Parents often ask me: “How can I prepare my child for the real world?” This question emerges in three distinct contexts:

• Navigating external influences like junk food and media;
• Dealing with broader social systems that don’t align with our values;
• Concerns about using traditional disciplinary methods, combined with worries that children won’t learn to function in a world where rewards and punishments are part of life.

In this post, I’ll explore practical approaches to addressing these challenges while honoring our children’s authentic selves.

Food Battles and Body Image

Let’s start with a familiar scenario: You’ve prepared a nutritious meal, but your child is munching on bread while ignoring everything else. You remind them about the protein and vegetables. They take a tiny nibble of chicken but refuse to touch the “green stuff.” As frustration builds, you wonder: “How will my child get the nutrients they need if all they eat is carbs?!”

Behind this concern lies a web of social pressures, including:

• Judgment from other parents
• Comments from relatives about your child’s body size
• Medical professionals evaluating growth curves
• A culture that’s unkind to children with diverse body types.

This creates tremendous stress around mealtimes. It goes far beyond your relationship with your child.

In my conversation with Dr. Lindo Bacon, we discussed how Body Mass Index (BMI) was never designed to measure individual health. It was created to assess population trends, not determine if a specific person is healthy. Now it’s used everywhere from schools to doctor’s offices to public health campaigns.

Even more surprising, research shows that the group with the longest lifespan isn’t those in the “normal” weight category – it’s those classified as “overweight.” And most people in the “obese” category live as long as those in the “normal” category.

So why are we so focused on controlling children’s eating habits? It can seem like the least bad option. The food industry has spent billions perfecting irresistible foods. Frito-Lay employs 500 chemists, psychologists, and technicians to find the “bliss point” in snack foods. Scientists engineered Cheetos with what one food scientist called “uncanny ability to melt in the mouth.” This creates “vanishing caloric density” that tricks your brain into thinking “you can just keep eating forever.”

Marketers bombard children with advertisements for these products. At the same time, you face immense pressure to ensure your kids eat “properly.” If your child refuses vegetables, society tells you it’s your fault and your responsibility to fix it.

One approach many parents find helpful is Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility model:

• Parents decide what, when, and where food is offered.
• Kids decide how much they eat—or whether they eat at all.

(In the episode we addressed a lot of the questions parents ask about reading books on DoR as they struggle to apply it in their own lives.)

Making foods forbidden tends to increase our desire for them. Instead, we can include them in our daily consumption, and treat them like any other food.  Serve dessert with dinner, and allow your child to decide which to eat first.  If you’re going to allow them to eat a square of chocolate today, does it matter when they eat it?  If they decide they want to eat it for breakfast, they get to meet their need for autonomy as well as for indulgent food.

We can learn what is a serving size of lots of different foods. When our child has eaten a serving of one food and they ask for another, we can say something like: “You’ve already had a serving of apples today.  Our bodies do best when we eat lots of different kinds of foods.  What else would you like?”

The key is that we treat apples the same as chips apples, so no food is ‘better’ than any other.  (The main exception to this would be with neurodivergent children, where you’ve decided that their emotional regulation is more important right now than what they eat.  A feeding therapist may be able to offer support if you and your child would like to make progress on their ability to tolerate and accept a wider variety of foods.)

Screen Time and Digital Media

Just as with food, parents often struggle with technology. Game designers, like food scientists, have engineered digital experiences to be extraordinarily compelling. They offer immediate feedback, achievable challenges, and social connection. They’re designed to meet children’s psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relationships.

Contrary to common belief, research doesn’t show a compelling link between video games and violence. In fact, as video game usage has increased globally, violent crime rates have generally decreased. Countries with higher percentages of young gamers than the US often have lower violence rates.

What’s more important are the cultural messages embedded within games and media. Many popular games reinforce limiting gender roles and social hierarchies. It can be tempting to shield children from these ideas. These ideas are out in the world, so we can’t shield our kids forever. Games can give us a way to discuss the topics and support our kids’ developing critical thinking skills.

Many parents’ most immediate concern is how to stop the battles at the end of screen time.  Seeing this as a gradual journey can help both us and our children. Expecting a child to go from having all screen time managed by you to managing it independently isn’t realistic. Break it down into stages:

• First you manage the timer;
• Then they manage it with your backup;
• Then they manage their time independently, with ongoing conversations about balance.

Social Expectations and Human Development

The cultural messages in video games aren’t isolated phenomenon. They’re reflections of broader social expectations that divide human qualities into rigid categories. For instance, games often portray male characters as warriors and female characters as healers. They reinforce the same limiting patterns that show up in children’s books, movies, and everyday interactions.

Our society often elevates certain qualities over others based on these divisions. Research by Dr. Carol Gilligan shows that boys as young as four demonstrate remarkable emotional intelligence. Between the ages of 5 and 7, they begin to shield these qualities, afraid of being seen as “soft.” Many girls learn between ages 9 and 13 that their authentic voice is “too much,” replacing it with a version that says what others want to hear.

Children naturally resist these divisions. They arrive in the world with both voice and desire for connection. They play freely across gender lines until social conditioning teaches them otherwise. When we force them to choose between these fundamental human capacities, they lose an important part of themselves.

You can help your child to see these influences when you read books or watch movies with your kids. I recently read the New York Times bestselling Fablehaven series to my daughter. In the second book, there’s a scene where the main character, Kendra, warns her friend Alyssa about walking home alone with a new boy (who Kendra knows is actually a disguised goblin). 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 reveals he kissed her: “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.”

This seemingly innocent middle-grade fantasy novel was teaching troubling lessons:

• That it’s girls’ responsibility to protect themselves from boys (not boys’ responsibility to respect boundaries);
• That feeling “terrified” during a romantic encounter is normal and should be pushed through;
• That boys should pursue while girls should be pursued.

I paused after I read this passage and we discussed how this narrative reinforces harmful expectations for both genders. It teaches girls to ignore their instincts and boys to adopt an aggressive role they might not be comfortable with. These discussions help children develop critical awareness of messaging they might otherwise absorb without questioning.

Rethinking Discipline

Behind questions about managing challenging behavior often lies the concern:

“How do I discipline my child so they’ll be ready for the real world (and also do what I say)?”

Researchers developed tools like Time-outs after they saw that pigeons and chimps would change their behavior to get rewards and avoid punishments. When you give a Time-out, you’re removing the child from the opportunity to get positive reinforcement (your attention) to discourage unwanted behavior.

This approach may reduce immediate problematic behaviors. But we have to wonder: What is time-out teaching our children about relationships? Many children interpret temporary withdrawal of attention as withdrawal of love, even when we don’t intend it that way.

This misses the crucial understanding that behavior is communication. When we look deeper at “misbehavior,” we typically find unmet needs:

• The child hitting a sibling might be desperately seeking connection
• The child throwing toys might be experiencing sensory overload
• The child refusing directions might be trying to meet their need for autonomy

Consider one parent I worked with whose 11-year-old had been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. When she shifted from demanding compliance to asking, “What’s going on? Do you need help?” her son responded with connection rather than resistance. Later, he wrote: “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 she reflected, “My son wasn’t being defiant. His needs weren’t being met.”

The Need for Acceptance

Dr. Marsha Linehan’s memoir Building a Life Worth Living illustrates how parents’ attempts to shape children can create profound harm, even with good intentions.

Dr. Linehan’s mother continually berated her about her weight, her looks, her clothing, and her lack of social graces.  Dr. Linehan was intellectually curious, but her questions were not welcomed by her parents.  She felt completely alone in a family of eight, with nobody who could understand her experience.

This created what Linehan calls “traumatic invalidation.” This is a pervasive misreading of emotions that led her to feel like an outsider in her own family.  What Dr. Linehan needed—what all children need—was acceptance of who she really was.  The irony was that Linehan’s parents tried to shape her behavior because they loved her, and they wanted her to be successful in life.  They wanted to make her acceptable in a world where her only job was to get married to a man who made enough money to maintain a middle class lifestyle.  They appear to have succeeded with Dr. Linehan’s siblings; Linehan’s mental health was the price that the family paid.

Most parents aren’t trying to harm their children; they’re trying to prepare them for what they believe is necessary for success. But in doing this, they communicate: “I’ll give you love and acceptance only when your behavior fits my expectations.” The child learns to cover up their real feelings and needs, and eventually forgets who they really are.

When we think about changing our child’s behavior, we must be clear on why we’re doing it. We might think it’s for their own benefit, just as Dr. Linehan’s mother thought as well. We, too, want our kids to to fit in social systems that dictate appropriate body size, emotional expression, and behavior. But this creates disconnection between us, instead of the validation and acceptance that we all crave. We might have done well in school and work ourselves, and now explode at our kids when they ask us to really ‘see’ them.  Our ‘success’ in life has come at the expense of our mental health, and the same thing may happen with our kids if we don’t make a conscious decision to do things differently.

Bringing It All Together

Whether we’re navigating food choices, screen time, social expectations, or discipline, the underlying question remains:

How do we prepare our children for the real world while honoring their authentic selves?

The thread connecting these areas is the tension between external pressures (from marketers, media, social systems) and children’s innate wisdom about their own needs. Our role isn’t to shield them completely, nor force them to conform, but to help them learn how to to navigate these influences with awareness.

These insights 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 today?”

Maybe they’re seeking connection or avoiding a problem at school. Understanding the underlying need allows you to address it while teaching valuable life skills.

This approach doesn’t coddle children; it validates them. It teaches them they’re lovable exactly as they are—the foundation they need to navigate our complex world.

To prepare children for the real world, our most powerful tool isn’t protection or control, but connection. We’re working to create relationships where children feel seen, understood, and valued, while developing skills to engage critically with the world around them.

If some of these ideas challenge your current parenting approaches, please be gentle with yourself. We parent from our own histories and with the tools we’ve been given. Your children benefit not from perfect parenting, but from your willingness to learn and grow alongside them.

References

Linehan, M.M. (2021). Building a life worth living. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks.

Moss, M. (2013, February 20). The extraordinary science of addictive junk food. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html

National Center for Education Statistics (1996). Do rich and poor districts spend alike? Author. Retrieved from:

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs/web/97916.asp#:~:text=Districts%20with%20high%2Dincome%20households,to%20spend%20for%20public%20education.&text=districts%20with%20moderate%2Dto%2Dhigh,student%20(%245%2C411%2D%20%244%2C774).

Finding this useful? Share with a friend!

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Dressing up in costumes can be fun at Halloween, but then you have to deal with the negotiations over how much candy is too much candy.

Our children receive gifts on their birthdays, but then we’re embarrassed when they refuse to thank the gift-givers.

And on Valentine’s Day we arm them with cards for the entire class, but when they return from school either they didn’t get as many valentines as everyone else or the one child they hoped to particularly impress spurned their offering, leaving us with tears and echoes of the disappointment and rejection we felt as children when the same thing happened to us.

A brief history of Valentine’s Day

While it might seem obvious that the day celebrates the life of St. Valentine, the real origins of the celebration are actually quite murky and likely lie in a pagan Roman purification and fertility ceremony.  It’s possible that a Roman emperor wanted single men who would fight in an army outlawed marriage and that a priest named Valentine continued to perform marriage ceremonies anyway.  Dozens of Christians named Valentine were martyred and became saints in the early church, and two priests named Valentine were reportedly both executed on February 14th sometime in the third century.  Later, the Church converted the pagan festival into a Christian holiday to make conversion to Christianity more palatable.

It was the poet Chaucer who provided the first written record of coupling Valentine’s Day with romanticism:

“For this was on seynt Valentynes day,

When every foul cometh there to chese his make.”

Many other poets and playwrights continued in this vein over the years and St. Valentine was transformed from an intermediary between humanity and God to one between lovers.  By the 17^th century, the meaning of the word “valentine” had shifted to becoming a person or relationship: in Britain, young people would draw lots to gain some hint of their future marital fortune, and would refer to their suitor as a “valentine.”  In the 19th century the meaning had shifted again and was most often used to refer to the fancy lace-paper card which a young person would buy and send to their valentine.

The commercialization of these cards actually originated in Britain but quickly made the leap to the colonies, with a Boston newspaper from 1845 noting that merchants had been reminding consumers of the upcoming holiday for two weeks, and it wasn’t long before the holiday was extended for the entire month of February to allow for return valentines to be sent.  Marketers also expanded the groups of people who were eligible to receive a valentine: “Remember that Valentines are appropriate for brothers, sisters, relatives and friends, as well as for sweethearts and lovers.”

The 19^th century also marked the transformation of our view of children from contributors to the family income to an object of sentimental devotion, beginning the elevation of children’s needs above those of adults.  Cherubic youngsters pictured in juvenile valentines of the period mirrored the newly refashioned image of a cherubic Cupid – a far cry from the Roman God whose arrows were sharpened on a grindstone whetted with infants’ blood.

Even early on, Valentine’s Day had an insidious underside, with “attack valentines” depicting assertive women, flirts, and coquettes implying that the first wave of women seeking suffrage around this period were overstepping their bounds.  And one early observer of a valentine mill commented on the “disenchanting” and “dingy” sight of workers piecing together layers of lace and paper for eleven hours a day.

Today lovers are once again the primary focus of marketing related to Valentine’s Day, perhaps because a holiday geared toward a celebration of their relationship has the potential to generate more expensive purchases than one that is celebrated by everyone.  Children are the exception to this rule because it helps marketers to sell us more stuff as adults: many of us have memories of arts and crafts, candy, time off from school work (permitted due to the secular nature of the holiday) and an egalitarian exchange of sometimes handmade, but often purchased, cards – with thousands of designs available in handy class-sized quantities.  These fond memories set the stage for the heightened expectations of a lifetime of recognition, with many young women anticipating a shower of gifts and affection, and young men uncertain about how to meet these expectations (card?  Flowers?  Chocolates? Movies?  Dinner?  Do I really need to do more this year than I did last year?).

Many of the people that researchers surveyed said they exchange gifts because it is “the thing to do” or because the holiday is about “going to dinner and exchanging gifts”: far from representing an exchange of intimacy, the pressure is on men to make expensive purchases that function as a sexual lubricant.

Must we spend money to express love?

When we talk with children about holidays it’s tempting to try to go back to the source; to make the holiday about what it used to be about.  But with Valentine’s Day, does this mean we go back to just the simple exchange of cards from the 1800s?  Or the games to draw lots and test your luck in love of the 1500s?  Or the non-specific martyred saint(s?) of the third century?  Or we could just say “Valentine’s Day is about love” (which it sort of is…) and be done with it?

But if it’s really about love, why do we need to buy so much stuff?

In part, it’s the peer pressure: not giving a gift when everyone else does sends the signal that a relationship is not important or the desire to terminate that relationship.  We thus feel compelled to give gifts lest we send a message of hostility by not giving one.  We also have to give the right gift: perhaps the man doesn’t realize there’s something ‘off’ about gifting a woman an exercise tape until she gives him “sand gathered from the beach where they first said ‘I love you,’”  but he will pretty soon afterward and he won’t make the same mistake twice.

The average consumer will spend $143.56 on Valentine’s Day this year, with total spending expected to reach $19.6 billion.  “With the holidays behind them and the winter months dragging along, consumers are looking for something to celebrate this time of year” said National Retail Federation President and CEO Matthew Shay.  And, fortunately for those children not yet in romantic relationships, Prosper Executive Vice President of Strategy Phil Rist added “Valentine’s Day has become a holiday consumers take advantage of not only to spoil their loved ones but themselves.”

It’s helpful that the $19.6bn is very close to the $19bn that Facebook paid for WhatsApp, because a number of websites put together lists of what Facebook could have bought instead with that money.  Like an MMR vaccine for every child in the world.  Clean drinking water for every person on the planet would only have cost $10bn.

Let me be clear: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with going out to dinner or buying a box of chocolates every once in a while if in that moment it feels like these gifts express love to your partner.  But I do think there’s something wrong with teaching our children that gifts are the best way to express that love.

So what’s a parent to do?

If you celebrate…

If you decide to celebrate Valentine’s Day, talk with your child about what the day means to you personally.  Discuss the practice of giving cards and gifts, and ask if your child wants to participate.  Most schools have a ‘cards for everyone or cards for no-one’ policy so nobody feels left out, and if your child wants to celebrate a particularly special relationship with another child they should do this outside of school hours.

It may be confusing to children to give them a message that ‘we give gifts to people we love’ but then tell them they have to give valentines to everyone in their class.  You may want to frame valentines as something that are given out in the spirit of fairness (most children have some understanding of fairness at a relatively early age) rather than representing a true gift.

If your child chooses to give valentines, talk with them about the money spent on them and what it could be used for instead.  Consider cutting simple hearts out of paper you already have on-hand, which will make the process cheap and fast.

If you don’t celebrate…

Prepare your child for what will likely happen at school.  Even though schools may have rules about everyone giving cards in the younger grades these may be relaxed as children get older.  Not giving cards in the early years might be remembered and children may decline to send your child cards once this happens.

Discuss how your family shares that you love each other, and reiterate that you are confident that your child loves you even if they don’t give you a valentine.

You might suggest that they privately approach their special friends during the day with a message: “I’m so glad you’re my friend because…”.

Whether or not you celebrate at school or in your family…

Consider doing some good with the $143.46 you saved by not spending on themed gifts.  Maybe your family could use the money for a rainy day fund.  Or you could bring a home-cooked meal to a senior in your community who would enjoy some company.  Or give to a charity that is meaningful to you, your child, and your community.  A child who is old enough to understand valentines is also old enough to understand a conversation about what love is, how we express it, and how not everyone has the luxury of spending money on valentines.

My aim with this post is not to take all the joy out of Valentine’s Day.  If you do genuinely enjoy the occasion and celebrating it is important to you then there’s absolutely no harm in sharing this with your children.  I aim to encourage you to not just do Valentine’s Day because everyone else does it, but to approach the day with intention that reflects your values and parenting goals.

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(Photo credit: Saul Loeb)

I don’t normally write political posts.  It’s not my expertise, and while four of my top five StrengthsFinder strengths are related to learning the fifth is Harmony, which means that while I enjoy a conversation about ideas, I can’t stand feeling attacked.  Political discussion just seems to often bring out both the best and worse in people.  And Your Parenting Mojo is about inclusiveness and commonality, not division.

But what’s going on with the Kavanaugh nomination fills me with both anger and despair – for the immediate cause, for sure, that we are about to confirm a nominee to the Supreme Court who may have committed sexual assault but we can’t know for certain because nobody will conduct a proper investigation.

What fills me with far greater frustration and despair is that Kavanaugh’s story is far from unique.  How many of the next candidates down the list of potential nominees can say with certainty that no such incident could possibly have occurred while they were attending their own fancy prep schools?  For that matter, how many of the Senators who are so incensed about Kavanaugh’s ‘treatment’ by the Democrats can be sure that they have never come close to crossing that line themselves?  After all, Senators don’t undergo any kind of routine background check before they are seated so the already long list of Senators who are accused of sexual misconduct might just be the tip of the iceberg that nobody has yet investigated.

Why are we in this position? 

We could argue that times were different then.  Rich boys at fancy prep schools did things they shouldn’t have done.  Adolescent drinking was out of control.  There wasn’t the same culture of backing off when a woman says “no.”

As much as we might like to think things have changed, they haven’t.  Rates of alcohol abuse among rich kids are as high today as they were in the ‘80s.  One in five women will be raped and one in three women will experience some form of sexual violence at some point in their lives. More than 90% of women are raped by an intimate partner or someone they know.

We’re afraid of being jumped by some random guy on the street but we should really be afraid of the men we know.

How can this be?  Where do men learn that it’s OK to force sex on women?  Where do women learn that someone wanting to have sex with them is a measure of their worth?

Parents, I hope this doesn’t sound like finger pointing.  If it does, the finger is pointing as much at me as it is at any of us.  But I see my finger out there pointed squarely at me and I want to do something about it.

The reason is us

The reason our children become adults who do these things is because we teach it to them. And we do it without even realizing it.

We teach it to girls when we tell them they look pretty in that dress (and thus beauty is the most important measure of their worth).  We teach it to boys when we tell them to suppress their feelings; to not be a sissy; to “man up.”

We teach it to boys and girls when we don’t respect their body autonomy: we tickle them to make them laugh even though they don’t like it (because if they’re laughing they must be having fun, right?); when we force them to stand still for unwanted kisses from distant relatives; when we can’t bring ourselves to say “penis” and “vulva,” which gives them the language they need to tell us when they aren’t safe.

Our actions that seem so benign have real-world implications for our girls’ safety and our boys’ ability to understand and listen to their own sense of what’s right and wrong.

But the best news in all of this mess is that we have the power to change it.  We don’t have to throw up our arms in frustration that our elected officials won’t do what’s right and we don’t have the power to change that.  We CAN do something about this right now.  Today.

Five powerful actions you can take

Here are five powerful yet practical steps you can take today to make a start:

1. Stop telling girls they are pretty, and start asking them what they are interested in;
2. Stop telling boys not to cry, and start asking them about their feelings;
3. Have a conversation about body autonomy. Make sure your child knows they can say “no” if they don’t want to be touched, and that you will respect their wishes and support them in expressing their wishes to less-understanding adults;
4. In the bath tonight, name your child’s body parts as you wash them. All of them.  Believe me, it does get easier.
5. Pause, and think about how the messages you send to your child will shape them for years to come. Habits can be difficult to change.  But noticing them is the first step.

And vote, of course.

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