Recently a listener posted a question in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group asking about research related to children who are assigned to one gender at birth, but later realize that this assigned gender doesn’t match the gender they experience. Another listener recommended Dr. Diane Ehrensaft’s book The Gender-Creative Child, and we are fortunate that Dr. Ehrensaft quickly agreed to speak. Listener Elizabeth co-interviews with me as we learn how to truly listen to our children when they tell...
Aug 19, 2019•1 hr 13 min
This is another of those topics I really wish I didn’t have to do. In this interview with Dr. Jennie Noll of Pennsylvania State University, we discuss the impacts that sexual abuse can have on a child (even many years after the event itself!), and we talk extensively about what parents can do to prevent abuse from happening in the first place. If you want to be sure to remember this info, there’s a FREE one-page cheat sheet of the 5 Key Steps Parents Can Take to Prevent Sexual Abuse available he...
Aug 06, 2019•55 min
A couple of months ago, when I was interviewing listener Rose Hoberman for her Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode , she casually mentioned after we got off air that her father in law – Dr. Benard Dreyer – is the immediate past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and would I like her to make a connection? I almost coughed up my water as I said yes, please, I very much would like her to make a connection if he would be interested in answering listener questions about the AAP’s polici...
Jul 22, 2019•1 hr 4 min
My guest on today’s episode in the Sharing Your Parenting Mojo series is Dovilė Šafranauskė, who joins us from Lithuania. Dovilė has discovered respectful parenting and her husband is on board, but many of the central tenets of RIE go very much against how children are raised in Lithuanian culture. Dovilė wonders how she can work with her parents – who look after her children regularly – to help them feel more comfortable with RIE, as well as what to do with Aunty Mavis whom her toddler twins se...
Jul 15, 2019•32 min
Today’s episode pulls together a lot of threads from previous shows, and will also give you some really concrete new tools using what’s called Nonviolent Communication to support you in your parenting. It’s not like these are concepts that we’ve never discussed before, but sometimes hearing them in a different framework can be the key to making them ‘click’ for you. Our guest Christine King has been teaching these techniques to college students, teachers, and parents for over 17 years. And I’m r...
Jul 07, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 94
Today we talk with listener Seanna Mallon about her struggles to be mindful when responding to her two spirited young sons (and I can confirm from direct experience that they are indeed spirited – we actually had to re-record the episode after we simply couldn’t continue the first interview due to her children’s continual interruptions!). I share some basic tools for staying calm in difficult moments; for a deeper dive on this topic, do join the Tame Your Triggers workshop! Enrollment is now ope...
Jul 02, 2019•26 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. We’ve done a LOT of episodes specifically for White parents by now: White privilege in parenting: What it is and what to do about it White privilege in schools Talking with children about race Teaching children about topics like slavery and the Civil Rights Movement Do I have privilege? In this episode we turn the tables: listener Dr. Elisa Celis ...
Jun 24, 2019•53 min•Ep. 93
This episode began out of a query that I see repeated endlessly in online parenting groups: “My child has a really strong preference for me. They get on great with the other parent (usually the father, in a heterosexual relationship) when I’m not around, but when I’m there it’s all “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” This is destroying my partner; how can we get through this stage?” So that’s where I began the research on this question, and it led me down quite a rabbit hole – I’d never thought too much abou...
Jun 10, 2019•57 min•Ep. 92
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. Each time I think I’m done with this series on the intersection of race and parenting, another great topic pops up! Listener Ann reached out to me after she heard the beginning of the series to let me know about her own journey of learning about her White privilege. Ann and her husband were a ‘normal’ White couple who were vaguely aware of some of...
May 27, 2019•49 min
This episode comes to us courtesy of my friend Jess, whose daughter has Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) and who is on a mission to make sure that as many parents as possible learn about it. She says that every time she describes it to a parent they realize that they know someone who exhibits behavior that looks like SPD that warrants following up. I have to say that I was highly ambivalent about doing this episode, because I don’t usually deal with topics that result in medical diagnoses as I’...
May 12, 2019•42 min
In this second episode of Sharing Your Parenting Mojo we talk with Rose, who is American but lives in Germany, about discussing math with girls – as well as with managing her daughter’s sugar intake. Here’s Rose’s blog , where she discusses what she thought of my Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue episode . If you’d like to be interviewed for Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, please complete the form located here and I’ll be in touch if there’s a fit…...
May 06, 2019•33 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. In this episode we continue our series on the intersection of race and parenting, which we started with Dr. Margaret Hagerman on the topic of White privilege in parenting ; then we covered White privilege in schools with Dr. Allison Roda and what parents can do to overcome structural racism as well as talk with their children about race with Dr. B...
Apr 29, 2019•1 hr 5 min
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 children push our buttons. If you’d like to be interviewed for Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, please complete ...
Apr 22, 2019•22 min
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 we blow up because they pushed us TOO FAR and they end up in tears (or angry) and we end up angry (or in tear...
Apr 15, 2019•46 min•Ep. 88
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 my listener Dr. Kim Rybacki and I interview a giant in the field: Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of t...
Apr 01, 2019•1 hr
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 discuss her book Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture , the advantages that sports can c...
Mar 18, 2019•45 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. 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 which disadvantage children from non-dominant cultures. We’ll cover the way that purportedly ‘scienti...
Mar 04, 2019•49 min
“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 focus on scientific research, you would think that I would have determined my overall approach to parent...
Feb 18, 2019•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 84
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 four topics. Today we’ll dig into White privilege in parenting through a conversation with Dr. Margaret ...
Feb 04, 2019•54 min
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 crying out loud!) our children will be able to do it. So we cover that in this episode, as well as some reso...
Jan 21, 2019•38 min
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 show, the majority of you are fortunate enough to not be highly economically challenged. So in this ...
Jan 07, 2019•31 min
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-hard seat at school, itchy labels, and the scratch of cutlery on plates? Is there any peer-reviewed res...
Dec 24, 2018•50 min
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 you that have been listening for quite a while that you’re willing to at least listen to this ‘respect ...
Dec 10, 2018•33 min
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 raise an independent child but every time the child struggles with something you step in and “help,” the...
Nov 26, 2018•48 min
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 continue for older children, and that if we allowed school-aged children to spend more time outside then a...
Nov 12, 2018•52 min
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 community. I actually used Dr. Lopez’ textbook for my Master’s in Education, so I’ve been familiar with her...
Oct 29, 2018•53 min
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 behavior will ruin their children—but the research is wildly misunderstood. Moyer’s main point is that while a...
Oct 15, 2018•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 75
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 was such an enormous topic to cover that Dr. Arietta Slade and I did the best we could in the time we had, an...
Oct 01, 2018•55 min
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 weekday mornings) that had not previously been a problem. Today’s interview with Dr. Jonathan Dalton ...
Sep 17, 2018•1 hr 1 min
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 importance of child-directed speech! This episode serves two purposes: it helps us to understand another ...
Sep 03, 2018•1 hr 3 min
