258: YPM 2025 Year in Review + What’s Coming in 2026

So twenty-twenty five was really a year of figuring out for me as well what's working for the podcast and what I want to evolve. We've been on the air for eight years now. I'm always trying to find the right balance between giving you the depth of research and analysis that you come here for while also making it accessible and useful in your daily life.

Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? Me too. Hi, I'm not Jen. I'm Jessica and I'm in rural East Panama. Jen has just created a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes and I got to test it out. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it in context for you as well so you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, sign up at yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe and come over to our free Facebook group to continue the conversation about this episode. You can also thank Jen for this episode by donating to keep the podcast ad free by going to the page for this or any other episode on yourparentingmojo.com. If you'd like to start a conversation with someone about this episode or know someone who would find it useful, please forward it to them. Over time, you're going to get sick of hearing me read this intro as well. So come and record one yourself. You can read from a script she's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to yourparentingmojo.com and click readtheintro. I can't wait to hear yours.

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Here we are at the beginning of yet another year. I know a lot of us use this time to think about what we want to do differently in the year ahead and I'd like to take a few minutes to do that with you. And before we get there, I want to take a few minutes to look back at what we've done together over the last year and then we'll look at what's coming in twenty-twenty six. I also want to mention right up front, I'm going to give you a whole lot of links in this episode so that you can find useful and very often free resources and all of those will be collected up on this episode's page at yourparentingmojo.com forward slash twenty-twenty six. That's yourparentingmojo.com forward slash twenty-twenty six. So for those of you who are watching on YouTube, you may have already noticed that one of the last things we did in twenty-twenty five was redecorated the studio. For those of you who mostly listen to the podcast, then that might be new news to you. So come on over to YouTube if you'd like to see that or join me on a group coaching call at some point if you'd like.

I hope that you will find that it's a little lighter, a little brighter, a little bit less master classy, a little bit more welcoming and inviting, and a little bit more my style. So hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed making it happen. We also covered a lot of topics last year on the podcast. We started off in January with one of my favorite episodes of the year, 10 game-changing parenting hacks straight from master dog trainers. It was such a fun one to research and put together and honestly it was really eye-opening for me too. One of the big things I noticed was that new dog owners, like parents, often think that their kid's difficult behavior or their dog's difficult behavior comes out of nowhere. But an experienced dog trainer sees the signs in a dog's behavior that a dog is going to bite long before that bite comes and then the trainer can take action to help the dog feel safer so the bite never arrives. Parents can learn to see difficult behavior coming too and offer support so the child doesn't get so dysregulated. In February we did a two-part series on timeouts and whether they are helpful or harmful.

The big take-home message from these was that there is a great deal of evidence showing that timeouts benefit kids but it turns out that most of that research is focused on parents who start off hitting their kids, not parents who aren't hitting their kids now and who are wondering if they should add timeouts. There's no research showing that timeouts are beneficial for those kids so we also looked at some more effective strategies we can use when our kids are having a hard time. Also in February we celebrated 10 cohorts of Taming Your Triggers. That is thousands of parents who have gone through the workshop to understand where their triggered reactions come from and learn tools to respond differently. And what we've seen from all of these cohorts is that what really helps people is being in community firstly and processing your learning with others but secondly the coaching and being able to work through your specific situations with support and seeing other parents work through theirs as well. So starting last October everyone who joined the Taming Your Triggers workshop also got group coaching as standard and we saw some really incredible shifts in parents' relationships with their kids as they went beyond just learning new tools to getting support and using them.

In March I used a Reddit post from a parent whose young child was making really wild threats, things like, I'm going to cut your eyeballs out, to understand what's happening in the relationship when kids make threats like this. Because it's not really about the eyeballs or even the threat of violence actually. When we see where kids learn to use this kind of power over us, we can shift our approach to more collaborative tools. Also, in March I talked with Dr. Caroline Fleck about her book on validation and that has really become a touchstone episode for me. I refer to people to it all the time because validation is such a powerful tool and it is not a black box that you have to figure out how to do by yourself. It's a very learnable skill. Then over the summer I released a series of resources on Dr. Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation and I went deep into the same research that he looked at in the book and I went beyond it as well and I think listeners really appreciated this because my listener, my podcast numbers definitely went up dramatically in those couple of months when those episodes were released. I began by looking at whether there really is a mental health crisis in the U.S. and it turns out there might not be. And then I found out that despite Haidt's claims of strong evidence that social media causes kids’ depression and anxiety, the actual evidence base is mostly weak correlational data.

Based on this I asked whether we should ban cell phones in school and we looked at what assumptions we're making when we ask a question like that about what kind of say kids should have in decision making about things that affect their lives so profoundly. I concluded with an episode on whether we should ban cell phones at home and also produced a 17-minute episode that summarizes all four of the hour-long episodes as well as a blog post and a set of conversation starter scripts that you can use with your kids. And all of those resources plus others that I developed related to screen time over the last couple of years are gathered up at yourparentingmojo.com/theanxiousgeneration. Throughout the year we did a lot of episodes on things that so many of us are struggling with. Feeling overwhelmed in parenting, feeling rage even when your own childhood “wasn't that bad”, and there doesn't seem to be a reason for why you're exploding at your kids and how to break family trauma cycles. These are topics that come up over and over in the Parenting Membership and I wanted to make sure we were addressing them on the podcast too.

We closed out the year with a couple of episodes on boundaries. One was with Nedra Glover Tawwab who wrote the book Set Boundaries Find Peace and then another one was with a listener who discovered that she might be able to come to terms with the relationship she wished she could have and can't have with her mother rather than trying to boundary her way into it. There was such a powerful realization that sometimes the work isn't about changing the other person or even changing the relationship but about accepting what is. So twenty -twenty five was really a year of figuring out for me as well what's working for the podcast and what I want to evolve. We've been on the air for eight years now I'm always trying to find the right balance between giving you the depth of research and analysis that you come here for while also making it accessible and useful in your daily life. A couple of years into the show I did some shorter episodes and I asked listeners what they thought and the consensus at the time was that people wanted the detail. Now things have shifted again and my approach is shifting as well. One of the big things I did this year was convene the podcast advisory council which brings together a group of listeners to help me understand better what content you want to hear about and how you want to hear about it and that feedback has been so valuable and from it I introduced the summary episodes as well as I was hearing for like this from listeners as well and starting in October I decided to stop releasing long episodes publicly.

Instead, I release a 15-to-20-minute excerpt of the long episode containing whatever I think is the most important idea in that conversation with the expert or in the research that I've been exploring myself. My goal in doing this for you is to get you to the insights that matter faster in a way that makes them easier to share. So if you're trying to explain to your partner or your mom or your best friend what you learned on the podcast you can send them a 15-to-20-minute episode on a tightly focused topic instead of a 60-minute exploration. Now of course if you want all of the analysis and the full deep dive those full episodes are available in a private podcast feed in the Parenting Membership but for the public facing podcasts, we're focusing on getting you those core insights as efficiently as possible. Another change that you may have noticed is an upgrade to the episodes page on the website. You can now see the number of pages of episode at the bottom of the page so if you know that you're looking for an episode that came out a while ago you can jump right to page 5 or page 10 of the results instead of endlessly scrolling.

That's already live so hopefully that makes it easier for you to get to what you need more quickly. Before I talk about what's ahead I want to share something about what I've learned from you this year because the truth is you really inspire me to keep doing this work. I hear from parents all the time who tell me that they used a tool that they heard on the podcast and they were so surprised when it worked and it helped them to get through their in the moment struggle with their child and maybe they took a breath and they got curious about why their child was resisting their request. They might have noticed that they were getting triggered and they took a break before saying something they'd regret. Maybe they used the problem-solving method to work through a conflict that had been going on for weeks and then there are the parents who tell me that the podcast and Taming Your Triggers and the Parenting Membership together have been the single biggest contributor to their healing journey both as people and as parents and that's the work that really matters to me because when we heal ourselves we stop passing our pain onto our kids. We break the cycles that have been going on for generations and we create families where everyone's needs matter not just the loudest person's needs or the adult's needs but everyone's needs. That's really what keeps me going knowing that this work is making a difference in real families in real moments. That's really what it's all about for me after eight years and counting.

So that's what we did in twenty-twenty five. Now I want to talk about what's coming in twenty-twenty six because I'm really excited about some of this stuff and it's quite a lot. So first a small change with a big usability impact. We're going to add filters to the episodes page soon. We're getting to the end of the massive process of adding the right categories to every one of 250 plus episodes which is why it's taking us a while and when this is live in just a few weeks, you'll be able to filter by the type of challenge that you're having and the age range of your child and get a curated list of resources to help. So if you're dealing with bedtime battles with a four-year-old or power struggles with a teenager or sibling conflict with kids of any age you're going to be able to find exactly what you're looking for much more efficiently. Even bigger than that we are working on a complete redesign of the website. The goal is to make it feel fresher, more modern, to help you find the resources that you need more easily. You're going to see a new get started button at the top of the page with 10 brand new short videos and these are going to help you get oriented to the main ideas on the show and in my work as well.

Things like understanding your child's behavior as communication, meeting both your needs and your child's needs and using the problem-solving method to work through challenges together. So if you're new to the podcast or if you've been listening for a while but want to get clearer on those core concepts those videos are going to be really helpful to you. Another big change is that the Parenting Membership is now starting January 1 available for year-round enrollment. In the past we only opened enrollment once a year in May and if you missed that window you had to wait for the rest of the year and there was a reason for that right? I did that because I really see a lot of value in learning as a cohort but I also know a lot of parents who are in the membership who had recommended it to their friends in December or October or June and their friend couldn't wait a whole year to address the issue they were having. So now you can sign up whenever you like and we have a brand-new onboarding process that will help to connect you with the resources that are going to support you the most.

When you join you begin with a deep dive into the problem-solving method and that helps you address whatever challenge you're having with your child whether that's bedtime, screen time, sibling rivalry, homework battles, whatever it is. It gives you a framework for understanding what's really going on and find solutions that work for everyone. After that you get help with disagreements over parenting with your partner, raising healthy eaters, navigating screen time and toward the end of your first year you're going to be ready to learn about how you and your child have been affected by shame and work on healing yourselves as well. That shame module is some of the most powerful work that we do in the membership because so many of our triggered reactions come from the shame that we experienced as kids. Here on the podcast twenty-twenty six is going to be our year of mental health where we will have other topics interspersed as well as those come up but I'm going to return as often as I can to questions like what even is mental health? How can we be mentally healthier? And what's the intersection of all of this with various neurodivergences and other health challenges? I've already recorded a couple of episodes to kick us off one on the mental health industrial complex another on depression and I have to tell you I'm super excited to learn with you on this one. My mind has been regularly blown as I have done the background research so far.

There's so much that I thought I knew about mental health that turns out to be way more complex and more interesting than I'd realized. We also have a lot of new resources for you. We've got a parent anger quiz that helps you to understand the source of the rage that you experience as a parent even if your childhood was “normal” and not traumatic. You can take that at yourparentingmojo.com/quiz. It's super-fast just a few minutes and it will point you toward what's really driving your anger because a lot of the time the anger that we feel isn't really about our child leaving their shoes in the middle of the floor for the millionth time. That's about something so much deeper than that. Another set of tools we have is the Calm Parent Toolkit. It's a set of two-page pdfs. These were actually requested by a therapist to support you because they give you super practical actionable tools to feel angry less often, to see it coming up when you're getting angry, to navigate it more effectively when it does show up.

That's available for just seven bucks at yourparentingmojo.com/calmparent. And if you are a therapist and you want to share these resources with your clients drop us a line at support@yourparentingmojo.com and we will set you up with a coupon code. We've made the Why You're So Angry with Your Child's Age-Appropriate Behavior Masterclass available any time now. Used to be just twice a year you could catch up with that. So now you can watch a 24-minute video of me explaining exactly where your triggered reactions come from and then watch me coach parents who are experiencing triggered reactions in super relatable situations. Things like bedtime resistance when different kids have needs that seem to compete and small daily hassles that don't seem like they should be triggering but somehow, they are anyway. The masterclass will help you see how it can be possible for you too to make the kinds of changes you want to make in your own relationship with your kids. Because I know how hard it can feel when you're in the middle of it. You know you don't want to yell and then you do it anyway.

You know you want to be patient but somehow your patience runs out at the exact moment your child needs it most. And watching other parents work through this with coaching can help you see that change is really possible. So that's at yourparentingmojo.com/triggersmasterclass. Another new free resource is our Beyond the Behavior coaching calls. These are totally free, drop-in, no commitment coaching calls where you can bring your real parenting struggles and get coached by me in real time. So we do record these calls. Some of the coaching sessions become podcast episodes, definitely not all of them. So even if you can't make it to a live call, you can listen and learn from other parent’s situations. The rest of the sessions that are not released publicly are released to Parenting Membership members who often find it really useful to hear me coach a parent on a specific random struggle that hasn't come up yet on the show or in the membership. You can sign up for the calls at yourparentingmojo.com/beyondthebehavior. When you sign up, we send you a calendar invitation to hold that slot from 9 to 10.30 am on the second Wednesday of every month and you can just show up whenever it's convenient for you. Finally, we have yet more free stuff.

I've released so many free resources over the last eight years and I realize they're all scattered in different places throughout the website and they can be kind of hard to find. There's 13 reasons why your child doesn't listen and what to do about each one, 55 ways to encourage your child without praise, 11 ways to help your child learn to read, 11 more on learning math, 6 strategies to teach emotional awareness, and about 20 other short actionable pdfs as well. Right now, we're making sure they're all aligned with my current ideas because those have evolved over the last eight years and also making sure that like they look like they all belong together and then we'll make them available to you. So if you want to get on the wait list for that or if you come to this episode in several months’ time then it will probably be available already but either way sign up at yourparentingmojo.com/freeparentingresources and if it's still in waitlist mode we'll drop you an email as soon as it's fully available. All of this is coming in the first month or so roughly of twenty-twenty six and all of it is in service of my broader goal of supporting parents and families in creating a different kind of world, not just in our individual homes but in how we show up in our communities and the systems that we're all part of. On a micro level I want to help families collaborate more effectively. In a Your Parenting Mojo family in twenty-twenty six you're not spending your days managing your child's behavior or enforcing consequences. Instead, you're working together to solve problems and when there's a conflict, you're both getting curious about what each person needs and you're finding creative solutions that work for everyone. Your child knows that their needs matter, that they have agency in their own life and that they can work with others to solve problems and you know that you can meet your own needs without your child having to lose something for you to do that.

I also want to help families heal intergenerational trauma. In a Your Parenting Mojo family you're doing the work to understand how your own childhood experiences are showing up in your parenting. You're noticing when you get triggered, you're learning to respond to your child from a place of calm steadiness instead of the very real pain of your own unmet needs. You're breaking cycles that have been going on for generations, cycles of shame, of control, of disconnection and you're creating something new for your children and for yourself as well. And finally, I want to help us recognize where societal norms are supporting us in becoming healed whole people and make choices that help us to do those things even though our culture sometimes pushes us in another direction. Your Parenting Mojo families feel grounded in the confidence that they know their values and they know that the actions they're taking with their kids on a daily basis align with those values because they get support from other families who are on the same journey.

That's what I'm working toward in twenty-twenty six because I want you to love being a parent not just in the of course I love my kids when I think about them but whether whenever I'm with them I need a break kind of way but in a way where you actually enjoy each other and you know that when hard stuff comes up you'll be able to navigate it effectively and feel confident that you're a great parent. So that's where we are right now. We've covered a lot of ground last year; we made the podcast more accessible with shorter episodes and better ways to find what you're looking for and we have so many changes coming in the next couple months as we roll out our deep dive into mental health while keeping our eyes on the bigger vision of what we're all creating together. I want to close by really deeply thanking you for being here. Whether you've been listening since the beginning, I know there are some of you out there, or you just found the podcast last week, I'm so grateful that you're here learning alongside me. Parenting is such hard work and doing it in a way that's different from how we were raised is even harder but you're doing it.

You're showing up for your kids in ways that maybe no one showed up for you. You're here and you're doing real work that matters. If you ever have any thoughts, suggestions, ideas on ways I can support you, on topics you'd like to hear me cover on the podcast or anything else, do feel free to reach out at support@yourparentingmojo.com. I can't promise that I'll do what you ask but I do promise to consider it. And I'm so excited for what twenty-twenty six holds and I hope you'll join me for that journey. I'll see you again very soon.

Hi, this is Jess from rural East Panama. I'm a Your Parenting Mojo fan and I hope you enjoy this show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful, you can also donate to help Jen produce more content like this and also save us from those interminable mattress ads. Then you can do that and also subscribe on the link that Jen just mentioned. And don't forget to head to yourparentingmojo.com to record your own message for the show.