Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive

Welcome to the first episode in a new series that I’m calling Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, where I interview listeners about what they’ve learned from the show as well as the parenting challenges they’re facing.  Today we talk with Ontario, Canada-based listener Jess Barnes , a registered social worker and parent of almost-two about a mindfulness tool that can help us to stay calm when our childre...

The way we set limits has such profound implications for our parenting: it’s the difference between parenting in a constant state of anxiety, and being truly calm and confident that you’re making the right decisions as you move through your day.   If we set ineffective limits, our child never knows where we stand.  They push and push and push because they know we will allow it, then finally w...

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.   Click here to view all the items in this series. We’ve laid a lot of groundwork on topics related to race by now: we learned about White privilege in parenting , and White privilege in schools , and even how parents can use sports to give their children advantages in school and in life . Today m...

Individual sports or competitive?  Recreational or organized?  Everyone gets a trophy or just the winners? And why do sports in the first place?  Granted there are some physical benefits, but don’t we also hope that our children will learn some kind of lessons about persistence and team work that will stand them in good stead in the future? In this interview with Dr. Hilary Levy Friedman we discus...

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.   Click here to view all the items in this series. Public schools are open to all children, no matter what their race, so where’s the privilege in schools? In this episode we’ll learn more about how even (and perhaps especially) well-meaning liberal White parents perpetuate inequalities in schools...

“Is RIE backed by scientific research?” It’s a question that comes up every once in a while among parents who use the Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE) approach to raising their children, and then they all (virtually) look at each other kind of uneasily because no study has ever shown that children raised using RIE methods have any better outcomes than children who aren’t. Given how much I focu...

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.   Click here to view all the items in this series. This episode launches a series of conversations on the intersection of race and parenting.  I spent a month wading around in the psychological literature on this topic and deciding how best to approach it, and eventually decided to split it into f...

We’ve already covered emotion regulation a few times on the show: there were these older short episodes on Three Reasons Not to Say “You’re OK!” and Modeling Emotion Regulation , as well as the more recent one on Dr. Stuart Shanker’s book Self-Reg.   But I realized I’d never done the episode that should underlie all of these, which discusses what actually is emotion regulation and when (for c...

I regularly receive questions from listeners asking me whether they should put their child in daycare or preschool and my response has typically been that there isn’t a lot of research on the benefits and drawbacks for middle class children on whether or not the child goes to daycare/preschool, and that is still true.  I’ve done research on my listeners and while parents of all types listen to the...

Emotion regulation: It’s one of the biggest challenges of childhood (and parenthood!).  We all want our children to be able to do it, but they struggle with it so much, and this is the root of many of our own struggles in parenting. But instead of trying to get them to reduce the intensity of their emotions, should we instead be trying to reduce the stress they experience from things like a too-ha...

What is – WHAT? Resources for Infant Educarers, or RIE (pronounced like Rye bread) is the parenting approach that we use with our daughter Carys which is grounded in respect for the child.  I’ve wanted to do an episode on this topic ever since I started the show but at first I didn’t want you thinking I was all California-granola-hippie-crazy and stop listening.  Now I figure there are enough of y...

We all have goals for our children, even if these are things that we’ve never formally articulated and are ideas we’ve inherited from half-remembered bits of parenting books and blogs (and the occasional podcast) and the way we were parented ourselves. But do you ever find that the way you’re parenting in the moment doesn’t necessarily support your overarching goals?  So, if you have a goal to rai...

If you’ve been following the show for a while now, you’ll know that my daughter and I LOVE to spend time outside.  I looked at the research on the benefits of outdoor play for young children , and in my interview with Dr. Scott Sampson on his book How to Raise a Wild Child , so I am already convinced of its benefits for young children. So doesn’t it go without saying that these benefits will conti...

Parent-Teacher conferences are about to be underway in many places, so I thought it might be helpful to give you some resources to make these as productive for you and your child as possible. In this episode we talk with Dr. Margaret Caspe and Dr. Elena Lopez of the Global Family Research Project, which develops authentic partnerships to support children’s learning in the home, school, and communi...

A couple of months ago, an article by journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer – whose work I normally greatly respect – started making the rounds on Facebook. Then (knowing my approach to parenting) a couple of readers emailed it to me and asked me what I thought of it.   The article was called Go Ahead: Heap Rewards On Your Kid , with the subtitle: Parents are told stickers and trinkets for good beh...

Is attachment the same as bonding?  Can I have a healthy attachment with my baby if I don’t breastfeed? Do I have to babywear to develop an attachment to my baby? Will being apart from my baby disrupt our attachment relationship? Is co-sleeping critical to attachment?   These are just a few of the questions that listeners wrote to me after I sent out a call for questions on Attachment. This w...

We’re a couple of weeks into the new school year by now and I hope that for most of you the morning drop-offs have gotten a bit easier than they were in the beginning. But some of you may still be struggling with a child who doesn’t want to go to school, who resists you leaving at drop-0ff time, and who might be suddenly suffering from stomachaches and headaches (particularly on Sunday nights or w...

This episode revisits the concept of the 30 Million Word Gap concept, which we first covered in an interview with Dr. Doug Sperry a few weeks back. After she heard that I was going to talk with Dr. Sperry, Dr. Roberta Golinkoff – with whom we discussed her book Becoming Brilliant almost two years ago now – asked to come back on to present a rebuttal. We’re going to learn a lot more about the impor...

We recently did an episode on the impact of intergenerational trauma , which was about how the ways we were parented, and even the ways our parents were parented, ends up influencing the relationship we have with our children – and often not in a positive way. But there’s another side to this story: relationships between the generations can actually have enormously beneficial effects on children’s...

“I spent the whole morning painting and doing origami and felting projects with my daughter – and not only did she not say “thank you,” but she refused to help clean up!” (I actually said this myself this morning:-)) “We took our son to Disneyland and went on every ride he wanted to go on except one, which was closed, and he spent the rest of the trip whining about how the whole trip was ruined be...

Do you ever snap at your child over tiny things, and wonder where that intense anger comes from? You're not alone - and there's actually a scientific explanation for why this happens.   What you're experiencing might be intergenerational trauma - the way traumatic experiences and their effects get passed down from parents to children, often without us even realizing it. But here's the hopeful...

Pretty regularly I see posts in online parenting groups saying “My child loves to pretend, and they always want me to participate.  I dare not tell anyone else, but I CAN’T STAND PRETEND PLAY.  What should I do?” In this final (unless something else catches my interest!) episode in our extended series on play, Dr. Ansley Gilpin of the University of Alabama helps us to do a deep dive into what chil...

The Marshmallow Test is one of the most famous experiments in Psychology: Dr. Walter Mischel and his colleagues presented a preschooler with a marshmallow.  The child was told that the researcher had to leave the room for a period of time and the child could either wait until the researcher returned and have two marshmallows, or if the child couldn’t wait, they could call the researcher back by ri...

You all know that on the show we pretty much steer clear of the clickbait articles that try to convince you that something is wrong with your child, in favor of getting a balanced view of the overall body of literature on a topic. But every once in a while a study comes along and I think “we really MUST learn more about that, even though it muddies the water a bit and leads us more toward confusio...

“Storytelling? I’m already reading books to my child – isn’t that enough?” Your child DOES get a lot out of reading books (which is why we’ve done a several episodes on that already, including What children learn from reading books , How to read with your child , and Did you already miss the boat on teaching your toddler how to read? . But it turns out that storytelling benefits our relationship w...