Hot on the heels of our last episode on whether only children really are as bad as their reputation , this week’s episode is for the 80% of families (in the U.S., at least) who have more than one child. How do siblings impact each other’s development? What should we make of the research on how birth order impacts each child? Why the heck do siblings fight so much, and what can we do about it? (Turns out that siblings in non-Western countries actually don’t fight anywhere near as much…) We cover ...
Jun 19, 2017•42 min
Today’s episode comes to us as a result of a listener named Sylvia who wrote to me saying she and her partner don’t want another child but are worried about the potential impact on their daughter of growing up without siblings. But why would there be a potential impact? Turns out there’s a slew of information in the popular press about how only children grow up with no way to learn social skills, which makes them simply awful to be around. And everybody agrees – from parents of multiples and chi...
Jun 05, 2017•30 min
It’s no secret that I do some episodes of the podcast altruistically for you, dear listeners, because I’m not facing the situation that I’m studying – or at least not yet. (Eyebrows were raised in our house when I started researching the impact of divorce on children but luckily for me I don’t need that episode…yet…) But today’s episode is for me, and you guys are just along for the ride. Because, friends, we are in the thick of what I now know to be called “oppositional defiance,” otherwise kno...
May 22, 2017•34 min
We’re concluding our mini-mini series today on chores – and on paying children to do chores, which leads us to larger conversations about money. If you missed the first part of this then then you might want to go and listen to last week’s interview with Dr. Andrew Coppens, who explores the ways that families in different cultures approach chores and what lessons that can hold for those of us who want to encourage our children to do their chores. Today we’re going to take that conversation to its...
May 16, 2017•39 min
This episode is on a topic that I find fascinating – the cultural issues that underlie our parenting. I actually think this issue is so important that I covered it in episode 1 of the podcast, which was really the first episode after the introductory one where I gave some information on what the show was going to be about. But recently I read a book called Generation Me (Affiliate link) by Jean Twenge, a Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University, which discusses some of the cultural ...
May 08, 2017•34 min
This is the second of a short series of episodes on issues related to divorce. The first was our “All Joy and No Fun” episode, where we talked about how parenting today can be the most joyful thing in our lives – even if it isn’t always a whole lot of fun from moment to moment. The series was inspired by a listener who sent me an email saying: “I was divorced when my husband was 2 ½ years old. He is now 5 years old and has a very hard time expressing his feelings. I have an intuitive “gut” feeli...
Apr 30, 2017•25 min
Today’s episode is about a book I read way before I started the podcast, called All Joy and No Fun (Affiliate link) by Jennifer Senior. I actually got a question from a listener recently asking me whether there’s any research on whether and how her divorce might have impacted her son’s development. It turns out that there is, and quite a lot – so I decided to make a series out of it. We’ll have one episode on how divorce impacts children, and a second on single parenting and step families, and w...
Apr 24, 2017•24 min
We have a pretty cool mini-mini-series launching today. I’ve been seeing a lot of those “chores your child could be doing” articles showing up in my social media feeds lately, and I was thinking about those as well about how children in other cultures seem to be MUCH more willing to help out with work around the house. I’m not saying we want to train our children to be slave laborers, but why is it that children in Western cultures really don’t seem to do chores unless they’re paid to do them? W...
Apr 16, 2017•42 min
Well this took a bit longer than I’d planned… WAY BACK in episode 11 I did Part 1 of a two-part series on tantrums, and was expecting to release the second episode in short order. Then I got inundated with interviews from awesome guests, which I always wanted to release as soon as I could after I spoke with them, and months have gone by without releasing that second episode. Episode 11 provided a lot of background information on tantrums: a seminal study in 1931 really forms the basis for all th...
Apr 08, 2017•22 min•Ep. 33
Professor Peter Gray was primarily interested in the motivations and emotions of animals before his son Scott started struggling in school, at which point Professor Gray’s interests shifted to developing our understanding of self-directed learning and how play helps us to learn. He has extensively studied the learning that occurs at the Sudbury Valley School in Sudbury Valley, MA – where children are free to associate with whomever they like, don’t have to take any classes at all, and yet go on ...
Apr 02, 2017•1 hr 3 min
Today I join forces with Malaika Dower of the How to Get Away with Parenting podcast to interview Dr. Christia Brown, who is a Professor of Developmental and Social Psychology at the University of Kentucky, where she studies the development of gender identity and children’s experience of gender discrimination. Dr. Brown’s book, Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue (Affiliate link), helps parents to really understand the scientific research around gender differences in children, which is a harder task ...
Mar 27, 2017•51 min
I’ve thought about doing this episode for a while but I sat on it for a few weeks because it’s still in motion. But now Betsy DeVos is confirmed as Secretary of Education I wanted to offer some thoughts on her work on educational issues, charter schools, as well as on the topic of schools more broadly. Spoiler alert: I graduated from my Master’s program! And I wrote my thesis on what motivates children to learn in the absence of a formal curriculum, so we also talk a bit about whether schools as...
Mar 20, 2017•33 min
This episode comes to us by way of a suggestion from my friend Jess, who told me she had joined an outing with some children in her three-year-old son’s preschool class. She said some of the slightly older children were running around playing that their hands were guns and shooting at each other, and the teachers were pretty much just ignoring it, which really shocked her. So I thought to myself “I bet some smart person has done some research on this” and so I went out and found us just such a s...
Mar 13, 2017•55 min
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. How social groups are formed has profound implications for what we teach our children about our culture. Professor Yarrow Dunham of Yale University tells us how we all group people in our heads according to criteria that we think are important – in many cases it’s a valuable tool that allows us to focus our mental energy. But when we look at ideas...
Mar 06, 2017•42 min
This episode is the final in our mini-series that I hope will help you to think through the options you might have for your child’s preschool. In previous episodes we looked at Waldorf and Montessori approaches to early childhood education; today we examine the Reggio Emilia-based approach with Suzanne Axelsson, who studied it for her Master’s degree in early childhood education and is well-respected in the Reggio field. She helps us to understand how the “concept of the child” impacts how we se...
Feb 27, 2017•47 min
Your kids don’t lie, right? And if they did, you’d be able to tell, right? News flash: they do. And you probably can’t. Dr. Kang Lee – who is one of the world’s experts in lying – tells us why children lie, how we can (try to) reduce the incidence of lying, and how we should handle it when we catch our children in a lie. And here’s the one story that Dr. Lee says can help to prevent your child from lying… Dr. Kang Lee's Book Children and lying: A century of scientific research - Affiliate link R...
Feb 20, 2017•47 min
This episode is the second in our mini-series on making decisions about preschools, which I know is on the minds of a lot of parents of young children at this time of year. Today we speak with Beverly Amico, the Director of Advancement at the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America. Beverly helps us to understand the philosophy behind a Waldorf approach to early childhood education as well as answer those all-important questions like “Can I send my child to a Waldorf preschool even if s/...
Feb 13, 2017•41 min
We talked a while ago about sharing , and how you can understand the developmental processes that your child needs to go through before s/he truly understands what it means to share. One of the inputs to sharing behavior is an understanding of what is fair , and Drs. Peter Blake and Katie McAuliffe talk us through what we know about what children understand about fairness. This episode will help you to understand how much of the idea of fairness is naturally culturally transmitted to children an...
Feb 06, 2017•44 min
It’s that time of year: daycare and preschool tours start ramping up and parents have to try to figure out which is the right option for their child. And many parents are overwhelmed by the options. Montessori? Waldorf? Reggio Emilia? How are they different? Will my child be messed up if I pick the wrong one? This episode is the first in a mini-series to help us think through the questions you might have as you explore the options that are available in your community. Today we’re going to learn ...
Jan 30, 2017•42 min
Have you read the now-classic book How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk? Ever wished there was a version that would help you with younger children who perhaps aren’t quite ready for a detailed problem-solving session? Well now there is! Adele Faber is a co-author of the original book; Adele’s daughter Joanna and Joanna’s childhood friend Julie King have teamed up to write the new version of How to Talk so LITTLE Kids Will Listen , packed with examples of how real parents ...
Jan 20, 2017•41 min
I was scrolling down my Facebook feed recently when I saw a post in a parenting group saying “My two year-old daughter seems to have a “special relationship” with her rocking horse. Is she masturbating?” And I thought to myself “Whoa, two year-olds masturbate? I gotta do an episode on this!” So I looked around to see who is writing about this and I found Saleema Noon, who has a Master degree in sexual health education, and who co-wrote the recent book Talk Sex Today (Affiliate link), which is ch...
Jan 15, 2017•43 min
Parenting is tough, huh? Sometimes it feels like we spend a lot of our time asking our daughter to do things…and asking again…and finding a more creative way to ask. We’re going to get some great advice on this next week from Julie King, co-author of the new book How to Talk so Little Kids will Listen – but for this week I want to set the stage and think about why we should bother with all of this. Why not just force our kids to do what we want them to do? And, is it possible to raise obedient k...
Jan 09, 2017•22 min
Did your child receive a digital device as a gift over the holidays? Have you been able to prise it out of his/her hands yet? Regular listeners might recall that we did an episode recently called “Really, how bad is screen time for my child?” where we went into the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines on screen time for very young children, so if you haven’t listened to that one yet you might want to go and do it before you listen to this episode, because this one really builds on that one...
Jan 01, 2017•42 min
Someone in a parenting group on Facebook suggested I do an episode on The Spiritual Child, by Dr. Lisa Miller. My first thought was that it didn’t really sound like my cup of tea but I was willing to read it and at least see what it had to say. I was surprised by the book’s thesis that spirituality can play a critical role in a child’s and adolescent’s development. But I was astounded that her thesis was actually backed up by scientific research. I invited Dr. Miller to be on the show and she in...
Dec 26, 2016•26 min
Self-Esteem When I first started researching this episode I thought it would be a bit of a slam-dunk. Self-esteem is a good thing, right? I was really surprised to find that there’s little evidence that self-esteem helps children to do better in school, or even be happier, so there’s a good deal of disagreement among psychologists about whether encouraging self-esteem is necessarily a good thing. This episode digs into these issues to understand (as much as scientists currently can) the benefits...
Dec 19, 2016•28 min
Have you ever wondered why your child acts up? Is it because they really want to annoy you or because they’re trying to tell you something? In this conversation Dr. Claudia Gold helps us to understand that what we call ADHD – an extreme example of a child’s “acting up” – is not a known biological process but rather a collection of behaviors that often go together. We might call them “symptoms,” but they aren’t symptoms in the way that a cough is a symptom of pneumonia. Instead, Dr. Gold argues t...
Dec 12, 2016•37 min•Ep. 16
Do you think your child may be introverted? Or are you not sure how to tell? Around one in three people are introverted so if you have two or three children, chances are one of them is introverted. While Western – and particularly American – society tends to favor extroverts, being an introvert isn’t something we can – or should – cure. It’s a personality trait, not a flaw. Join me as we walk through a topic near and dear to my heart, and learn the difference between introversion and shyness, an...
Dec 05, 2016•26 min
The American Academy of Pediatrics just updated its screen time recommendations – and, for the first time, we can actually see and understand the research on which the recommendations are based. They’re a bit more nuanced than the previous versions, so join me as we walk through what the recommendations mean for parents of babies and toddlers – whether or not your children have been using screens until now. We’ll look at the impact particularly of TV on cognitive development, obesity, and prosoc...
Nov 28, 2016•27 min
Are you pregnant? Thinking about getting pregnant? Do you love Your Parenting Mojo and wish there was a show that could help you to understand how scientific research can help you make decisions about your pregnancy? Well, there is! In this episode we chat with Vanessa Merten, who hosts The Pregnancy Podcast. She uses scientific research to examine – sometimes controversial – issues from all sides to help you decide what’s best for you. And best of all, she goes beyond looking at individual issu...
Nov 21, 2016•22 min
Does your child eat any food under the sun...as long as it's cheese? Do you find yourself worrying that you'll never get all the nutrients into her that she needs? Dr. Dina Rose approaches eating from a sociologist's perspective, which is to say that It's Not About The Broccoli (which also happens to be the name of her book), it's about habits and relationships. Join Dr. Rose as she counsels the parent who struggles with her almost four-year-old "highly spirited" son's eating habits. There is ho...
Nov 14, 2016•51 min
