Shows
Transforming The Toddler Years- Parents and Educators Raising Calm, Connected, Capable KidsNew Baby? How Partner Relationships Change with Jen LumanlanRelationship different after having kids? Jen Lumanlan from Your Parenting Mojo joins me to talk about how our relationship with our partner shifts after baby. We talk about how we often feel frustration, anger and resentment towards our partner when our needs are not met, and how to resolve this. Jen Lumanlan MS, MEd hosts the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, is author of Parenting Beyond Power: How to Use Connection and Collaboration to Transform Your Family - and the World and mom of two. Check out Jen's Right from...
2025-04-1733 min
The Heartful Parent PodcastEp 104 | From Control to Connection: Transforming Your Parenting Approach with Jen LumanlanHave you ever considered how the way we parent connects to bigger societal systems like white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism? In this episode of the Heartful Parent Podcast, I have the privilege of sitting down with Jen Lumanlan—host of Your Parenting Mojo podcast and author of Parenting Beyond Power—for a thought-provoking conversation about how traditional parenting methods can unknowingly reinforce these power structures. Jen helps us see how discipline and authority play into these systems and explore how a more heartful, mindful approach to parenting can create lasting change in our families and beyond...
2025-03-0451 min
Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive233: Time Outs: Helpful or harmful? Here’s what the research saysTime Outs: Helpful or harmful? Here’s what the research says
Pediatricians and researchers commonly recommend that parents use time outs when kids misbehave. Time outs are promoted as an effective, evidence-based parenting strategy - although the real reason they’re so highly recommended is that they cause less damage to children than hitting.But if we’re already using respectful/gentle parenting strategies most of the time, could there be any benefit to adding time outs when our children don’t comply with more gentle methods?
This episode delves into the research on:
Which children and families researcher...
2025-01-1358 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive232: 10 game-changing parenting hacks – straight from master dog trainersWhat Dog Trainers Know That You Don’t!
Ever felt stuck figuring out how to respond to your child’s challenging behavior? What if the key lies in techniques used by master dog trainers?
In this episode, we explore how strategies designed to nurture trust and communication with dogs can revolutionize the way we parent. From co-regulation to building a culture of consent, you’ll learn actionable steps to create a harmonious home environment.
What you’ll learn:
Read dogs’ non-verbal cues to prevent bites - and how reading your child’s can prevent meltdowns.
...
2025-01-0653 min
Love Each Other Better22: Challenging White Supremacy, Patriarchy, and Capitalism in our Families with Jen LumanlanIn this thought-provoking episode of the Love Each Other Better podcast, I sit down with Jen Lumanlan, host of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast and author of Parenting Beyond Power: How to Use Connection & Collaboration to Transform Your Family and the World. Join us for an introduction to how white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism shape family dynamics and influence parenting approaches, and how to shift out of traditional power dynamics to make family life easier and more connecting. Jen shares powerful insights and practical tools to help parents navigate conflicts and create family environments where everyone's needs—pa...
2024-12-1055 min
Dads With DaughtersParenting Beyond Power: Jen Lumanlan's Insights on Engaged Fatherhood and Child DevelopmentAn Educational Journey Turned Parenting Mission Jen Lumanlan's shift from a sustainability consulting career to a focus on parenting wasn't incidental. After grappling with the challenges of raising her own daughter, she realized that academic research on child development could serve as a guiding light. This led her to pursue master's degrees in psychology and education, and subsequently, to the creation of her podcast and book. Her primary goal? To leverage her learnings to support other parents facing similar challenges. Challenging Conventional Discipline Understanding the Power Dynamics at Play At the heart of...
2024-12-0928 minDads With DaughtersParenting Beyond Power: Jen Lumanlan's Insights on Engaged Fatherhood and Child DevelopmentAn Educational Journey Turned Parenting Mission Jen Lumanlan's shift from a sustainability consulting career to a focus on parenting wasn't incidental. After grappling with the challenges of raising her own daughter, she realized that academic research on child development could serve as a guiding light. This led her to pursue master's degrees in psychology and education, and subsequently, to the creation of her podcast and book. Her primary goal? To leverage her learnings to support other parents facing similar challenges. Challenging Conventional Discipline Understanding the Power Dynamics at Play At the heart of...
2024-12-0928 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive229: Raising kids in divisive times: Where do we go after the 2024 election?How to Raise Kids and Live Our Values in Divisive Times
Chances are, if you're thinking of listening to this podcast episode, the 2024 election didn't go the way you hoped it would.
A lot of people are feeling scared right now. I've heard some people wanting to fight, while others want to hunker down. I've had both of those feelings myself over the last few weeks.
I don't usually wade into current events. My brain needs time to process and digest and preferably take in a lot of peer-reviewed research before I can decide what I think.
I trie...
2024-11-121h 34Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive227: Where emotions come from (and why it matters) Part 2Understanding Emotions: Insights from Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
In our last conversation with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett [Where emotions come from (and why it matters) Part 1] a couple of weeks ago we looked at her theory of where emotions originate. This has important implications for things like:
How our 'body budgets' affect our feelingsHow we make meaning from our feelings so our internal experience makes senseThat we don't always understand other people's feelings very well!
The introduction to the theory plus the conversation plus the take-home messages would have made for an unwieldy episode, so I split i...
2024-10-2147 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveQ&A#6: Am I damaging my child?Today's episode comes from listener who submitted an emotional voicemail on the Ask Jen a Question button on the Your Parenting Mojo homepage, which boils down to:
Am I damaging my child?
The messages you can leave are limited to two minutes in length, so we get just a taste of what the parent is struggling with: a difficult relationship with their neurodivergent son, because he triggers the parent and then the parent feels triggered again by the guilt and shame that some of the challenges the son is facing might be the parent's fault.
In this episode I walk th...
2024-09-161h 00Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive216: Am I in Perimenopause? with Dr. Louise NewsonHow do I know if I'm perimenopausal?
A few months ago a member in the Parenting Membership shared a whole bunch of symptoms she'd had, from fatigue to rage to dry eyes. She'd been on a four year journey to figure out what was going on before finding out that she was in perimenopause, and wanted to save other members from the same experience she'd had.
That sparked a huge discussion in the community, with other members wondering whether the symptoms they were experiencing were also related to menopause - and whether this was going to be yet a...
2024-07-151h 02Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive214: Ask Alvin Anything: Part 2Exploring Marriage, Autism, Race, and Parenting Together
Want to know how my autism self-diagnosis has affected my relationship with my husband? (I will apologize to autistic listeners here as an ableist perspective is still something we're working on, and he also uses some outdated terminology probably from an old book he's started twice - but not yet finished - on supporting partners with Asperger's Syndrome.)
Curious about whether he identifies as Filipino-American... or not? And how his perspective on race differs from mine?
Want to hear how he sent a chicken up into space...and then found out wh...
2024-05-271h 05Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive207: How to not be a permissive parent
Sometimes when listeners write to me, fun things happen! 🤪
Listener Diana replied to a recent email because she had listened to quite a lot of my episodes (although more of the earlier ones than the recent ones) and she was generally on board with my approach.
But she was having a hard time! Despite doing a lot of things for her children, and trying to remain calm and 'unruffled' and show that she loves them unconditionally, but as pretty often when she asked them to do something they sometimes scream at her for offering to help, they attempt to boss her ar...
2024-04-011h 11Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive206: How to find yourself as a parentIt can be really hard to see what's happening in our struggles with our children. They refuse to go to bed at bedtime; we're at home alone all day with a baby who doesn't like being put down, and our older child who is now being aggressive, and there's no time for us to even take a shower, and maybe it seems like everyone around us is judging our parenting choices.
In this very different episode you're going to hear from parents who are in exactly these kinds of situations, and who joined me for a group coaching call to t...
2024-03-251h 22Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive203: How to move toward anti-racism with Kerry CaversLast year I hosted a panel event in Vancouver where four people who have been active in helping us to navigate toward an anti-racist, post-patriarchal, post-capitalist future came together to share their ideas in front of a live audience.
It was a beautiful event (eventually we'll process the video of it to share with you!), and I really hit it off with Moms Against Racism Canada founder Kerry Cavers so we got together afterward to chat.
This is a much more personal episode than many. I actually didn't know it was going to be an episode beforehand - I thought we...
2024-02-1256 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive199: Digging Deeper into Parenting Beyond Power with Rachel DisneyListener Rachel also reached out with some questions, and due to my book tour schedule it took us a little longer to get a call on the calendar, but eventually - on a day in Seattle when I also had a coaching call and two two-hour workshops based on the book - we made it happen.
Rachel's questions go deeeep. She wanted to know:
If there are ideas I logically know are the right ones to follow but I still have trouble doing it;
How my parenting is evolving as Carys gets older (her own daughter is a year older th...
2023-12-1143 min
UpbringingLIVE Q&A SERIES // Parenting Beyond Power with Jen Lumanlan of Your Parenting MojoWe loved connecting with friend and colleague, author and speaker Jen Lumanlan of Your Parenting Mojo about her new book, Parenting Beyond Power! ✨ Tune in to learn more about ways to use connection and collaboration to transform your family — and the world! Visit Jen's website for ways to purchase her book and check below, Oregon folx, for information on her book tour as it passes through at the end of October! 🎉October 28th: Sip & Sign at Circle RoundOctober 29th: Workshop at Living Room Realty
2023-10-1948 min
ON BOYS PodcastParenting Beyond Power with Jen LumanlanJen Lumanlan, author of Parenting Beyond Power: How to Use Connection & Collaboration to Transform Your Family, believes there’s a direct link between parenting and social justice.“The way that we raise our children — the daily interactions that we have with them that seem like they’re about discipline — actually support our children in learning about how power works in families and in our culture,” she says. “That shapes how they go out into the world and treat other people.If we want to move toward a vision of society in which everyone belongs, everyone feels free to be...
2023-10-0548 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveYou don't have to believe everything you thinkIn this short episode, I'm going to teach you a real, legit, bona fide magic trick.
And unlike most magic tricks which rely on sleight of hand to convince you of something that has happened when it really hasn't, this one actually works. It helps you to see that things are not as bad as they seem, and that you can cope, even when things feel incredibly difficult and that you're failing as a parent.
I asked four listeners to help me explain the concept to you, and how it has helped them, and one even went above and beyond an...
2023-10-0239 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive192: What to do with the myth of Polyvagal TheoryPolyvagal Theory is everywhere these days.
Psychologists talk about it; parenting coaches talk about it; if you’re in
the mental health field you’re probably referring to polyvagal theory in some way. So one would assume that there’s lots of evidence for it, right? Well, maybe. Maybe not.
In this episode I dig into the foundational principles of Polyvagal Theory and find that there's a lot less evidence supporting it than you might think, given how many places it's used.
So what's going on? Is it legit? Should we be using a different theory to understand our experience instead?
...
2023-09-181h 17
Authentic ParentingHow to Meet Your Children's Needs Without Neglecting Your Own with Jen LumanlanWe all have needs. Our children have needs and so do we. How can we parent in such a way that everyone's needs are seen, understood and met? Is it possible? A deep dive into the nuanced, complex world of human needs with Jen Lumanlan, host of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. A MUST listen! SUPPORT THE SHOW, SHOW YOUR LOVE Authentic Parenting is an ad-free show and support for the podcast comes from listners like you. Your support is vital and much appreictaed. Make a donation. www.authenticparenting.com/support Rate or write a r...
2023-09-1254 min
DiscomfortableJen LumanlanJen Lumanlan
In this episode, I’m joined by researcher, parenting coach, and author Jen Lumanlan to discuss her new book, Parenting Beyond Power: How to Use Connection and Collaboration to Transform Your Family—and the World. I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of Parenting Beyond Power and even though I’m not a parent, I gained a lot of valuable insight from her exploration of the connection between social justice and parenting. Jen’s book talks about the transferrence of cultural norms like white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism from one generation to another, and offers alternati...
2023-09-1200 min
Mindful Mama: Raising Kind, Confident Kids Without Losing Your Cool | Parenting Strategies For Big Emotions & MoreParenting Beyond Power - Jen Lumanlan [417]Conventional discipline methods like time-outs, countdowns, and “consequences” teach children that it’s OK for more powerful people to control others—a lesson they take out into the world. This is how we learned White supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism from our parents—and we will replicate this with our children unless we make a different choice. How do we make a different choice? Jen Lumanlan comes on to talk about her new book!If you enjoyed this episode, and it inspired you in some way, I’d love to hear about it and know your biggest...
2023-09-0553 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive191: Parenting Beyond Power launch celebrationParenting Beyond Power is officially available today! Come join a mini-celebration with me in this podcast episode, and TODAY on Zoom at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern/8pm Central Europe, and in-person this weekend if you're in the Bay Area! Do you celebrate your achievements? I don't know about you, but I find it pretty difficult. I didn't celebrate getting into Berkeley or Yale, or gr...
2023-09-0555 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive190: How to use the tools in Parenting Beyond PowerOne of the questions I'm asked most often about Parenting Beyond Power (preorder bonuses are available for just a few more days!) is:So when a group of listeners volunteered to get together to discuss what they got out of the book, that was the first thing I wanted to ask them.
2023-08-2858 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveQ&A 4: Is it safe to delay math learning?In this episode we hear from listener Lindsay who wonders whether it's safe to delay math learning, since (they've heard) there's a 'critical window' for learning language.
Would delaying math learning mean that our child can't catch up later? Will they develop a negative view of their own learning? What if they can't get into college? We address all of these questions and more.
Learning Membership
Do you want to turn your child’s interests into learning opportunities? The Learning Membership is here to help you. Make learning a fun adventure that not only strengthens your bond, but also...
2023-07-3125 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive188: How to learn way beyond ‘doing well in school’When you listen to this episode you may get a bit of a sense of deja vu - way back in 2020, listener Kelly reached out to me and asked if I would be willing to do an episode on parental burnout, which she was struggling to navigate at the time. We ended up interviewing Dr. Moira Mikolajczak, one of the world's experts on parental burnout.
After the conversation Dr. Mikolajczak expressed to me how much her heart went out to Kelly, who was navigating what seemed like an individual-level problem when it was actually very much our society's failure to s...
2023-07-1741 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive183: What I wish I’d known about parentingRecently, a number of parents in the Parenting Membership have posted in our community about challenges they've faced that they've navigated with grace that would have seemed insurmountable a couple of years ago.
Many of these are parents of children who are already through the toddler stage, and the parents are starting to see the tools they've been using come alive in their interactions with their children.
I thought: There's a podcast episode in that!
I asked parents to submit short videos to me responding to the question: What do you wish you had known about parenting when your children were...
2023-05-0154 min
Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive182: How to get frustrating behavior to stopAll of our children go through phases when they do things we wish they wouldn’t do. Sometimes those things are relatively harmless but are pretty annoying, because they take extra time for us to clean up - things like eating (and making crumbs) in areas where we don’t want them to eat, shaving up a bar of soap, or piling up all the toys and refusing to help clean them up. Other times it’s not so harmless. They might hit us.
Or hit a (smaller) sibling, for what seems like no reason.
We want to get that behavior to...
2023-04-2442 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive179: I Never Thought of It That Way with Mónica Guzmán and LuluIf you're anything like me, navigating conflict comes pretty easily to you. You always know what to say to make your point in a tone that's firm but still inviting, right? You listen for the purpose of understanding the other person and don't just use the time while the other person is speaking to form your own rebuttal? You never get overwhelmed, and maintain your own sense of boundaries even when the discussion argument gets really heated?
(Yeah, me either, really...)
A few months ago I put out a request for folks who disagree with me on a social issue to...
2023-03-061h 06
What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood | Parenting Tips From Funny MomsFresh Take: Jen Lumanlan of "Your Parenting Mojo"Do you feel like you're at the end of your rope with trying to get your kids to behave? Jen Lumanlan takes us through the steps for getting at the root cause of our children's behavior - and the root cause of our negative reactions, too.Jen Lumanlan is the host of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, which Lifehacker named "Best Research-Based Parenting Podcast." She runs a course called Taming Your Triggers, which helps parents to understand why they feel triggered and to feel triggered less often. Jen holds a Master's in Psychology focused on Child Development a...
2023-02-0332 min
Keep Calm Mother On! with Christy Thomas324. Getting to the NEED with Jen LumanlanSign up for the email list to get the behind-the-scenes view. https://www.subscribepage.com/kcmo Want to try a coaching call-- sign up for a free 30-minute call: https://calendly.com/christythomas/exploratory-call-free Getting to the NEED with Jen Lumanlan Jen Lumanlan holds an M.S. in Psychology (Child Development) and an M.Ed., and hosts the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, which is a reference guide for parents of children under the age of 10 based on scientific research and the principles of respectful parenting. In each issue, she exa...
2023-02-0350 min
Less Drama More MamaTriggers and Trauma with Jen Lumanlan – 216Today’s guest on the podcast is Jen Lumanlan, the host of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, a reference guide for parents of young children based on scientific research and the principles of respectful parenting. In this interview, Jen and I talk about the impact of different types of trauma on parenting and what she calls the "trauma of unmet needs." We discuss how understanding our own needs and the needs of our children can help us problem-solve in situations when we feel triggered. And you'll hear Jen answer an email I received from a mom wanting to help he...
2022-09-2753 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveSYPM 020: Preparing for the afterbirth with Renee ReinaI don’t know about you, but I spent a LOT of time thinking about my birth plan before Carys was born. I mean, that thing went through multiple iterations as I read new books about the birth process and thought about what I wanted mine to be like.
And I got lucky; we didn’t stray too far from the plan (except that that whole ‘urge to push’ thing? Well I never felt that. It seemed like she was quite happy where she was. Perhaps that explains why she enjoys being wrapped in fluffy blankets so much?)
So I put all this e...
2022-04-0443 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive152: Everything you need to know about sleep trainingWe've already covered a couple of episodes on sleep, including the cultural issues associated with sleep, then more recently we talked with Dr. Chris Winter about his book The Rested Child where we looked at sleep issues in older children.
But if you have a young child who isn't sleeping well, from the baby stage all the way up to about preschool, this episode is for you! My guest is Macall Gordon, senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Antioch University Seattle, and who has studied young children's sleep for 20 years. She's particularly interested in the intersection between children's temper...
2022-03-2753 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive151: The Alphabet Rockers with Kaitlin McGaw and Tommy ShepherdThe band The Alphabet Rockers consists of lead members Kaitlin McGaw and Tommy Shepherd, and a multi-racial group of children who are also involved in writing and performing. They write about their real lived experiences and their desire to live in a world where everyone belongs.
Kaitlin and Tommy are actually fellows at the Othering and Belonging Institute, run by Dr. jon powell, whose work I really respect and whom we interviewed in the episode on othering.
They also do work in schools - in an hour-long program they work with a class to compose a song, which gives children th...
2022-03-2039 min
The Blissful Parenting PodcastTaming Your Triggers As A Parent with Jen LumanlanIf you're usually a calm and reasonable person, it can be very confusing when that calm vanishes the moment your child frustrates you.At first we think, if my child would just stop doing that I would be fine.But the truth is there's an underlying fear your child's behavior is triggering and it usually comes from a trauma in your own childhood. Maybe not a huge trauma, maybe a small way that you learned to set aside your needs. And when your child behaves in this way it triggers those same feelings of not...
2022-01-3138 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveSYPM 018: No Set Bedtime with Gila and KatherineWhen I interviewed Dr. Chris Winters last year, I described how we’ve been using a No Set Bedtime method with our daughter Carys. He used it with his children starting in the Elementary years, and his eyes nearly fell out of his head when I told him we’d been using it since Carys was about three.
In the email about the Dr. Winters interview I asked any listeners who wanted to learn more about this method to be in touch, so in this episode we’ll meet listeners Katherine and Gila. Katherine’s daughter is three and Gila’s son is seve...
2022-01-3058 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveRE-RELEASE: Why storytelling is so important for our children“Storytelling? I’m already reading books to my child – isn’t that enough?”
Your child DOES get a lot out of reading books (which is why we’ve done a several episodes on that already, including What children learn from reading books, How to read with your child, and Did you already miss the boat on teaching your toddler how to read?.
But it turns out that storytelling benefits our relationship with our child in ways that reading books really can’t, because you’re looking at the book rather than at your child. If you ask your child what kind of story they’...
2022-01-0238 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive[Looking back and looking ahead]In this short episode I reflect on where we’ve been over the past year, my plans to slow down a bit at the end of the year (as well as a super exciting project I’m working on!), and what episodes we have lined up for the new year.
In this episode I also mention something I haven’t done for a while, which is that it’s possible to donate to support the show. You might know that it takes 20-40 hours to do the research for each episode (although my record is about 80 hours for the show on Self-Reg...
2021-10-3117 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive146: The Rested Child with Dr. Chris WinterSleep! It’s a topic that’s on pretty much every parent’s mind. We’ve already looked at this from a cultural perspective, where we learned our Western approach to sleep is by no means universal, and that this can result in quite a few of the problems we face in getting our children to sleep.
In this episode we dive deep into the practicalities of sleep with Dr. Chris Winter, who has practiced sleep medicine and neurology since 2004. His first book, The Sleep Solution, Why Your Sleep Is Broken and How To Fix It (affiliate link) was focused on adults’ s...
2021-10-171h 10Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveHow to keep your child safe from guns (even if you don't own one)Many of us haven't been in each other's homes for a while now, but pretty soon we'll be getting together inside again. And our children will be heading inside, in their friends' houses.
People store guns inside.
Are you certain that nobody owns a gun in any of the places your child plays?
If they do own a gun, are you certain they store it safely?
If not, you need to ask.
That's one issue we discuss in this interview with Dr. Nina Agrawal, a board-certified pediatrician who has expertise in violence against children. She co-founded the Gun Safety Committee for the Ame...
2021-06-2044 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveWhat Carys wants you to know about your children's feelingsAfter dinner a few days ago, Carys randomly started telling us that if we want to understand some of the things she's feeling, we should cast our minds back to when we were children and remember how we would have felt about it at the time. The conversation continued as we explored more of her feelings when she's having difficult moments, and at some point someone (recollections differ on exactly who it was!) suggested we record a podcast episode about it.
Carys was immediately on board and wanted to do it right away, but we came back to it the n...
2021-04-1116 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive132: How implicit bias affects my child (Part 2)
Do we really know what implicit bias is, and whether we have it?
This is the second episode on our two-part series on implicit bias; the first part was an interview with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, former Dean of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and co-creator of the Implicit Association Test.
But the body of research on this topic is large and quite complicated, and I couldn't possibly do it justice in one episode. There are a number of criticisms of the test which are worth examining, so we can get a better sense for whether implicit bias is r...
2021-03-2157 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive131: Implicit Bias with Dr. Mahzarin BanajiExplicitly, nobody really believes in gender stereotypes anymore, but when we look at the world, and who's where and how much money people make, and so on, it still seems to be there. And the answer to that is yeah, because it's there. It's just not something we say. It’s more of something we do.
-Dr. Mahzarin Banaji
What is implicit bias? Do I have it (and do you?)? Does my (and your?) child have it? And if we do have implicit bias, what, if anything, can we do about it?
Join me in a conversation with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji...
2021-03-0752 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveDismantling White Supremacy and Patriarchy on MLK DayIn this short ad hoc episode that was originally recorded as a Facebook Live, I discuss ways that my family is working on dismantling both White supremacy and patriarchy (and having a go at capitalism while we're at it!) this Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend.
The best part is that this doesn't have to be heavy work that brings with it a huge sense of guilt. It's about building community that lifts all of us up, and gets us out of the 'stay in my lane' mindset that White supremacy uses to keep us in line. And it...
2021-01-1816 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveResponding to the U.S. Capitol SiegeIn this ad hoc episode, I outline a response to the U.S. Capitol siege. I provide some suggestions for ways to talk with your child about the events, but also ask that you take two more steps: (1) examine your own role in these events, even if you condemn them yourself (as I do); (2) take action based on your own position and role in the world to work toward equality.
You can find my resources on the intersection of parenting and race here.
There's a specific blog post suggesting a script for talking with children about the Black Lives Matter m...
2021-01-1027 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveSYPM 010: From Anxious Overwhelm to Optimistic CalmIn this Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode we hear from listener Anne, who has been in my Parenting Membership for a year now. In our conversation we discussed the anxiety she used to feel about every aspect of parenting, including the things she wanted to teach her son to do (Spanish! Coding!) and how she interacted with both him and with her husband.
She actually joined the Parenting Membership to learn how to become the perfect parent, and I'm sorry to say that I failed as her teacher/guide in that regard. She is not a perfect parent (and neither am...
2020-12-1324 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive125: Should you worry about technoference?I often hear two related ideas about adults' screen usage around children. Sometimes the parent asking the question guiltily confesses to using screens around their children more than they would like, and to using screens as a momentary escape from the demands of parenting.
Or the parent asking the question feels that they have found a sense of balance in their own screen usage, but worries about their partner who frequently ignores their child because they're so focused on a screen.
In this episode we interview a luminary in the field of research related to children and screen usage: Dr...
2020-11-2059 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive124: The Art of Holding SpaceIf you’ve been a parent for a while, or maybe even if you haven’t, you probably saw an article on Holding Space making the rounds of online communities a few years ago. In the article the author, Heather Plett, describes how she and her siblings were able to hold space for their dying mother in her final days because a palliative care nurse held space for them.
The article outlined some principles of holding space, and I think it really resonated with a lot of people – possibly because so many of us wish we had been held in that...
2020-11-0653 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive122: Self-Compassion for ParentsIn this episode, Dr. Susan Pollak helps us to apply mindfulness skills to our relationships with our children so we can parent in line with our values, rather than just reacting when our children push our buttons.
You'll learn:
What's the point of mindfulness, and does it matter if we bring our full attention and presence to diaper changes?
Why we're so hard on ourselves, even when we always try to be kind to others
Some concrete tools to use when you interact with your children TODAY in those moments when it seems like everything is falling apart.
Dr...
2020-10-181h 05Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive121: How To Support Your Perfectionist ChildParents often reach out to me to ask how they can support their perfectionist children, who can't seem to cope with failure. I've been on the lookout for someone to talk with us for a while, but just as with our episode on anxiety, it took quite some searching to find an expert who doesn't take a behaviorist-based approach - meaning that if the behavior is fixed, the problem is fixed too.
I was really glad to find today's guest, Dr. Paul Hewitt, who is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Hewitt...
2020-10-0555 min
Psychologists Off the Clock160. Schooling at Home, Pandemic Pods, And Socially Just Parenting With Jen LumanlanParenting is stressful right now. This is because we are educating our kids at home while juggling work with limited childcare. We are also navigating difficult, important conversations about racism, the pandemic, and world events. How can we regain our sanity and parent in a way that is meaningful? Join us for a conversation with Jen Lumanlan, a child development expert and podcast host from Your Parenting Mojo. During this episode, we explore homeschooling, pandemic pods, and socially just parenting.
Listen and Learn:
How Diana and Debbie are navigating school at homeHomeschooling strategies that foster deep learning and keep kids e...
2020-08-3057 minPsychologists Off the Clock160. Schooling at Home, Pandemic Pods, And Socially Just Parenting With Jen LumanlanParenting is stressful right now. This is because we are educating our kids at home while juggling work with limited childcare. We are also navigating difficult, important conversations about racism, the pandemic, and world events. How can we regain our sanity and parent in a way that is meaningful? Join us for a conversation with Jen Lumanlan, a child development expert and podcast host from Your Parenting Mojo. During this episode, we explore homeschooling, pandemic pods, and socially just parenting.
Listen and Learn:
How Diana and Debbie are navigating school at homeHomeschooling strategies that foster deep learning and keep kids e...
2020-08-3057 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveSYPM 007: Parenting Across Cultural DividesIn this episode we hear from Denise, who claims to have listened to every Your Parenting Mojo episode...
Denise is a Filipina living in Madrid, and the intentional, respectful parenting style she's chosen to use is somewhat out of place in both cultures. She wanted to chat about what to do when her daughter is having some big feelings out in public, and a well-meaning senior citizen approaches and says directly to her daughter: "You shouldn't cry, because you look ugly when you cry."
We talk through the immediate issue, as well as all the layers underneath that question, on t...
2020-08-2319 min
Mindful Mama: Raising Kind, Confident Kids Without Losing Your Cool | Parenting Strategies For Big Emotions & MoreParenting From the Research - Jen LumanlanHave you ever wondered if you are parenting the “right” way? Our podcast guest Jen Lumanlan did and decided that she would go to the research to figure out how to parent her child. She discovered what was worth paying attention to and what wasn’t, and it allowed her to let go of some core tenets of parenting. Takeaways: When we understand why our children resist things, then we can discover solutions. The right way to get your child to eat their vegetables. What we think of as “bad behavior” are our children’s unskillful attempts to m...
2020-08-181h 09Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive118: MaterialismThis episode on the topic of materialism concludes our series on the intersection of parenting and money. Here we talk with Dr. Susanna Opree of Erasmus University Rotterdam, who studies the effect of advertising and commercial media on use, materialism, and well-being.
We discuss how children's understanding of materialism shifts as they age, the extent to which advertising contributes to materialism, and the specific role that parents play in passing on this value.
Other episodes in this series:
This episode is the second in a series on the intersection of parenting and money. You can find other episodes in this s...
2020-08-111h 00
Her Mother TongueHomeschooling and Trusting Your Ability to Teach with Jen LumanlanSo many of us are facing a big decision this Fall, will we be teaching our kids at home? Or maybe we have no choice at all. So many of us are being thrown into the role as teacher and parent. This week Felica is interviewing Jen Lumanlan of Your Parenting Mojo. Jen Lumanlan holds an M.S. in Psychology (Child Development) and an M.Ed., and hosts the Your Parenting Mojo podcast which is a reference guide for parents of toddlers and preschoolers based on scientific researchers and the principles of respectful parenting. In each episode she examines a...
2020-08-0348 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive116: Work-Family ConflictWork-family conflict can seem unavoidable - especially in the era of COVID when we're either working from home with children underfoot all day, or we're an essential worker who has to leave the house and can't find childcare.
In this conversation with licensed psychologist Dr. Yael Schonbrun, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Brown University, and co-host of the Psychologists Off The Clock podcast, we acknowledge that we must enact policies that provide more of a safety net for families. But even in the absence of these policies, we can make choices that allow us to live in greater alignment with o...
2020-07-1652 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive115: Advertising to ChildrenWe're almost (but not quite!) at the end of our lengthy series on the intersection of money and parenting. Most recently, we talked with Dr. Allison Pugh to try to understand the answer to the question "Given that advertising is happening, how do parents and children respond?"
In this episode we take a step back by asking "what about that advertising?" with Dr. Esther Rozendaal of Radboud University in the Netherlands whose research focuses on children's understanding of advertising messages. Can children understand that advertising is different from regular TV programming? At what age do they realize an advertisement is an...
2020-07-0552 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thriveSYPM 005: Getting Confident About the Decision to Homeschool
School districts are starting to make plans to reopen - some with sneeze guards between desks; some on reduced schedules to accommodate the amount of space needed for social distancing, while some are going online-only for the Fall semester.
How will your child cope with this?
Did your child adapt well to online learning when schools closed? Will they find it relatively easy to see their friends but not be close to them? There are some children for whom these arrangements work well, but for others parents see big trouble ahead.
What are the options? Even if you've never considered home...
2020-06-0745 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive109: Education in a time between worldsIt seems pretty clear that we are in a societal 'liminal space' right now, which is a threshold between what we have known until now and what we will know in the future.
We are also in a liminal space related to learning and education, as schools hastily try to move learning online (despite disparities in access to online learning systems), and we have an incredible opportunity to think through what we think children's learning should look like in the future.
In today's episode we hear from Dr. Zak Stein, who has spent many years thinking about ways in which...
2020-03-301h 01Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive107: The impact of consumerism on childrenA few weeks ago we talked with Dr. Brad Klontz about the 'money scripts' that we pass on to our children - perhaps unintentionally - if we fail to examine these and make conscious decisions about the messages we want to convey about money to our children.
Today we continue our series on the intersection of parenting and money with a conversation with Dr. Allison Pugh, whose doctoral dissertation (and subsequent book, Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture) remain seminal works in this field even a decade after their publication.
In this interview, we take the position that...
2020-03-0958 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive106: Patriarchy is perpetuated through parenting (Part 1)"Wait, whaaaat?" (I can hear you thinking this now, as you're reading the title for this episode.)
When I think of patriarchy, I usually think of a powerful guy in a suit. He's always White. He probably works in government or maybe high up in a corporation. He's part of The System, which is just The Way Things Are Done - and he's never going to listen to me. There's really not much I can do to impact this system.
And patriarchy isn't good for any of us. It's not difficult to see how it represses women and any non-straight...
2020-02-231h 04Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive105: How to pass on mental wealth to your childThink about your parents.
Now think about money.
What kinds of ideas, images, and feelings come to mind?
Do you recall any discussions about money - or were these hidden from you?
Was there always enough to go around - or were you ever-conscious of its absence?
What little incidents do you recall that ended up becoming defining 'money scripts' of your life?
Perhaps it won't be a shock to learn that just as we learned how to raise children from our parents, we also learned how to think about money from them. And as we will raise our children t...
2020-02-1054 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive104: How to help a child to overcome anxietyListeners have been asking me for an episode on supporting anxious children for a loooooong time, but I was really struggling to find anyone who didn't take a behaviorist-based approach (where behaviors are reinforced using the parent's attention (or stickers) or the withdrawal of the parent's attention or other 'privileges.').
Long-time listeners will see that these approaches don't really fit with how we usually view behavior on the show, which is an expression of a need - if you just focus on extinguishing 'undesirable' behavior, you haven't really done anything about the child's need and - even worse...
2020-01-2752 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive098: Do school shooter trainings help (or hurt) children?A few months ago a listener in my own home town reached out because a potentially incendiary device had been found on the elementary school property, and many parents were demanding disaster drill training in response. The listener wanted to know whether there is any research on whether these drills are actually effective in preparing children for these situations, and whether it’s possible that they might actually cause psychological damage.
In this episode we review the (scant) evidence available on drills themselves, and also take a broader look at the kinds of measures used in schools in the name of...
2019-09-0255 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive097: How to support gender-creative childrenRecently a listener posted a question in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group asking about research related to children who are assigned to one gender at birth, but later realize that this assigned gender doesn’t match the gender they experience.
Another listener recommended Dr. Diane Ehrensaft’s book The Gender-Creative Child, and we are fortunate that Dr. Ehrensaft quickly agreed to speak. Listener Elizabeth co-interviews with me as we learn how to truly listen to our children when they tell us about their gender, and what we can do to help them navigate a world full of people who may k...
2019-08-191h 13Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive096: How to prevent sexual abuseThis is another of those topics I really wish I didn’t have to do. In this interview with Dr. Jennie Noll of Pennsylvania State University, we discuss the impacts that sexual abuse can have on a child (even many years after the event itself!), and we talk extensively about what parents can do to prevent abuse from happening in the first place.
If you want to be sure to remember this info, there’s a FREE one-page cheat sheet of the 5 Key Steps Parents Can Take to Prevent Sexual Abuse available here:
Get the FREE Guide!
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2019-08-0655 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive095: Ask the American Academy of Pediatrics!A couple of months ago, when I was interviewing listener Rose Hoberman for her Sharing Your Parenting Mojo episode, she casually mentioned after we got off air that her father in law – Dr. Benard Dreyer – is the immediate past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and would I like her to make a connection?
I almost coughed up my water as I said yes, please, I very much would like her to make a connection if he would be interested in answering listener questions about the AAP’s policies and work. Dr. Dreyer gamely agreed to chat, and in this wi...
2019-07-221h 04Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive091: Do I have privilege?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.
Each time I think I’m done with this series on the intersection of race and parenting, another great topic pops up!
Listener Ann reached out to me after she heard the beginning of the series to let me know about her own journey of learning about her White privilege. Ann and her husband were a ‘normal’ White couple who were vaguely aware of some of the things they could do to help others (Ann work...
2019-05-2748 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive087: Talking with children about race, with Dr. Beverly Daniel TatumThis 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.
We’ve laid a lot of groundwork on topics related to race by now: we learned about White privilege in parenting, and White privilege in schools, and even how parents can use sports to give their children advantages in school and in life.
Today my listener Dr. Kim Rybacki and I interview a giant in the field: Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of the now-classic book (recently released in a 20th anniversary edition!) Why Are...
2019-04-0159 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive086: 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 in the future?
In this interview with Dr. Hilary Levy Friedman we discuss her book Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture, the advantages that sports can confer on children (which might not be the ones you expect!), as well as what child...
2019-03-1845 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive078: 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 necessarily support your overarching goals? So, if you have a goal to raise an independent child but every time the child struggles with something you step in and “help,” then your daily interactions with your child may not help your child to achieve th...
2018-11-2648 min
The Wellness Mama Podcast206: Jen Lumanlan on Why We Should Let Kids Take More Risks Today’s guest Jen Lumanlan is the host of the fascinating “Your Parenting Mojo” podcast, which is all about helping parents find (and fine-tune) their own unique way of raising their kids. I’ve wanted to meet Jen Lumanlan ever since I heard her story. Jen decided to turn her self-proclaimed lack of parenting intuition into an opportunity …
2018-11-1952 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive065: Why storytelling is so important for our children“Storytelling? I’m already reading books to my child – isn’t that enough?”
Your child DOES get a lot out of reading books (which is why we’ve done a several episodes on that already, including What children learn from reading books, How to read with your child, and Did you already miss the boat on teaching your toddler how to read?.
But it turns out that storytelling benefits our relationship with our child in ways that reading books really can’t, because you’re looking at the book rather than at your child. If you ask your child what kind of story th...
2018-06-0438 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive064: Compassion (and how to help your child develop it)“Social and Emotional Learning” is all the rage in school these days, along with claims that it can help children to manage their emotions, make responsible decisions, as well as improve academic outcomes.
But what if those programs don’t go nearly far enough?
What if we could support our child in developing a sense of compassion that acts as a moral compass to not only display compassion toward others, but also to pursue those things in life that have been demonstrated – through research – to make us happy? And what if we could do that by supporting them in reading cues they alr...
2018-05-2155 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive060: What do children learn from reading books?We’ve done a couple of episodes on reading by now; episode 3 (which seems so long ago!) asked whether you might have missed the boat on teaching your toddler to read. Of course, we know that you’ve only missed the boat on that if you think that sitting your child in front of a video so they can recite the words they see without really understanding them counts as “reading.”
Much more recently in episode 48 we talked with Dr. Laura Froyen about the benefits of shared reading with your child and how to do that according to best practices from the r...
2018-03-2553 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive059: How to Raise a Wild ChildSo you listened to episode 58 and you’re convinced of the benefits of outdoor play. But you’re a grown-up. You don’t play outdoors. And you don’t know anything about nature. How can you possibly get started in helping your child to play outdoors more?
There are a number of books out there on getting outside with children – some arguably more well-known than this one, but I have to say that Dr. Scott Sampson’s book How to Raise a Wild Child is the BEST book I’ve seen on this topic because it balances just the right amount of inform...
2018-03-1244 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive057: What is the value of play?Does play really matter? Do children get anything out of it? Or is it just messing around; time that could be better spent preparing our children for success in life?
Today we talk with Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, about the benefits of play for both children and – I was surprised to find – adults.
This is the first in a series of episodes on play – lots more to come on outdoor play (and how to raise kids who love being outdoors), risky play, and imaginative play.
Dr. Stuart Brown's Book
Play: How it shapes the brain...
2018-02-1244 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive055: Raising Your Spirited ChildIs your child ‘spirited’? Even if they aren’t spirited all the time, do they have spirited moments? You know exactly what to do in those moments, right?
No?
Well then we have a treat for you today. Dr. Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, author of Raising Your Spirited Child, walks us through the ins and outs of her book on the same topic. Best yet, we do the interview as a consult with a parent, Kathryn, who has read and loved the book, but struggled with implementing the ideas.
Warning: we spend quite a bit of time brainstorming very specific problems that Kathr...
2018-01-1352 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive050: How to raise emotionally healthy boys“Be a man.” “Boys don’t cry.” “Don’t be a sissy.”
Boys hear these things all the time – from parents, from teachers, from friends and peers. What does it do to their emotional lives when they crave close relationships but society tells them to keep emotional distance from others?
Join my guest Alan Turkus and me as we quiz Dr. Judy Chu, who lectures on this topic at Stanford and was featured in the (awesome!) documentary The Mask You Live In.
This episode is a must-listen if you’re the parent of a boy, and may even help those of you with girls to und...
2017-11-0656 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive047: How to raise a bilingual childDo you have to start teaching a second language from birth? Does it help to get a nanny who speaks a second language? Is there any way your child will retain the language you speak even though you’re currently in a country where another language is dominant? Does learning a second language lead to any developmental advantages beyond just the benefits of learning the language?
Several listeners have actually written to me requesting an episode on this topic, and one has been particularly insistent (you know who you are!), so I was very glad to finally find an expert!
Dr. E...
2017-09-1050 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive038: The Opposite of SpoiledWe’re concluding our mini-mini series today on chores – and on paying children to do chores, which leads us to larger conversations about money. If you missed the first part of this then then you might want to go and listen to last week’s interview with Dr. Andrew Coppens, who explores the ways that families in different cultures approach chores and what lessons that can hold for those of us who want to encourage our children to do their chores.
Today we’re going to take that conversation to its logical conclusion by talking about money, and what better guest to...
2017-05-1638 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive034: How do I get my child to do chores?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 around the house. I’m not saying we want to train our children to be slave laborers, but why is it that children in Western cultures really don’t seem to do chores unless they’re paid to do them?
We’re going to hold off on the...
2017-04-1742 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive032: Free to learnProfessor 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 in Sudbury Valley, MA – where children are free to associate with whomever they like, don’t have to take any classes at all, and yet go on college and to satisfying lives as adults. How can this possibly be? We’ll find out.
Reference
Gray, P (201...
2017-04-021h 02Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive031: Parenting beyond pink and blueToday 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 Blue (Affiliate link), helps parents to really understand the scientific research around gender differences in children, which is a harder task than with some other topics because there’s just a lot of bad research out there on this one. I ask about the...
2017-03-2751 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive029: Why we shouldn’t ban war playThis 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 teachers were pretty much just ignoring it, which really shocked her. So I thought to myself “I bet some smart person has done some research on this” and so I went out and found us just such a smart person to talk with.
Diane E. Lev...
2017-03-1355 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive028: How do children form social groups?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 in our heads according to criteria that we think are important – in many cases it’s a valuable tool that allows us to focus our mental energy. But when we look at ideas like race and gender, we see that we tend to classify people...
2017-03-0642 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive027: Is a Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool right for my child?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 degree in early childhood education and is well-respected in the Reggio field. She helps us to understand how the “concept of the child” impacts how we see the child and support their learning, and what are the “hundred languages of children”…
Suzanne Axelsson's Book
...
2017-02-2746 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive026: Is my child lying to me? (Hint: Yes!)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 should handle it when we catch our children in a lie.
And here’s the one story that Dr. Lee says can help to prevent your child from lying…
Dr. Kang Lee's Book
Children and lying: A century of scientific research - Affiliate link
Reference
Dr...
2017-02-2047 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive025: Is a Waldorf preschool right for my child?This episode is the second in our mini-series on making decisions about preschools, which I know is on the minds of a lot of parents of young children at this time of year. Today we speak with Beverly Amico, the Director of Advancement at the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America.
Beverly helps us to understand the philosophy behind a Waldorf approach to early childhood education as well as answer those all-important questions like “Can I send my child to a Waldorf preschool even if s/he has plastic toys and watches TV?”.
Here’s the link to the Essenti...
2017-02-1341 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive024: How (and when) does my child understand fairness?We talked a while ago about sharing, and how you can understand the developmental processes that your child needs to go through before s/he truly understands what it means to share.
One of the inputs to sharing behavior is an understanding of what is fair, and Drs. Peter Blake and Katie McAuliffe talk us through what we know about what children understand about fairness. This episode will help you to understand how much of the idea of fairness is naturally culturally transmitted to children and what you can do to encourage a sense of fairness in your child, which i...
2017-02-0643 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive023: Is a Montessori preschool right for my child?It’s that time of year: daycare and preschool tours start ramping up and parents have to try to figure out which is the right option for their child. And many parents are overwhelmed by the options. Montessori? Waldorf? Reggio Emilia? How are they different? Will my child be messed up if I pick the wrong one?
This episode is the first in a mini-series to help us think through the questions you might have as you explore the options that are available in your community.
Today we’re going to learn about Dr. Maria Montessori’s approach to early childhood ed...
2017-01-3042 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive022: How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen: Author Interview!
Have you read the now-classic book How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk? Ever wished there was a version that would help you with younger children who perhaps aren’t quite ready for a detailed problem-solving session?
Well now there is! Adele Faber is a co-author of the original book; Adele’s daughter Joanna and Joanna’s childhood friend Julie King have teamed up to write the new version of How to Talk so LITTLE Kids Will Listen, packed with examples of how real parents have used the information they’ve now been teaching for over 3...
2017-01-2041 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive021: Talk Sex Today!I was scrolling down my Facebook feed recently when I saw a post in a parenting group saying “My two year-old daughter seems to have a “special relationship” with her rocking horse. Is she masturbating?” And I thought to myself “Whoa, two year-olds masturbate? I gotta do an episode on this!” So I looked around to see who is writing about this and I found Saleema Noon, who has a Master degree in sexual health education, and who co-wrote the recent book Talk Sex Today (Affiliate link), which is chock-full of information on how to talk with children of all ages about sex.
...
2017-01-1543 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive019: Raising your Child in a Digital World: Interview with Dr. Kristy Goodwin
Did your child receive a digital device as a gift over the holidays? Have you been able to prise it out of his/her hands yet?
Regular listeners might recall that we did an episode recently called “Really, how bad is screen time for my child?” where we went into the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines on screen time for very young children, so if you haven’t listened to that one yet you might want to go and do it before you listen to this episode, because this one really builds on that one.
Yes, we know we’re not supposed...
2017-01-0142 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive013: Vanessa Merten of the Pregnancy Podcast
Are you pregnant? Thinking about getting pregnant? Do you love Your Parenting Mojo and wish there was a show that could help you to understand how scientific research can help you make decisions about your pregnancy? Well, there is!
In this episode we chat with Vanessa Merten, who hosts The Pregnancy Podcast. She uses scientific research to examine – sometimes controversial – issues from all sides to help you decide what’s best for you.
And best of all, she goes beyond looking at individual issues to really synthesizing the outcomes of the research in a way that will make your decision-making much more...
2016-11-2121 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive010: Becoming Brilliant – Interview with Prof. Roberta GolinkoffIn just a few years, today’s children and teens will forge careers that look nothing like those that were available to their parents or grandparents. While the U.S. economy becomes ever more information-driven, our system of education seems stuck on the idea that “content is king,” neglecting other skills that 21st century citizens sorely need.
Backed by the latest scientific evidence and illustrated with examples of what’s being done right in schools today, Becoming Brilliant (Affiliate link) introduces the “6Cs” collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence along with ways parents can nurture their children’s development i...
2016-10-3142 minYour Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive000: Philosophy (aka "What’s this Podcast All About?")I always thought the infant phase would be the hardest part of parenting, when all the baby does is eat and sleep and cry. Now I have a toddler I’m finding it’s harder than having a baby, some of the support systems that I had when she was a baby aren’t there any more, and the parenting skills I need are totally different. How do I even know what I need to learn to not mess up this parenting thing? Should I go back to school to try to figure it all out?
In this episode I’ll tell you t...
2016-08-1514 min