I actually hadn’t realized what a can of worms I was opening when I started the research for today’s episode, which is on the topic of manners and politeness. It began innocently enough – as an English person, for whom manners are pretty important, I started to wonder why my almost three-year-old doesn’t have better…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…