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

Sugar has a bad name these days - much like fat did back in the 1990s.  "Research shows" that it's addictive...that it shrinks your brain...that it's likely to lead to all kinds of health problems.   But will it really?   I interviewed Dr. Michael Goran, author of the recent book Sugarproof: The Hidden Dangers of Sugar that are Putting Your Child’s Health at Risk and What You Can Do.  Th...

I hear from a lot of parents who are worried about their children’s learning.  They tell me things like:“I want to encourage my child’s learning and creativity and confidence as a learner without solely focusing on literacy and numeracy.”   “We’ve been in lockdown here in Melbourne for a very long time, with my older kids learning remotely, and I feel that a lot of the tasks they are given by...

Is your child gifted?   Do you wonder if they're gifted but aren't quite sure?   Do you want to know how to support your gifted child's learning in a way that doesn't pressure them or make them resist working with you?   If so, this episode will help.   I have to say, I wasn't sure where this one was going to end up.  I was really uneasy about the concept of giftedness from the...

We don’t just think with our brains.   What?!   How can that possibly be true?   I struggled to understand it if myself for quite a while, until I read the fabulous English philosopher Andy Clark’s description of what happens when someone writes, which essentially involves ideas flowing down the arm and hand, through the pen and ink, across the paper, up to your eyes, and back to yo...

Do you worry that your child isn't eating enough...or is eating too much? Do you wish they would eat a more balanced diet...but don't want to be the Vegetable Police? Do you find yourself in constant negotiations over your child's favorite snacks? You're not alone! Join me for a conversation with Ellyn Satter MS, MSSW, author of many books including Child of Mine: Feeding With Love and Good Sense....

When you’re learning a new skill, information is critical.  Without that, it’s very difficult to make any kind of meaningful change.   But I see a parallel between learning new skills and respectful parenting: I like to say that love between parent and child is necessary but not sufficient - and that respect is the missing ingredient.  With learning a new skill, knowledge is necessary - but n...

How does trauma affect us?   Yes, we feel it in our brains - we get scared, frustrated, and angry - often for reasons we don’t fully understand.   But even if our brains have managed to cover up the trauma; to paper a veneer over it so everything seems fine, that doesn’t mean everything actually is fine - because as our guest in this episode, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk says: The Body Keeps...

When we're having a hard time interacting with our family members, it's pretty common for our first reaction to be: "I need this person (or these people!) to change their behavior" - especially when this person (or these people!) are children.  After all, we've been around for longer and we know what we're doing and we were fine before our children started misbehaving, right?   My guest today...

This episode kicks off a series on the intersection of parenting and food.   We begin today with a conversation with Dr. Lindo Bacon, where we bust a LOT of myths about the obesity epidemic that is said to be plaguing people in the United States and other countries that follow a similar diet.   The messaging we get from government entities seems pretty simple: being fat is bad for you. It cau...

Many of us haven't been in each other's homes for a while now, but pretty soon we'll be getting together inside again.  And our children will be heading inside, in their friends' houses.   People store guns inside.   Are you  certain  that nobody owns a gun in any of the places your child plays?   If they do own a gun, are you  certain  they store it safely?   If not, you need...

New parents often worry about attachment to their baby - will I be able to build it? My baby cries a lot - does that mean that we aren't attached? If I put my baby in daycare, will they get attached to the daycare staff rather than to me?   Based on the ideas about attachment that have been circulated over the years, these are entirely valid concerns. But it turns out that not only should we...

"Psychological Flexibility" sounds amazing.  Shouldn't we all want that?  After all, psychological flexibility has been significantly positively associated with wellness during the COVID-19 pandemic, and negatively associated with anxiety, depression, and COVID-29-related distress and worry. (But what is it, anyway?!) Psychological Flexibility is about being fully in touch with the present moment...

We've been in a liminal space for the last 15 months or so, since COVID shutdowns.  (The word 'liminal' comes from the Latin root limen, meaning threshold).   It’s a place where a certain part of our lives has come to an end but the next thing hasn’t yet begun, so we’re in a transitional state.   We're finally starting to see the end of this liminal state but before we can fully emerge into t...

This episode grew out of a post that long-time friend of the podcast, Dr. Laura Froyen, published in a respectful parenting group that we both work in as admins.  In the post she asked people to share how they felt before and after they discovered respectful parenting, and then she created a word cloud of the results.   The words in the 'before' cloud were perhaps predictable - things like 'w...

"You're doing it wrong!  You're not asking for consent before changing the diaper!" In this Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode we meet parent Nicole, who has core values related to being empathic, constantly learning, and upholding justice in the world.  These awesome values came together in a difficult way when Nicole became a parent: she had a deep fear of not getting parenting right, so she wa...

"Do you know what happens to your body when you get older?"   "Um...you get hairy in some places?"   "Yeah...other things happen too.  We'll get you some books."   That was what I learned about sex education when I was seven - I  was  always grateful that I learned it from my parents (who were pretty terrified to talk about it,  I think) rather than from the other kids at school.  B...

After dinner a few days ago, Carys randomly started telling us that if we want to understand some of the things she's feeling, we should cast our minds back to when we were children and remember how we would have felt about it at the time.  The conversation continued as we explored more of her feelings when she's having difficult moments, and at some point someone (recollections differ on exactly...

Today we build on episodes that we've done in the past on talking with children about the basics of sex (so when you listen to this episode we're assuming you've got the basics covered - things like using anatomically correct names for body parts  and  taking basic steps to prevent sexual abuse ).   This is the first in a mini-series of episodes that digs deeper into topics related to sex.  H...

Do we really know what implicit bias is, and whether we have it? This is the second episode on our two-part series on implicit bias; the first part was an interview with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji , former Dean of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and co-creator of the Implicit Association Test. But the body of research on this topic is large and quite complicated, and I couldn't possib...

Explicitly, nobody really believes in gender stereotypes anymore, but when we look at the world, and who's where and how much money people make, and so on, it still seems to be there. And the answer to that is yeah, because it's there. It's just not something we say. It’s more of something we do. -Dr. Mahzarin Banaji   What is implicit bias?  Do I have it (and do you?)?  Does my (and your?) c...

"When she was younger, she wasn't that into reading and that was like a huge deal for me.  I thought: "I'm such a reader. My daughter doesn't love to read." She's still not a big reader, but it's not hampering her in any way. She's blossoming in fifty other ways, but when I get caught in that story, "She's not like me. She's not..." - that's when I'm suffering. So I settle back into trusting, and...

Why do we yell at our children - even when we know we shouldn't? Why isn't just knowing what to do enough to actually interact with our children in a way that aligns with our values? For many of us, the reason we struggle to actually implement the ideas we know we want to use is because we've experienced trauma in our lives. This may be the overt kind that we can objectively say was traumatic (div...

In this episode we talk with Iris Chen about her new book, Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent.   Iris admits to being a parent who engaged in "yelling, spanking, and threatening with unreasonable consequences" - but far from becoming a well-behaved, obedient child, her son fought back.  The harder she punished, the more he resisted. Their home became a battlegr...

Parents - worried about their child's lack of maturity or ability to 'fit in' in a classroom environment - often ask me whether they should hold their child back a year before entering kindergarten or first grade.  In this episode I review the origins of the redshirting phenomenon (which lie in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, and which statisticians say contained some seriously dodgy math), what...

In this short ad hoc episode that was originally recorded as a Facebook Live, I discuss ways that my family is working on dismantling both White supremacy and patriarchy (and having a go at capitalism while we're at it!) this Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend. The best part is that this doesn't have to be heavy work that brings with it a huge sense of guilt. It's about building community...