Latest Episodes & Transcripts

037: Generation Me

By Jen Lumanlan | May 7, 2017

This episode is on a topic that I find fascinating – the cultural issues that underlie our parenting. I actually think this issue is so important that I covered it in episode 1 of the podcast, which was really the first episode after the introductory one where I gave some information on what the show was going…

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036: The impact of divorce on a child’s development (Part 1)

By Jen Lumanlan | Apr 30, 2017

This is the second of a short series of episodes on issues related to divorce.  The first was our “All Joy and No Fun” episode, where we talked about how parenting today can be the most joyful thing in our lives – even if it isn’t always a whole lot of fun from moment to…

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035: Parenting: All joy and no fun?

By Jen Lumanlan | Apr 23, 2017

Today’s episode is about a book I read way before I started the podcast, called All Joy and No Fun (Affiliate link) by Jennifer Senior. I actually got a question from a listener recently asking me whether there’s any research on whether and how her divorce might have impacted her son’s development. It turns out that there…

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034: How do I get my child to do chores?

By Jen Lumanlan | Apr 16, 2017

We have a pretty cool mini-mini-series launching today. I’ve been seeing a lot of those “chores your child could be doing” articles showing up in my social media feeds lately, and I was thinking about those as well about how children in other cultures seem to be MUCH more willing to help out with work…

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033: Does your child ever throw tantrums? (Part 2)

By Jen Lumanlan | Apr 8, 2017

Well this took a bit longer than I’d planned…  WAY BACK in episode 11 I did Part 1 of a two-part series on tantrums, and was expecting to release the second episode in short order.  Then I got inundated with interviews from awesome guests, which I always wanted to release as soon as I could…

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032: Free to learn

By Jen Lumanlan | Apr 1, 2017

Professor Peter Gray was primarily interested in the motivations and emotions of animals before his son Scott started struggling in school, at which point Professor Gray’s interests shifted to developing our understanding of self-directed learning and how play helps us to learn.  He has extensively studied the learning that occurs at the Sudbury Valley School…

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031: Parenting beyond pink and blue

By Jen Lumanlan | Mar 26, 2017

Today I join forces with Malaika Dower of the How to Get Away with Parenting podcast to interview Dr. Christia Brown, who is a Professor of Developmental and Social Psychology at the University of Kentucky, where she studies the development of gender identity and children’s experience of gender discrimination. Dr. Brown’s book, Parenting Beyond Pink and…

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030: On Education (And on Betsy DeVos)

By Jen Lumanlan | Mar 19, 2017

I’ve thought about doing this episode for a while but I sat on it for a few weeks because it’s still in motion.  But now Betsy DeVos is confirmed as Secretary of Education I wanted to offer some thoughts on her work on educational issues, charter schools, as well as on the topic of schools…

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029: Why we shouldn’t ban war play

By Jen Lumanlan | Mar 12, 2017

This episode comes to us by way of a suggestion from my friend Jess, who told me she had joined an outing with some children in her three-year-old son’s preschool class. She said some of the slightly older children were running around playing that their hands were guns and shooting at each other, and the…

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028: How do children form social groups?

By Jen Lumanlan | Mar 6, 2017

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.  Click here to view all the items in this series. How social groups are formed has profound implications for what we teach our children about our culture. Professor Yarrow Dunham of Yale University tells us how we all group people…

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027: Is a Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool right for my child?

By Jen Lumanlan | Feb 27, 2017

This episode is the final in our mini-series that I hope will help you to think through the options you might have for your child’s preschool. In previous episodes we looked at Waldorf and Montessori approaches to early childhood education; today we examine the Reggio Emilia-based approach with Suzanne Axelsson, who studied it for her Master’s…

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026: Is my child lying to me? (Hint: Yes!)

By Jen Lumanlan | Feb 20, 2017

Your kids don’t lie, right?  And if they did, you’d be able to tell, right? News flash: they do.  And you probably can’t. Dr. Kang Lee – who is one of the world’s experts in lying – tells us why children lie, how we can (try to) reduce the incidence of lying, and how we…

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