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

All of our children go through phases when they do things we wish they wouldn’t do. Sometimes those things are relatively harmless but are pretty annoying, because they take extra time for us to clean up - things like eating (and making crumbs) in areas where we don’t want them to eat, shaving up a bar of soap, or piling up all the toys and refusing to help clean them up. Other times it’s not so h...

Giving choices’ is a hot tool in the respectful parenting world.  In the scripts, it usually goes like this:   Child: “I want a snack!” Parent: “OK!  Would you like an apple or a banana?” Child: “A banana, please!” And the parent hands over the banana. But when you actually try it in your own home, it usually looks more like this: Your child:: “I want a snack!” You: “OK! Would you like an app...

  If there’s one topic that never fails to rile parents up, it’s sibling fighting. Why does it affect us so much?  (There are two main reasons.) Why is this happening, and what can we do about it?  There are two main reasons, and one strategy to use with each reason. That’s it! There are not an infinite number of reasons why this is happening, or an infinite number of things to try to get it...

This Q&A episode comes from a special education preschool teacher had listened to the Why We Shouldn’t Read The Your X-Year-Old Child books anymore , and wondered:   My first thought was: There’s no way I’m touching that question, because I don’t have the relevant qualifications and I’ll get torn apart. I’ve been in some groups for Autistic parents for several months now, and one thing th...

If you're anything like me, navigating conflict comes pretty easily to you. You always know what to say to make your point in a tone that's firm but still inviting, right? You listen for the purpose of understanding the other person and don't just use the time while the other person is speaking to form your own rebuttal? You never get overwhelmed, and maintain your own sense of boundaries even whe...

Do you ever have that voice in your head that tells you things like: "You shouldn't have laid in bed for so long; you should have got up earlier to get ready for the day"?   Or how about: "You shouldn't let your kids watch TV; good mothers don't let their kids watch TV"?   Or: "If I was any good at this parenting thing, my kids wouldn't fight with each other"?   If you do, have you...

In this episode I take a look at the main reasons why we have these hard days - from our child's temperament to our temperament to attachment relationships, trauma, and neurodivergences - all of these intersect especially tightly on the hard days.   Then we look at three ways to get through these days with a little more grace - and maybe even without having to apologize to your child at the e...

Do you ever feel ashamed? Many people find it among their most physical emotions, resulting in a big knot of tension or a hot flush that washes over their whole body. But what is shame, and where does it come from?   I recently read a LOT of academic papers and books, and also popular books about shame, and the most helpful resource I found among all of the ones I read was written by my guest...

This episode kicks off a series of new episodes that I'm very excited about, which is based on listeners' questions. My goal is to produce shorter episodes that cut across the research base to help you answer the questions that are on your mind about your child's behavior and development.   Our first question comes from Dee in New Zealand, who wants to know: should she should do what her pres...

In this most personal episode I've ever created, I'll share with you how my autism self-diagnosis has helped me to understand the experiences I've had in ways that bring a great deal more clarity and insight than I've had up to now.   In addition to hearing from me, you'll hear the actual voicemail the therapist who has been helping me left to explain the results of my autism screeners, as we...

Most of the resources related to parenting and neurodiversity are geared toward helping neurodivergent children, not neurodivergent parents, so this episode aims to help close that gap.   Whether you (or your partner, if you have one) have a diagnosis or you see yourself (or them) struggling but can't quite figure out why, this episode may help. Autism and ADHD are diagnosed at wildly differi...

Have you ever seen recommendations for the books called Your One Year Old, Your Two Year Old, and so on, by Louise Bates Ames?  Every few weeks I see parents posting in online communities asking about some aspect of their child’s behavior that is confusing or annoying to them, and somebody responds: “You should read the Louise Bates Ames books!”   This usually comes with the caveat that the r...

Are you a shitty parent? Or do you ever think you might be? Parenting today is so hard, and there are so many models of 'perfect parenting' available on social media that we can compare ourselves against that provide 'evidence' that we're not doing it right. Things can get even more difficult when we believe in respectful parenting, because we have a model for what we know we want parenting to be...

Did you read Little House on the Prairie when you were a child? I didn't, but I know it's a common American rite of passage.   My guest in this new episode, Dr. Dolly Chugh, got entirely immersed in the story with her two young daughters - so much so that they took a vacation to the places depicted in the story, and her daughters danced around in prairie dresses.   Dr. Chugh didn't reali...

In this episode, we explore procrastination—why it happens, its effects on our well-being, and practical solutions. Whether you struggle with putting things off, worry about your child developing this habit, or just want to understand the psychology behind it, this episode delivers valuable insights.   Our guest, Dr. Fuschia Sirois from Durham University, brings over 20 years of research on p...

Liann did not have an easy entry into motherhood. Her first child’s birth was pretty traumatic; it was followed by a miscarriage and then very quickly by another pregnancy. And then by COVID. She was already overwhelmed and then everyone was isolated…and suddenly Liann had a whole lot of anger that she hadn’t seen before. She didn’t think things could be more difficult than they were in the immedi...

I know it can be really difficult to navigate all the events happening in the world today.  It seems like things are falling apart, with wars, climate change-caused drought and wildfires in some areas and flooding in others, with hunger not following far behind.  And things aren’t any better on the political front either.   When difficult things happen out there in the world, they spill over...

In this conversation with Dean Spade we resolve a long-running challenge in my understanding: when we talked with Dr. john powell on the topic of Othering and Belonging a couple of years ago we discussed how volunteering promotes othering, because it perpetuates the idea that the volunteer is a person with resources to give, and the recipient has little in the way of useful knowledge or resources...

Claire had used respectful parenting methods since her children were babies, so child-led learning seemed like a natural fit for her.  She protected her toddler’s free play time and involved her in household chores and nature walks.   Claire attended school as a child (just like I did!); she even enjoyed elementary school. By high school she didn’t see the relevance between what she was being...

At the beginning of our stay at a friend’s house in Oregon six weeks ago, my eight-year-old daughter Carys had biked a flat mile on a mountain biking trail; when we got to a very slight incline she made it 20 feet further and then it all fell apart. She whined; she cried; she refused to go on. Later in the day, after we had both calmed down, we discussed the idea of Doing Hard Things, and we ultim...

Parents have been asking me for episodes on neurodivergence for a while now so I’m hoping this episode will become the start of a mini-series. In this first conversation I talk with Dr. Hanna Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist, co-author of the new book Neurodiveristy Studies: A New Critical Paradigm. We look at this topic through the lens of autism, and I share some information I found to be pretty surprisin...

Every once in a while a blog post about ‘childism’ makes the rounds on social media, which is described as being a “prejudice against young people” that’s on par with sexism, racism, and homophobia. But the Director of the Childism Institute, Dr. John Wall, argues that that definition implies children are simply victims of whatever adults throw at them - when actually they are active agents who cr...

This episode builds on our conversation with Dr. Atle Dyregrov on the topic of talking with children about death , where we focused mainly on death as a general concept and navigating the first few days after the death. Grief therapist Katie Lear has a new book called A Parent's Guide to Managing Childhood Grief and focuses on the much longer period of mourning that follows the death of someone cl...

We've covered a number of episodes in the past that feed into this one, including Raising Emotionally Healthy Boys with Dr. Judy Chu (which focused on boys' understanding of masculinity in the preschool years), and Playing to Win with Dr. Hilary Levy Friedman (which looked at the lessons children learn from sports...which aren't really related to the sports themselves...).   And of course the...

There are lots of books available now on how to talk with children about issues related to race, but Sarah W. Jaffe noticed a gap: there weren't any books geared toward non-academic audiences talking about how the choices that predominantly well-off, predominantly White parents make impact other people. From childcare choices to school to college, at every step of the way we make decisions that re...