, we finish up our three-part series about the three best gifts you can give your children; we also finish out the year, so best wishes for 2016 to you and your family! In December's Just You and Me episodes, we've been Stopping the Holiday Insanity by focusing on gifts we can give our children, one episode per gift. The first two, Your Time and Ritual/Routine , help make family life run more...

Carey Andersen, Tuesday's guest in episode 45 , had so many wonderful and inspiring things to say; we can learn a lot from her positive approach to balancing family and work – and the fact that she does it all with multiple sclerosis. Our chat this past Tuesday isn't a prerequisite to today's Your Child Explained episode, where we always get right into the minds of our children and see what makes...

If you're listening to this the day this episode drops, it's three days before Christmas… in many parents' lives one of the busiest, most harried and frustrating days of the whole year. The laundry list of gifts for teachers, snacks for parties, plans for travel or hosting, endless shopping and wrapping certainly has me reaching for the chocolate vodka more often than is strictly necessary! If tha...

In today's Just You and Me episode, we jump into the second of the three best gifts you can give your kids In the previous Stop the Holiday Insanity episode, 41 (click here to listen), we talked about Time. Today in this second installment of Stop The Holiday Insanity we discuss the second of these three best gifts: Ritual. Growing up, every year around December 1 my Mom got out wrapping paper, sc...

Today's Your Child Explained episode – where we always try to get into the heads of our kids – is a little different. Usually, the Thursday YCE pertains to the previous Tuesday guest episode. This week, though, I wanted to share something a little different. Last night my husband and I got to attend a live presentation with interest-led learning expert Blake Boles. His most recent book, The Art of...

It can be tough to find time to read the paper on a Sunday morning. In fact, I generally don't finish it until much later in the week! But Sundays, I always find time for a favorite column, Miss Conduct, because author Robin Abrahams – stand-up comedian, doctor of research psychology, researcher at Harvard business school and professor of psychology and writing – shares great relationship advice i...

Today, the first of the three-part series about stopping the Holiday Insanity by using the three best gifts you can ever give your children, we dive into: Time. In each of the Just You and Me December episodes – today's, December 15, and December 29 – we talk about one of these three gifts. Today's is time! For the show notes to this episode, go to the We Turned Out Okay website by clicking this l...

Tuesday's guest – cartoonist and author Emily Flake – and I had a great conversation  ( although, full of swears and subject matter totally inappropriate for work or children – please take note :-) about modern parenting, but even with nearly an hour to talk we didn't cover everything I wanted to cover. Which leads to today's Your Child Explained, episodes in which we are always looking right into...

WARNING : Today's show is full of expletives and stuff you do not want your child to know about yet… please make sure to use headphones or listen away from the kiddos! It's an awesome show, just there are pieces of it that are totally not suitable for children :-) Today's guest is the wonderful and talented author and cartoonist/illustrator Emily Flake . She writes a weekly comic strip for grown-u...

Today's episode dives into the four best, most practical ninja tactics that I know and use every day to teach my boys right from wrong. Because, that's really what discipline is, isn't it? Teaching right from wrong – in my experience as a teacher and parent, positive discipline is not only the most user-friendly way to do this, but the most effective, too. Listen to the episode for details, but he...

In episode 36 – which aired this past Tuesday in real time – nursery school owner and director Tanya Trainor shared about the changes she, her staff, and the children they serve made to their playground. The traditional slides, climbers, and other big (pricey) equipment typically seen on the playground are gone, and in their place are what Tanya calls "loose parts." Tanya shares that loose parts o...

Today's episode was super fun to record because I got out of my usual studio and hung out at what's easily the most amazing playground I've ever seen. All of the equipment we see on a typical playground – huge climber, big slide, jungle gym – was gone, and in its place were loose pieces. Bricks, cement pavers, wooden siding, bales of hay, an 8 foot long rowboat, tree stumps suitable for sitting on...

Today is the first of a two parter, because the subject of positive discipline – how we teach our kids right from wrong – is such a biggie. In this first part, we talk about the mindset of positive discipline… Three things are required for us parents to get into this mindset: 1) a calm, quiet demeanor; yelling and screaming produces negativity, not to mention unhappy family members 2) making the p...

Podcast Episode 034: Why Do Kids Need to Play? A Your Child Explained Episode This past Tuesday, I had a great conversation with mom and licensed mental health counselor Janine Halloran of encourageplay.com . Janine specializes in facilitating play, and our conversation ranged from the benefits of play and how little is really required to encourage it, to how endangered open-ended play is in our s...

From the moment I first read her article on The Many Perks Of Play in the October 2015 issue of baystateparent, I knew I was going to have to talk to Janine Halloran. She explains everything there is to know about play and how it can benefit kids, in a really well-written and entertaining way. Janine graciously agreed to come on to the show, and our interview is really one of my favorites so far!...

As a kid, I loved Halloween.… But as the mom of young children, it used to scare the heck out of me! There is so much to worry about: pressures to spend money on costumes and decorations, what to do about all the candy coming into the house, helping our kids deal with their emotional fears. I decided to do an episode that's actually an audio kit to help you stop being scared by Halloween – because...

In today's Your Child Explained episode – where we always take a subject and look at it from within the mind of our kids – we figure out how to incorporate time for daydreaming into our kids' daily life. If you remember, in episode 30 I spoke with dad and business owner Steve Mirando (give it a listen if you haven't yet, it's a great interview with lots of ideas for balancing work and life), and S...

Today's guest, along with his wife and children, have been special people in my family's life ever since we had the excellent luck of moving in across the street from them more than a decade ago. We've watched Steve Mirando and his wife Sue support each other through a lot – having children, figuring out work-life challenges, Steve's going to full-time school for acupuncture and then hanging out h...

Recently, I got to have an amazing conversation with a dear friend, granddad to a 1 1/2-year-old girl. Today's episode is a recounting of that conversation, because we can learn so much from it! Here are the three big ideas that my friend and I (who remains nameless, to protect the privacy of he and his family) spoke about: 1) The mother-in-law/daughter-in-law dynamic is very different – and can b...

I love shows like today's, when a listener has written in and I get to respond on the air! Today, Melissa asks how to help give her young kids the support they need in the outside-of-school hours. Here's what I suggest: that Melissa and her husband give their children some control over what they do in their out-of-school time. Listen in for more details! The other reason I love today's episode is...

"My editor, once in my early career when I lost a big story in my computer, told me this: everything is better the second time." Heather Kempskie shares this story to comfort me as I'm apologizing for losing our original post-RV trip in my quest for the sound of cicadas… Click here to listen to that episode… And the cool thing is that I think she's right! In this interview we talk about: Heather's...

Did you know that, by the time we are five years old, we've heard "no" 40,000 times? And that in that same span of time, we've only heard "yes" 5000 times? (I learned that reading The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, a great book by the way.) While it's true that "no" is important – for safety, if nothing else – this n-word can really bring us down… As Jeff puts it: "Eight times as many noes as yeses. E...

Your Child Explained: where we talk about what is going on inside your kid's head! YCE episodes drop every other Thursday, always the same week as selected as last a guest interview episode. Sometimes a YCE episode will also be a Q&A, so if you're child is doing something that is driving you nuts, please ask me about it – just go to  weturnedoutokay.com/contact  – but most often the YCE will be on...

Today's guest has had a lifetime of unplanned adventures… Abused and abandoned during his young childhood, simultaneously a troublemaker and a bullied kid all through school… Wesley Chapman developed an entrepreneurial spirit at age 8, when his grandmother became disabled and he started going door to door selling flowers from her garden. The entrepreneurial spirit stuck with Wes, who found that hi...

Today's episode is probably almost exactly the opposite of what you think of when you think of school rules. In fact, it feels a little subversive… The truth is, I think that schools are getting some important things wrong. These rules for you to follow can right some of these wrongs. Let's jump in! 1) Get into the mindset that school exists to help your child. We often feel like, especially if ou...