086: Playing to Win: How does playing sports impact children?
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…
Listen to the full episode
White privilege in schools
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 ‘scientific’ standardized tests perpetuate inequality,…
Listen to the full episode
The Science of RIE
“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…
Listen to the full episode
White privilege in parenting: What it is & what to do about it
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…
Listen to the full episode
Regulating emotions: What, When, & How
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…
Listen to the full episode
How can I decide which daycare/preschool is right for my child?
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…
Listen to the full episode
Self-Reg: Can it help our children?
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…
Listen to the full episode
What is RIE?
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…
Listen to the full episode
You have parenting goals; do you know what they are?
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…
Listen to the full episode
Are forest schools any better for children than regular schools?
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…
Listen to the full episode
How to rock your parent-teacher conference
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…
Listen to the full episode
Should we Go Ahead and Heap Rewards On Our Kid?
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…
Listen to the full episode