240: How to prepare your kids for the real world

Hi this is Kelly Peterson from Chicago, Illinois. There’s no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo which doesn’t just tell you about latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it into context for you as well. So you can decide whether and how to use these new information. And we’re trying to get new episode in your inbox along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn’t listening to you and what to do with each one sign up at yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe. If you’d like to start a conversation with someone about this episode or you know someone who would find it useful please do forward it to them. Thank you so much.

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. In this episode I want to address a question that parents ask me in three different contexts, and that is: How can I prepare my child for the real world? The first context this gets asked is when we think about all of the influences that our children are exposed to now, and how much these will grow over the years. I’m thinking of hyper palatable foods like candy and salty snacks, as well as media that includes violence and other ideas that we wish they never had to see. How can we help them to navigate this world that doesn’t fit with our values? That links to the second idea, which is broader social systems that also don’t fit with our values like unfair treatment of people based on their gender or the color of their skin. It can seem like protecting our children for as long as possible is our best strategy, but the third way this idea shows up is that many parents I work with worry that if we protect them too much, that they won’t learn how to cope in the real world. This ‘protecting them too much’ idea isn’t so much about foods and media and ideas, but more about discipline. Parents worry that if we don’t discipline our children enough, they won’t learn to function in a world where rewards and punishments are regular part of life. They fear that if they ‘coddle’ their kids by meeting their kids’ needs now, their kids won’t learn how to function in a world that doesn’t care very much about their needs. So I’m going to address both of these issues in this summary episode, drawing on several previous episodes, so that you can prepare YOUR kids for the real world.

Let’s start by looking at what our kids eat, because there are all kinds of cultural implications involved in that. Perhaps YOU’VE never found yourself in this situation, but plenty of other parents have: You’re sitting at the dinner table in front of a nutritious meal that you’ve spent a good deal of time preparing, and your child is happily munching on a piece of bread, ignoring the rest of what’s on their plate. You remind them about the chicken and the broccoli. They take a tiny nibble of chicken but refuse to touch the green stuff. You’re trying to stay calm, but in the back of your mind, you’re thinking, "How is my kid ever going to get the nutrients they need if all they eat is carbs?!"

And what’s behind our fears about what they’re eating? It’s a lot of things. It’s other parents, who might judge our kids for what they eat and what they don’t eat when our kids go to their house. It’s well-meaning family members who make a side comment about whether our child should really take another helping of dessert, given how much weight they’ve put on since we last saw the relative. It’s the doctor at our well child appointments, who tell us where our child is on growth curves, and who judges whether or not what we’re feeding them is appropriate based on their body shape. Our culture is not kind to children who have big bodies, or boys who have slim bodies, either. Once bullying people related to homophobia and disabilities became less acceptable, although they’re making a comeback these days, unfortunately, teasing and bullying of fat people was still seen as acceptable. I interviewed Dr. Lindo Bacon on this topic. In that conversation we learned that the number that we use to measure the amount of fat on a person’s body, the Body Mass Index is everywhere – school nurses do weigh-ins and calculate a child’s BMI; their doctors do the same, and public health campaigns encourage us to reduce our BMI. But here’s the kicker: BMI was never designed to measure an individual health. It was created by a statistician to assess population trends, not to determine if a specific person is healthy or not. And yet, it’s somehow become a gold standard for diagnosing "obesity" and making assumptions about people’s well-being.

Dr. Bacon points out something even more surprising: when we look at actual research on weight and longevity, the group that lives the longest isn’t the "normal" weight category—it’s those in the "overweight" category. And the vast majority of people in the "obese" category live just as long as those in the "normal" category. So why are we so focused on shrinking our bodies?

It’s true that larger-bodied people have higher rates of certain diseases like diabetes and heart disease. But does weight cause these issues? Perhaps not necessarily. Dr. Bacon explains that weight stigma—which is how society treats people in larger bodies—plays a major role in health outcomes. If you’re constantly told your body is a problem, you’re more likely to experience stress, avoid doctor’s appointments, and feel unwelcome in healthcare settings. And stress alone is a huge contributor to chronic health issues.

Another factor? Weight cycling. Most people who try to lose weight will regain it—often gaining back more than they lost. This repeated cycle of losing and regaining weight (known as "yo-yo dieting") is linked to worse health outcomes than simply staying at a stable weight, even if that weight is higher than the so-called "healthy" range.

So we have all of these societal expectations pressing on us in that moment when our child is munching on bread and ignoring their vegetables, which is why mealtimes can be so stressful. It’s not just about you and your child and the bread in your child’s hand.

One tool that a lot of parents have found helpful is nutritionist and family therapist Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility model. The idea is simple: Parents are responsible for what, when, and where food is offered. Kids are responsible for how much they eat—or if they eat at all. It sounds almost too good to be true, right? Just provide the food, step back, and trust the process. But for a lot of us, that’s easier said than done.

It’s hard to let go when everything around us is telling us that kids need to eat a certain way. You hear that they need five servings of vegetables a day. That sugar is the enemy. That ultra-processed foods are going to ruin their health. And when you see your child ignoring their carrots and reaching for another handful of goldfish crackers, it’s easy to panic. Division of Responsibility is certainly a lot easier to practice in an environment where we aren’t surrounded by foods that companies have spent billions of dollars making more palatable to us. The food manufacturer Cadbury Schweppes had three thousand, nine hundred four people test sixty-one subtly distinct formulas for a new flavor of cherry vanilla Dr. Pepper – thirty-one for the regular version and thirty for the diet version. A consultant compiled a one hundred, thiry-five -page report showing how people felt about the different proportions of flavors, including its mouthfeel, which is the way the product interacts with your mouth, from dryness to gumminess to moisture release, which together define a particular product’s ‘bliss point,’ which predicts how much craving a product will induce. Frito-Lay spends $30 million a year on a team of five hundred chemists, psychologists, and technicians to find the bliss point in snack foods. Food scientist Steven Witherly, author of the book “Why humans like junk food,” said that Cheetos are one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure. A New York Times article describing these ideas quotes him as saying that Cheetos have a dozen attributes that make them more appealing to us, but primary among these is the puff’s “uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said.” If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it…you can just keep eating it forever.” To me it really doesn’t seem fair to pit children’s developing brains against this industry that has invested billions of dollars in making snack foods more palatable.

Children are surrounded by social influences that shape their eating habits. Highly palatable foods—those rich in sugar, fat, and salt—are marketed aggressively to children. From colorful cereal boxes to fast food ads featuring beloved cartoon characters, kids are constantly bombarded with messages that these foods are fun and desirable. And once they get a taste for them, it’s no wonder they keep asking for more.

At the same time, parents feel immense pressure to get their children to eat vegetables. Messages from pediatricians, parenting books, and even well-meaning relatives reinforce the idea that good parenting means making sure your child eats a "balanced diet." If your child refuses vegetables, we’re told that it’s our fault as parents, and especially as mothers, and therefore our responsibility to fix it – and definitely is not the responsibility of the companies making the products that are marketed to our kids.

Research shows that young kids actually often do get the nutrients they need over time, even if it doesn’t look like it meal to meal. The study done by Clara Mae Davis study in the nineteen, thirty’s followed children who were given a variety of whole foods with no pressure to eat any specific thing.

These kids, left to their own devices, naturally chose a well-balanced diet over time. No bribes, no begging, no "one more bite" negotiations. The key was that children were presented with only nutritious foods, because the highly palatable foods we eat today simply weren’t available. But we also know that restricting treats can backfire.

You know how when something is off-limits, it suddenly becomes way more interesting? Kids are no different when it comes to food. Studies show that when parents tightly control access to treats, kids just want them more. And when they finally get their hands on that "forbidden" food, they tend to go overboard.

This effect is compounded by peer influences. If your child sees their friends eating chips at school every day, they might start fixating on them too. The more those foods are restricted at home, the more intensely they may desire them in social settings. Similarly, if a child has experienced forced vegetable eating at home, they may associate those foods with stress and power struggles—making them even less likely to choose vegetables voluntarily.

So what are we need to do? Instead of making certain foods feel special or off-limits, we can take the mystery away by including them in everyday meals and snacks in a structured way. That way, kids learn that cookies, chips, and candy aren’t some rare treasure—they’re just another food. And when that happens, the obsession fades. Here’s some things you can try.

You can Make mealtimes predictable and possible pressure-free – Offer a variety of foods at meals and snacks, and then just step back. No bribes, no "just take one bite," no commentary. The more we pressure kids, the more they dig their heels in, just like we do on issues that are important to us. We’re going to try to let go of the food battles – Instead of focusing on what your child isn’t eating, notice what they are eating. Are they exploring any new foods, even if they don’t eat them yet? Are they listening to their hunger cues? These are wins! Another thing we can try is to know what a serving size of a food is, and offer one serving of each food per day. Once your child has already eaten a service of a food and they ask for another serving, you can say: “You’ve already had a serving of that today. Our bodies need all kinds of nutrients to be healthy. What else would you like?” You can be prepared to offer some ideas; you might even try having a menu of appealing options stuck to the fridge. What’s key here is that a serving of cookies or chips is treated the same as a serving of apples or carrots. This means that cookies and chips aren’t positioned as ‘bad’ foods while fruits and vegetables are ‘good’ foods – it’s just that some variety in foods really does help our bodies. The main exception to this is where the child is already eating a HIGHLY restricted diet, due to suspected or diagnosed sensory issues, or neurodivergence. In this case, you may decide that supporting the child’s ability to regulate by eating foods they find comforting and reliable, which often includes highly processed foods, takes precedence over immediately expanding their diet, at least in the short term. You might be able to work with a feeding therapist to expand the variety of foods they will accept, but this might be out of reach for many families as it may not be covered by insurance. Only you can make the decision about what to do on this issue that’s right for you and your family.

Now let's pivot to another area where we struggle with preparing children for the real world: screen time and video games. Just as with food, many parents find themselves caught in a cycle of worry, guilt, and frustration around technology. You might find yourself saying things like, "Just five more minutes and then we need to turn it off," only to face tears, tantrums, or negotiation tactics that would impress a seasoned diplomat when that timer goes off.

Behind these struggles is the same fundamental question we faced with food: How do we prepare our children to navigate a digital world that's designed to capture and hold their attention, while still instilling the values we find important?

Let's be honest – video games and digital media are incredibly compelling by design. Game designers, much like the food scientists we discussed earlier, have spent billions perfecting the "bliss point" of digital experiences. Games offer immediate feedback, incremental challenges that feel achievable, and social connection – all wrapped in colorful, fast-paced packaging. They're specifically engineered to meet children's core psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness in ways that real-world experiences sometimes struggle to match.

When we understand this, we can see why simply setting rigid time limits or demonizing screens isn't particularly effective. Just as with restricted foods, forbidden screen time often becomes more desirable, not less.

What's fascinating is that contrary to popular belief, there isn't actually compelling evidence that shows video games make children more violent. This might come as a surprise if you've heard otherwise, but the relationship between gaming and aggression is much more complex than headlines suggest. In fact, while video game usage has dramatically increased globally, violent crime rates have generally decreased. Countries with higher percentages of young gamers than the US often have lower violence rates.

That said, averages don't tell individual stories. If you notice negative behavior changes after your child plays certain games, that's important information. Every child responds differently, and you know your child best. It's perfectly reasonable to limit access to specific games, especially for younger children.

What's often more important than the games themselves are the cultural messages embedded within them. Just as food choices aren't neutral – they're wrapped in cultural expectations – video games reflect our broader societal values. For example, many popular games reinforce particular gender roles, with female characters often positioned as supporters and healers rather than protagonists. These aren't ideas created by games, but rather reflections of existing cultural narratives that show up in games, books, movies, and other media our children consume.

Rather than trying to shield our children from these influences entirely, we can help them develop critical thinking skills by discussing these patterns. We might say something like "have you noticed how the female characters in this game mostly help the male characters? What do you think about that?" These conversations help children recognize cultural messages and decide which ones align with their own values.

Video games also offer incredible learning opportunities. Children playing games are often engaging in complex problem-solving, developing persistence, testing hypotheses, and collaborating with others. They're active producers of knowledge, not just passive consumers. This represents a very different kind of learning than memorizing facts or procedures without understanding their deeper purpose – the kind of learning that many of us experienced in school.

So what can you do to help your child develop a healthy relationship with screens while preparing them for the digital world they'll inhabit?

First, recognize that developing self-regulation around screens is a journey that happens in small steps. Just as with food choices, expecting a child to go from having all screen time managed by you to managing it completely independently isn't realistic. Instead, try breaking it down into steps: your setting and enforcing the timer, and then they start setting the timer with your backup, and then over time they start to manage the timer independently, and eventually testing periods of more open-ended use with ongoing conversations about balance.

If your child struggles to turn off screens when asked, that's not a character flaw – it's information about where they are in their developmental journey. Meeting them where they are with appropriate support will feel much better – to both of you! - than repeatedly getting frustrated when they can't meet expectations beyond their current capabilities.

Second, have activities ready that meet the same psychological needs as video games when screen time ends. Games, physical play, or creative projects that offer competence, autonomy, and connection can make the transition smoother.

Finally, try to observe and acknowledge the learning happening during game play. Notice their problem-solving, persistence, creativity, and collaboration. Help them to see these skills as transferable to other areas of their lives – this metacognitive awareness is a powerful tool for deeper learning in any context.

Just as we can help children develop critical thinking about food marketing and screen time content, we also have to support their ability to question limiting social expectations that divide human qualities into rigid categories. When we use disciplinary approaches like time-out, we may unintentionally send a message that connection is conditional. Many of us were raised this way ourselves, so it feels natural - but we now understand that children interpret temporary withdrawal of attention as withdrawal of love, even when that's not our intention. What if we could address challenging behavior while maintaining connection? Here, we’re ultimately asking: How do we prepare our children to thrive in a world where certain human capacities are divided and ranked in ways that impact everyone's development?

As I explored in my conversation with listener Brian Stout and Dr. Carol Gilligan, our society often splits human qualities into separate categories. Reason versus emotion. Mind versus body. Self versus relationships. Some of these qualities are elevated over others, and from a very young age, children face pressure to conform to these categorizations.

Think about what we see with young boys. Research shows that boys as young as four demonstrate remarkable emotional intelligence and relational awareness. One four-year-old in a study noticed his mother's subtle emotional cues, and asked, "Mama, why do you smile when you're sad?" Yet between ages 5-7, many boys begin to shield these qualities, afraid of being seen as "soft" or different. Dr. Judy Chu’s PhD research, which she conducted in Dr. Gilligan’s lab, found that even by pre-kindergarten, many boys will no longer hug their mother’s goodbye. Early in the school year, she observed that boys who wouldn’t hug their moms would still cuddle with their dads, sit in their laps, and read together. By the Spring semester, the boys had begun to distance themselves from their dads. They might do a high five rather than a hug and a kiss. They didn’t all make that transition at the same time, but they seemed very aware of who was watching the interaction. They previously been fully present in their relationships with other boys, and then they started using scripted language they had seen on TV or heard older siblings using, and using that to hold each other at a distance. It seemed like they still craved hugs, because Dr. Chu described one boy Jake, and his father who had a very openly loving relationship. When Jake’s father came to the classroom, several of the boys would end up hugging the Dad and climbing on his back. One of the boys in the classroom would question the other boys and ask: “What are you doing?” if he saw them being affectionate toward their fathers, and Jake would confidently respond: “I’m snuggling with my Dad.” Dr. Chu said that she had recently had coffee with Jake, because he’s 27 now, and apparently he continued to resist these stereotypical messages of what boys and men should be like, and he said how important it was to him that he always knew he could talk about things with his parents.

A related process happens to girls once reach adolescence. One 17-year-old research participant put it: "If I were to say what I was really feeling and thinking, no one would want to be with me, my voice would be too loud." Between ages nine and thirteen, roughly many girls learn that their honest voice is "stupid" or "too much," and they begin to replace it with a more acceptable version that says what others want to hear. Around the same time we often see some of the ‘mean girl’ behavior starting to happen, and I do not think this is a coincidence. We talked with Dr. Marnina Gonick about this, and I chose her specifically because most of the people writing on this topic are journalists rather than academics, and their books take the perspective that we just need to get the mean girls to stop being mean, and then we won’t have a problem. Dr. Gonick helped me and listener Caroline to see how this isn’t girls being ‘mean;’ it’s girls seeing how little power they have in our culture and experimenting with ways to get more power. Girls are trying to do a complex dance where they build up their own status to be high but not so high as to be threatening to others, because if they do that then they’re likely to be kicked off their pedestal back to the bottom of the heap. Seen from this perspective, the so-called ‘mean’ behavior is a symptom, rather than the problem itself. One way we can address this issue is to make sure girls have a real voice in issues they think are important to them. We can also help them to see what they have in common with other girls, rather than seeing all the ways that they’re different from other girls. In fact, they have so many interests in common, and a lot more power when they work with other girls to do things that are important to them, rather than working against each other. This shows us how the ideas we saw in video games don’t exist in isolation - they directly reinforce the social systems we've been discussing. When games portray male characters as warriors and female characters as healers, they're teaching the same division of human qualities that pressures boys to hide emotional sensitivity and girls to silence their authentic voices.

Children naturally resist these divisions. They arrive in the world with both voice and a desire for connection. Young children will play with other children of all genders, until they learn from older kids to start sorting themselves by gender. They want to express themselves and relate to others. When we force them to choose between these fundamental human capacities, something essential is lost.

This affects not just relationships between different groups, but also our ability to repair disconnection when it happens. As human beings, we lose connection throughout the day – with ourselves, with others – and the healthy response is to notice this and try to repair it. But when certain ways of being are labeled as unacceptable or undesirable, we lose the tools that we need to heal these ruptures.

The research I've explored shows how this plays out in different communities. Dr. Margaret Hagerman's work reminds us that where families choose to live significantly shapes what children learn about social structures. Children in more homogeneous communities often develop the idea that systems are overall fairly fair, while those in diverse settings develop more sophisticated understanding of structural inequalities and historical contexts.

Her research also revealed how deeply our housing patterns are shaped by historical policies with ongoing consequences. For example, her work notes how between nineteen thirty-four and nineteen sixty-two, ninety-eight percent of home loans went to families from the dominant racial group, creating wealth disparities that continue generations later. These aren't just historical curiosities—they directly impact children's experiences today, from the schools they attend to the opportunities they're given. Most schools in the U.S. get their funding from local property taxes, so homes that are worth more generate more in taxes. The nation’s poorest communities receive only about sixty-four percent of the funding that the richest communities receive. Sometimes there are funding disparities even within the same school district – one school in a district in Illinois where ¾ of students are English language learners received only eighty-six percent of the funding per student as a school on the other side of the same district where only seventeen percent of students were English language learners. Even when districts aren’t making the conscious decision to give more money to wealthier schools, they often end up doing just that. Some of the primary drivers of this discrepancy are that schools with the wealthiest students tend to draw the most experienced teachers, who get paid more, and smaller schools that serve wealthier students don’t get to the economies of scale that a big school does, so they end up spending more on wealthier kids. Magnet schools are often small schools, and also often get extra funding to support specialized programming. But it doesn’t have to be like this – some parents are pushing back on these systems. Parent-Teacher organizations often do fund raising that also boosts money available to students, but in Portland, Oregon the money is pooled and allocated on a per-student basis across the entire district rather than staying in the school where it was raised.

So what can we do as parents to prepare our children for this reality while helping them develop into individuals who can create a more just world?

First we need to recognize that avoiding these topics does not protect our children. When we frame certain subjects as too uncomfortable to discuss, we're not shielding innocence – we're allowing misconceptions to flourish. Children notice social patterns whether we discuss them or not. Rather than silence, they need guidance to interpret what they see. I’ve found a lot of scope for doing this in reading children’s chapter books. These issues are everywhere if you know to look for them. I recently read the New York Times Bestselling Fablehaven series to my daughter that was about a world where a few humans were protecting the world from magical creatures. In the second book in the series the main character, Kendra, was one of only a very few who could see that an attractive new boy at school named Corey was actually a goblin. The goblin disguised as a boy goes to see a movie with Kendra and her friend Alyssa, and then wants to walk Alyssa home. Kendra takes Alyssa aside and says: “Think about it. We hardly know anything about him. You just met him today. He's not a little guy. Are you sure you want to go walking alone in the dark with him? Girls can get in a lot of trouble that way.” The next day, Alyssa shows up at school looking upset, Kendra asks if she’s OK, and Alyssa says:

“He kissed me.

“He what?” Kendra tried to conceal her revulsion. “You don't sound too thrilled.”

Alyssa shook her head regretfully. “I was having so much fun. We talked in front of my house for a while after you drove away. He was being really cute and funny, and then he moved in close. I was terrified. I mean, I hardly know him, but it was also sort of exciting until we actually kissed. Kendra, he had dog breath.”

So these kids had just met each other the same day they went to the movies, they went to the movies once. This sequence is telling girls firstly that it’s their responsibility to keep themselves safe, because being alone with a boy could have bad consequences for the girl, but not for the boy. Then, if girls find themselves in that situation and a boy kisses them they may feel terrified but they should just keep going, because it will probably end up being exciting. So this is teaching girls to override what they know in their gut is right for them, and let the boy do whatever he wants. It’s more common than we might think for people who experience sexual assault to not be able to say ‘no,’ to push the person away, or do other things that we think of as signifying resistance. And this is a middle-grade children’s novel training children that boys should be the pursuer, and girls should be pursued, and they should do what the boy wants whether they like it or not. These ideas hurt boys as well, who may not be comfortable in the traditional pursuer role. We have to know that these ideas are in the books they’re reading, the films they’re watching, and the conversations they’re having, because that’s how the ideas are passed on. When I read this passage to Carys I paused and we discussed pretty much exactly what I just shared here.

Second, we can help children maintain their wholeness as human beings. We can affirm their full range of emotional expression, their curiosity, their desire for both autonomy and connection. This often means hearing them when they push back against us, especially at the different ages we’ve already mentioned. So when kindergarten and elementary-aged boys are seeking connection with us, we can lean into that. This may look like resistance to doing things that they ‘should be able to do by themselves,’ either because they’re ‘old enough,’ or they did it last week so why can’t they do it this week? When we see their request for help as a request for connection and respond accordingly, we build connection with our boys rather than creating disconnection. When we see our girls wanting more autonomy in the middle school years, if we see that as a reaction to systems that want to squash their ability to speak up for themselves, and listen, and we help them to take action against systems they think are unjust, we’ll be supporting them in preserving their voice and agency into their adult years.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't prepare our children for the world as it currently exists. They'll still need to navigate systems that may not always recognize their full humanity. The key is helping them understand these realities without internalizing limiting messages. We can say, 'This is how some people think, but it doesn't have to define you,' instead of 'This is just how things are.’

I recognize that putting these ideas into practice isn't always straightforward, especially when we're operating within systems like schools and workplaces that have their own expectations. Perfect implementation is not our goal here, it’s more about awareness and making incremental shifts are. Even small moments of true connection and validation make a difference in how children understand themselves and their place in the world.

The third issue we can work on here is modelling what it means to extend care beyond our immediate circle. One powerful example from Dr. Margaret Hagerman's research involved parents who deliberately invested extra resources in community programs rather than exclusive opportunities for just their own children. When signing up for summer camps or activities, these parents would contribute to scholarship funds for families with fewer resources, ensuring that more children could participate in enriching experiences. When I had a corporate job and access to more resources, I would regularly do this in the programs that Carys attended. Now our income is lower, we typically support programs with our time rather than money.

This approach – asking "what about all children?" rather than just "what about my child?" – represents a really profound shift in thinking. It recognizes that true preparation for the real world is not just about equipping our individual children with advantages, but working toward systems where all children can thrive.

The final area that I want to look at as we think about preparing our children is something we touched on earlier, it’s related to how we discipline them. Parents often start working with me because there’s some aspect of their children’s behavior that is driving them up the wall. Behind their question of: “How do I deal with this behavior?” is the underlying question: "How do I discipline my child so they'll be ready for the real world?" Many parents worry that if we don't use traditional disciplinary methods like time-outs, our children won't learn important lessons about appropriate behavior and consequences.

When we look closely at tools like time-out, we can see they come directly from behaviorist theory – the same approach used with laboratory pigeons and chimpanzees in the nineteen forty’s. The premise is simple: remove the child from "positive reinforcement" which is basicly your attention and love for a period of time to discourage unwanted behavior.

Researchers claim time-out effectively reduces problematic behaviors, and I will agree with this to some extent. But I find myself asking a more fundamental question: What is time-out actually teaching our children about relationships and their place in the world?

When we use approaches like time-out, we may unintentionally send a message that connection is conditional. Many of us were raised this way ourselves, so it feels normal to us - but we now understand that children interpret temporary withdrawal of attention as withdrawal of love, even if we didn’t intend that. What if we could address challenging behavior while maintaining our connection?

This approach misses the crucial understanding that behavior is communication. When we look more deeply at children's "misbehavior," we typically find unmet needs:

Consider one parent that I worked with whose 11-year-old had been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Mornings were incredibly difficult, with the child refusing to get ready and constant sibling conflicts. Rather than implementing stricter discipline, we explored what needs might be behind the behavior.

When this parent shifted from demanding compliance to asking, "What's going on? Do you need help?" something really remarkable happened. Her son responded with connection rather than resistance. Later, when a conflict with his sister arose, instead of acting out, he wrote a note: "Mom, I'm so sorry I didn't get us to school on time. I really needed your help. Thank you for giving me grace this morning."

As this parent reflected, "My son wasn't being defiant. His needs weren't being met." Once she understood this, the diagnosis no longer seemed relevant.

I've seen this pattern countless times. What looks like defiance, aggression, or non-compliance is often a child trying to meet their need in the only way they know how. The child who hits their sibling might be desperately seeking connection or struggling to get attention in a positive way. The child throwing toys might be experiencing sensory overload or needing physical movement. The child refusing to follow directions might be trying to meet their need for autonomy and control in a world where they have so little. When we use time-out, we're not teaching children better ways to meet their needs – we're teaching them to suppress the expression of those needs to please us.

In preparation for an episode on the topic of validation that will be coming up very soon, I’m reading Dr. Marsha Linehan’s memoir Building a Life Worth Living. Dr. Linehan developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which is a behaviorist-based approach to working with people with very serious mental health challenges. I’m going to refer to her in this next stretch as Marsha rather than Dr. Linehan, partly to make the narrative easier and partly because that’s how she refers to herself in the book but I just know that it’s coming from the same place of respect as if I address her as Doctor each time because I know we don’t always for women who were Doctors. Marsha herself had some sort of breakdown in her late teenage years; she went from being a child who had everything going for her to spending two years in a private mental institution. She traces the path of how that happened, and I want to share some chunks of what she wrote with you because I think it illustrates a number of the ideas we’ve worked with in this episode. The book begins by telling us about her teenage years – there’s a quote from her nineteen sixty-one yearbook calling out how “her laughter can be heard echoing around the halls as she performs another good-natured prank. The high esteem for Marsha has led her to be Junior Mardi Gras Queen candidate and Senior Class Council Secretary.” She describes herself as an intellectual rebel, always thinking out of the box, always questioning assumptions. She says: “I was a voracious reader. I could sit in the library for hours by myself, reading. Because I was growing up in a seriously Catholic family and being educated by nuns, my questioning mind was, shall we say, not always appreciated. I was one of six siblings of a highly respected, upper-middle class family in Tulsa, Oklahoma that in many ways, from my perspective and those of many others, was a wonderful family. My father, John Marston Linehan, was vice president of the Sunoco oil company and a pillar of Tulsa society. My mother, Ella Marie, was Louisiana Cajun and proud of it. She was outgoing and uninhibited in just about any situation, and very active in volunteering. Mom could buy a piece of cloth from the thrift store and make it look like something from Dior. My father’s success in the corporate world made the family reasonably well-off. We lived in a big, beautiful, white Spanish-style house…our yard was landscaped with care by Mother, with perennial beds, flowering bushes, and magnolia trees that she worked on every spring.” Perhaps you’re already reading between the lines on what’s really going on in this family? We get a hint just a little later: “My brothers were good looking, accomplished, and popular, and my sister Aline was and still is slim and very beautiful. Aline was the model daughter somehow without effort, it seemed to me, being the kind of person Mother approved of. My sister says that the bottom line was that I simply could not please my mother no matter what I did. Mother’s efforts to transform me into a girl who was cute, good-looking, and socially appropriate in Tulsa society somehow always backfired.” After setting the stage, Marsha moves fairly quickly into describing in the book what she calls her “descent into hell,” and then walks back through her memories, other people’s memories, and other evidence that can explain why the descent happened. She experienced electroshock therapy in the hospital, so she doesn’t have many memories of her own childhood. She looks at old family photos where she is often physically very close to her dad, with his arm around her shoulders, suggesting that he was emotionally close to her has well. She wonders: “Perhaps his in ability to take my side, to support me, was more important than I have thought. Dad was definitely a conservative Southern man of his times. He had no concept whatsoever of mental disorders. Like many people, even today, I think he believed that I could just ‘get over it’ if I tried harder. Both he and mom, like almost everyone else in Tulsa, Oklahoma, believed young women should be pretty and should eventually marry a nice man and become a good (that is, submissive) wife and mother, while men should do important work and make money. They thought boys should be treated as superior to girls. Boys could express their opinions; girls should be compliant and sweet. Even Aline, Mother’s perfect daughter, felt pressure. “I was Miss Goody Two-shoes,” she now says, “but I was terrified I would get into trouble, and I lived in fear that I wouldn’t get Mother’s approval.””

Then she shares her parent’s own histories, and it makes perfect sense that her mom would treat her this way. Her Mom’s father lost nearly everything in the great depression, so she went to school to be a teacher to support the family. While she was in school her parents died, so she worked as a teacher to support her brothers until they could support themselves. And then she moved in with an aunt in Dallas, a sophisticated, intellectual woman with a husband in the oil business. Dr. Linehan says: “At this point, Mother had little education in how to present oneself well, how to dress attractively, how to speak well in social settings, and so forth. She showed up at Aunt Aline’s overweight and single. She was twenty-two, at a time when women were expected to be married by twenty-two.” Aunt Aline got her charge to lose weight, to dress better, to learn sophisticated social skills, and to look cute, and then sent her to another Aunt in Tulsa to look for a husband.” That’s how Marsha’s parents met and married – the plan had worked. She goes on: “It is therefore not surprising that Mom tried to improve me just as Aunt Aline had improved her, hoping for a similar positive outcome. Given that she talked to aunt almost every day, I suspect that Aunt Aline supported her in her efforts. Mom tried to change me into a girl who conformed to their idea of a successful person. The problem was that, unlike Mother, I was just not able to make the changes they wanted. The tension between us went from bad to worse. I just wasn’t a malleable daughter. I couldn’t’ have been a socialite if I wanted to. Nevertheless, she was determined and constantly badgered me to dress properly, do my hair, lose weight, speak only when appropriate. Alas, Mother’s unceasing advice did not come across as caring, only demanding and invalidating. As Aline whining her sister said, to feel Mother’s love, you had to fit a certain mold, and I didn’t. I was constantly aware of her disapproval, the look in her eyes, her tone of voice. She just couldn’t hide it. Aline has told me that there was nothing about me that my mother really approved of – that I just couldn’t win. No matter my efforts, there would be something else the next day that she didn’t like. I don’t know how many times Mother came home from parties and talked glowingly about some girl my age, praising her poise, her looks the whole nine yards. Naturally, it made me think, “There must be something wrong with me.” Mom had no idea of her negative impact on me, and how her constant efforts to improve me had the opposite effect. As a teenager, I often felt very unacceptable in my own home. My older brothers were away at college. My sister was protecting herself from Mother and staying away from me. My younger brothers had no idea what was going on. Aline recently said to me, “you had no one, Marsha, not even me, your own sister, to turn to for comfort. You were alone in a family of eight.” This is not to say that my brothers might not have helped me if I had asked. Instead, it is likely that no one knew anything was wrong.”

It's really hard to hear that, right? I want to point out some of the things that stood out to me as I read out these paragraphs. Firstly, the project that Marsha’s mom had to shape Marsha’s behavior. Given her mom’s background, it isn’t at all surprising that she would do this. What’s more unusual here is that because of her training, Marsha can now look back and see that it happened. Most of us don’t fully understand why our parents try to shape our behavior. As Marsha did, we just assume that there’s something wrong with US. And remember that Marsha’s mom didn’t do this shaping because she hated Marsha. On the contrary. Her mom remembered how hard her own life had been because she wasn’t slim enough, pretty enough, and socially skilled enough, and she wanted to prevent Marsha from feeling the pain that she had felt as a young woman. Not all parents approach this as a conscious project like Marsha’s mom did. Many of our parents don’t fully see why they’re doing this shaping. To them, it just seemed like it was their job to discipline us to fit in better, and to make them look like competent parents. It wasn’t a conscious decision to shape us; it’s just what everyone else around them was doing to get their kids to do what everyone else’s kids were doing. But this creates an environment that Marsha describes as “traumatic invalidation.” She says: “traumatic invalidation may only occur once, as when a mother refuses to believe that her daughter is telling the truth when she reports sexual abuse. Or it can be an accumulation of pervasive misreading of emotions by others. Trauma is most likely when these actions make the individual feel like an outsider.” Also remember that nobody seemed to realize what was happening for Marsha certainly not in her nuclear family. The casual observer, this looked like a happy middle-class family but inside, everyone is having their own awful experience, and nobody can talk about it.

The second thing I noticed was that Aline didn’t come out of this unscathed either. Aline was the slim, pretty one who met her mom’s expectations, and even that didn’t keep her safe. Aline saw their mom’s treatment of Marsha and realized that she was a few pounds, a bad haircut, and a social misstep away from the kind of treatment that Marsha got. Even if you’re the one who gets the praise and the rewards, that isn’t a safe place to be when the praise and rewards are contingent on your looking and behaving a certain way. You may well have experienced this yourself if YOU were the one in your family who got good grades and did all the right things and won your parents’ love and approval, but somewhere deep inside you still knew that love and approval could be withdrawn if you didn’t perform. I obviously don’t know Aline and as far as I know she’s never written a memoir of her own. But the pattern I see among parents who showed up in their childhoods like Aline did is that they end up as perfectionists who can never rest because they’re never quite perfect ENOUGH, and they often end up in burnout.

The third thing I noticed is the mechanism through which these difficult interactions arise – it’s when we compare our children with a theoretically successful child, or with actually successful children. Marsha’s mom would come home from parties where she would see these other girls who were doing what Marsha couldn’t do. Marsha’s mom compared Marsha out loud to these other ideal girls, and Marsha could never measure up. It also seems like her mom compared Aline to theoretically perfect girls, and Aline fared pretty well by comparison, but she was always aware that there was that external standard out there that she had to meet. In our recent episode two hundred thirty-eight called Feeling exhausted and overwhelmed? Tools to help you cope, I walked you through an example of how you might have compared YOURSELF with real or hypothetical parents who have their act together, and how that may have created shame in YOU. Because our kids are people too, they often feel shame when they see us comparing them with other kids, even if we aren’t doing it explicitly. We don’t have to be as explicit as Marsha’s mom was, saying things like “Why aren’t you like Betty-Sue’s lovely daughter – SHE has a boyfriend already.” We communicate our withdrawal of love and approval very effectively by giving them the side eye when they do things we don’t like, making comments like: “Why would you DO that?!” in an exasperated voice. We tell them what kinds of behaviors we want to see when we give them love and approval after we see them.

What Marsha’s mom actually needed, and what Marsha herself needed, was acceptance of who she really was. I don’t want to say that Marsha’s mom created Marsha’s mental health problems, because I don’t think that’s true. Marsha says she’s spent many hours with one of her closest colleagues and friends, Martin Bohus, who is a psychiatrist in Germany, working to figure out what could have happened to her. They concluded that there must be some sort of biological component; an innate vulnerability. There is a long history of depression on her mother’s side of the family, and she believes that “the combination of the biological predisposition and a toxic home environment proves to be a psychologically deadly mix. Had I grown up in a different family environment, one where I was accepted for who I was and what I valued, my life might have been different.”

Marsha went on to develop Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which she says is designed to help clients to accept reality as it is, and embrace the changes they need to make in their lives. This is different from psychotherapy, which can help us to understand WHY we ended up where we ended up. DBT helps people to gain new SKILLS to cope with their lives. I do think that tools like DBT have an important role to play in treating adults and even older teenagers. But by the time a person needs DBT, a LOT has gone wrong for them in their lives. I’m also reminded of what Dr. Moira Mikolojzak said about burnout, which is that she’s trying to address problems on the back end, loooong after they’ve been created as she supports parents with burnout. What I hope we can do is address these issues on the FRONT end. There’s nothing we can do about our family’s mental health history, or even our own mental health history. That may impact our child’s potential for challenges, but there’s nothing we can do about it. What we CAN do, what Marsha’s mom and dad are unable to do is to shift how we show up in our relationship with our child. I believe that if we’re asking our child to learn to accept situations in our own family that can’t be changed, then we’re missing something huge. There are a lot of systems out there that are going to be really hard to change, and I think some degree of acceptance of where we are, coupled with a willingness to try to do what we can to change them is helpful. But our family is US. WE get to decide how we are together. Asking our child to simply accept that our family is the way it is and they’re the one who has to change is completely backwards. Very often, it’s our kids who are the ones shining the spotlight on the family’s challenges. Using therapy to get our child to simply accept the family as it is, is missing the point for the whole family. We should be looking at how the family system as a whole is not working, and how to support the family in actually meeting all of their needs, instead of everyone staying in their own silo, not realizing that everyone else is struggling too.

What could it have looked like for Marsha, if her whole family had gotten help? It’s kind of heartbreaking that she actually DID have some idea of what true acceptance looked like. Her Aunt Julia, her father’s sister, lived close by and was the one person who loved and approved of her unconditionally. Marsha says: “I learned later that she and Uncle Jerry had tried to get my parents, my mother in particular, to back off from the never-ending criticism. Aunt Julia was a voice of validation, a voice saying, “We love you as you are and for who you are. You do not have to change to be valued.” But Aunt Julia was overweight and she talked a lot and Uncle Jerry had no social standing. Marsha’s parents looked down on them, and probably thought: There’s no way I’m taking parenting advice from someone in THEIR position. They are exactly how we DON’T want Marsha to turn out. And Marsha didn’t have a full awareness of what was going on for herself to be able to get all of the support she needed from Aunt Julia. So many of our childhood experiences don’t make sense when we’re in them and we can only see them from our perspective, and it seems like if things aren’t going well with our parents, there must be something wrong with US. It isn’t until we reach adulthood that we see more of what was going on for our parents that we realize it wasn’t all about us, and that all of their traumatic experiences were showing up in their interactions with us. But by that time, the damage has been done. So yes, acceptance of our circumstances can be helpful at times. Certainly, skills to deal with our circumstances can be helpful. Let’s imagine that you and I miraculously invented DBT, the very same toolkit that Marsha herself invented. But we did it decades before she did, so this treatment was actually available to Marsha before she spiraled so badly that she went to the hospital. Let’s imagine she was still a teenager, and was struggling, and we got to work with her and teach her mindfulness skills, and distress tolerance skills and emotion regulation skills and interpersonal effectiveness skills which are all the components of DBT. Would that have helped Marsha? My hypothesis is that it might have helped her a bit, in that it would have made her appear more compliant. If she could tolerate the distress of her mother comparing her to more ladylike girls, and regulate her emotions so she didn’t turn her distress inward on herself, she probably would have gotten on better with her mom because from her mom’s perspective, if Marsha was more ladylike then there wouldn’t be a problem. I don’t think Marsha could have used the Interpersonal Effectiveness skills as they’re defined by DBT. These are defined by the acronym DEARMAN – D is for describing the situation objectively, then E for express your feelings, A for asserting what you need clearly and concretely, R is for reinforcing people who respond positively with rewards. M is for mindful awareness of the objective of the interaction, A is for Appearing confident, and N is for being willing to negotiate, because you can’t have everything you want all the time. Marsha told us she had no self-insight into why she felt the way she did when she was young, so it would have been pretty hard for her to advocate for herself. I also don’t really think it’s the child’s responsibility to do all this work with a person in a position of power who is actively trying to shape the child. So DBT wouldn’t really have helped Marsha, because Marsha’s behavior wasn’t the problem in the family. The problem was her mom’s refusal to consider Marsha as a person who deserved to be seen and known and understood and loved as she really was. No amount of therapy for Marsha could have fixed THAT situation. Because what Marsha ultimately needed was VALIDATION from her parents. She needed them to say, through their words AND their actions: you are lovable, and you are loved. We can’t know that that would have prevented all of Marsha’s problems, but it would have given her a fighting chance.

Marsha's story illustrates something profound about our approach to raising children. Most parents, like Marsha's mother, are not trying to harm their children – they're desperately trying to prepare them for what they believe is necessary for success in the world. The challenge is that in doing so, they may inadvertently communicate that their love is conditional on the child becoming someone different than who they authentically are. This creates the exact kind of invalidation that can make children feel fundamentally flawed rather than simply learning and growing.

So when we think about trying to change our child’s behavior, which means we’re really trying to change our CHILD, we have to be really clear on why we’re doing that. Chances are, if we’re thinking about disciplining our child, we’re trying to change their behavior. We’re trying to get them to fit in better with social systems that tell us what our body shape should be like, and whether we should be a leader or be compliant and sweet, and how it’s appropriate to dress, and to protect the comfort of the people in charge, and that if there’s a problem in the family, it’s the person at the bottom of the power heap who should change their behavior, and definitely not the person at the top. And all of this is to be done to prepare us to do well in a capitalist society, which at the time meant that men should get a well-paying job and women should find a man with a well-paying job. Most of Marsha’s family got the memo on that front. Some of her siblings have relatively common names and it was harder to find information on them, but her older brother Earl was the President of Woodbrook Capital who has donated millions of dollars in the city of Baltimore, which means he’s made millions more for himself. It seems like her younger brother Marston is a doctor who researches the genetic basis of kidney cancer. Aline’s marriage to a cardiologist was celebrated in front of an audience of 500 people. For the most part, the Linehan parents did exactly what they were supposed to do in our culture. Marsha’s mental health was the most visible sign of the stress that it took to make all that happen. Earl described their parents as “very judgmental people, never making positive comments, never praising us.’ Earl tells a story about his son that I want to use to lead us toward a conclusion. Earl said:

“My son, Brendan, visited his grandparents once when he was ten. He said to me, “When I went to Tulsa, I went with this big bucket of love for Grandma and Grandpa. When they told me my jacket didn’t look right and I needed to get a new jacket, I just put my head in the bucket and shook it, and said to myself, “OK, I love you Grandma, I love you Grandpa. Well get me a new jacket.’

Brendan was playing with some kid they didn’t think was socially right for him, so they stopped him. He said to himself, “Okay, and I put my head in the bucket again and shook it. “Ok grandma, ok grandpa.”

It goes on and on like this for Brendan. “And on the last day,” he told me, “I was looking forward so much to going skiing with a friend, and Grandpa wanted me to get a new suit instead. Dad, I put my head in the bucket, and there just wasn’t anything left in the bucket.” Brendon had seen it in a way that I had never quite seen it. My parents had sucked up all the love Brendan had for them, with their obsession that he should look right rather than listen to what he wanted, and they hadn’t even noticed it.”

Of course from the grandparents’ perspective, they want nothing but the best for Brendan. They want him to look like a middle-class child with well-fitting clothes, and associate with appropriate middle class children so he could learn the ways of middle class life and achieve it himself. They wanted all of these things to help him, but what Brendan needed was to be loved as he really was.

That’s what you needed when you were a child too. That’s what your child needs now. And it’s so hard to do because our parents weren’t able to do that for us, because they were trying to shape us to fit in with these social systems. But we can choose to see what our parents were doing, and what WE may well have been doing up to this point. If you recognize some of your own parenting approaches in the examples I've shared, please be gentle with yourself. We parent from our own histories and with the tools we've been given. The fact that you're engaging with these ideas shows your commitment to growth. Your children benefit not from perfect parenting, but from your willingness to learn and adapt.

We began by exploring three contexts in which parents wonder how to prepare children for the real world, navigating external influences like junk food and media, dealing with broader social systems, and concerns about discipline.

Whether we're navigating food choices, screen time, social expectations, or discipline, the underlying question remains the same: How do we prepare our children for the world that exist now while honoring their authentic selves? The thread connecting all these areas is the tension between external pressures from food marketers, media creators, social systems, and behavioral expectations and our children's innate wisdom about their own needs and experiences. Our role is not to shield them from these pressures entirely, nor to force them to conform, but to help them to develop the discernment to navigate these influences with awareness. In each of these contexts, our most powerful tool is not protection or control, but connection - creating relationships where children feel seen, and understood, and valued as they are, while developing the skills to engage critically with the world around them.

These insights might sound theoretical, but they play out in everyday moments. When your child resists getting ready in the morning, instead of assuming defiance, try asking: with genuine curiosity: why is this hard? Maybe the child is looking for connection with you, or maybe they’re having a problem at school and they’re dragging out getting ready to postpone being taken to school. When we understand the underlying need, most of the time we can help them to meet that need – while meeting our own needs as well. This doesn’t coddle children; it validates them, it teaches them that they are deeply loveable and loved just as they are. That is what we all need to know to be successful in the messed up world we live in right now, and the world we’re trying to create where everyone’s needs are met.

To start creating that world, we have to see who our kids really are underneath all their difficult behavior, and learn why that difficult behavior is so present, and when we help them meet their needs, there may well be a lot less difficult behavior to navigate. That’s the relationship I want to help you create with YOUR child, and I hope we’ll get to work together to make that happen.

Hi, I’m Kelly Peterson from Chicago, Illinois. I’m a Your Parenting Mojo fan, and I hope you enjoy the show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful, you can donate to help Jen produce more content like this and also save us both from those interminable mattress ads you hear on other podcasts. Then you can do that and also subscribe on the link that Jen just mentioned. Thanks for listening!