Do you hate punishing (with Time Outs, withdrawing privileges, or even yelling at) your child? Do you feel guilty after you punish them, wishing there was a way to just get them to listen? And do bribes ("If you brush your teeth now, you can have 5 minutes of screen time...") feel just as awful? But what other choice do you have? Your kids don't listen now, so how could not rewarding and punishing them possibly help? That's what parent Dr. Houri Parsi thought when I first met her. ...

Here's a little thought exercise: think back to what you were doing this time last year, right around Mother's Day (in the U.S...I know it has already passed in other places!). What kinds of things were your children doing that were really endearing? What kinds of things were they doing that drove you up the wall? What kinds of fights (resistance, back-talk, stalling, tantrums, etc.) were you having with them a year ago? Are you still having those same fights now (or variations on...

Are there parts of yourself that you don't share with other people? Things that you think: "If people knew that about me, they wouldn't love me / they'd think I'm a terrible person / they wouldn't even want to be around me"? When you mess up, does it seem like it's not that you did a silly/bad thing, but that you are a stupid/bad person? If your answer to any of these questions is "yes," then you're experiencing shame. Almost all of the parents I work with are ashamed of some aspect of...

Do you have a core group of parent friends who are always there for you? Friends who might not be 100% aligned with your parenting philosophy, but they're close enough that you know that when they do offer suggestions you would at least consider doing them? And on the days when you just want to just vent and not hear any advice at all, you know that it'll be totally fine for you to vent. They won't take offense and they'll just empathize and reassure you that you aren't a terrible parent;...

Do you ever fight with your partner? Do you ever fight with your partner about parenting? (Pretty much all of the couples I work with do both of those things.) And these arguments tend to follow a pretty well-defined formula: Child misbehaves. Parent A gets overwhelmed, criticizes the child and snaps at Partner B for not doing more to help. Parent B and says that clearly Parent A's 'better parenting approach' isn't working, since the kids are still misbehaving - this is contempt. Parent A...

Do you ever wish that you know the appropriate logical consequence to give your child (aged 1-10) for each different kind of misbehavior you see? When your toddler empties the water out of the dog's bowl for the 10th time today... When your preschooler climbs on the table three minutes after you told them to get off it... When your kindergartener refuses to come to the table for dinner (and you know they're going to announce they're hungry in an hour)... When your elementary schooler won't...

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...

It 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...

I have to admit, I’m a bit scared to say it… The P-word… “Patriarchy.”(Phew! I did it!)I know some listeners find it hard to hear. I’ve spoken with more than one woman who has told me: “I sent your podcast to my husband but then he heard the word “Patriarchy” and it was all over. There’s some sadness there for me, for sure. Every time I talk about patriarchy I talk about how much it hurts me and those of us who identify as women – but I also talk about how much it hurts men as well. ...

Sara has always tried really hard to not just be a good parent, but a really good parent. The best parent. (When I coached her and her partner recently to create some content for the Parenting Membership that you'll hear more about in a few weeks, her partner said to her: You hold everyone else to a high standard. You hold yourself to a higher standard.) Sara put a lot of pressure on herself, and this was even harder because she she didn't have the most amazing parental role models. ...

Last 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 Candada founder Kerry Cavers so we got together afterward to chat. This is a much more personal episode than many. I...

Listener Roberta submitted a question recently on YourParentingMojo.com/question: What does the research say are the decisions that really matter in parenting? That question immediately got my brain churning about what could be included, and how we would decide what to include, and how much of what's included could actually be research-based. The episode begins with a look at some of the major categories of factors that impact our children's development that we may not have as much...

My mom died when I was 10, and for a while people in our small village would look at my sister and me as if we were 'special' in some weird way. By the time I was a young adult that was just one of a stew of difficult experiences I'd had, and I also realized: my stuff is not special. By that age, most people are carrying around some kind of trauma. But so what? Does it matter? If our mental health is good enough, does it help to wallow around in all the stuff that's in the past? In this...

When Carys was about three, I forced a dropper of antibiotics into her mouth to just get her to take it, so she would start to feel better. We were both tired and hangry and I didn't see another path forward, when she was refusing something that I knew would help her. What other choice did I have? My husband did see another path when he arrived home later that evening, and before she went to bed she willingly took a full dose of the medicine. These kinds of situations come up often in...

When I saw that our 200th episode was coming up, I knew I wanted to do something special to celebrate. Listeners called in with questions for me for our 100th episode, which was released in September 2019. The numbering is a bit fuzzy, I have to admit - we're actually well over 200 episodes because there have been an assortment of Sharing Your Parenting Mojo conversations with parents and other folks that use a different numbering system, but whatever. It's still a milestone😊 Back then, I...

Listener 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...

  A couple of years ago I was watching a session of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education's online conference by unschooling advocate Idzie Desmerais. At some point she dropped a quote into her presentation that I jotted down but didn't think much of at the time:   What if your ideas about politics were just your ideas about childhood, extrapolated?   I returned to my notes some months later, having spent much of that time immersed in writing the first draft...

This is the first in a series of 'back to basics' episodes here on the show, where we'll look at the everyday challenges you're facing as a parent. (Have an idea for an episode? Share it on this thread in our free Facebook group [insert link], send us a max 2 minute video of you saying your question, or click here to record an audio message for me...) I'd wanted to do an episode on the use of reward and punishment systems in classrooms for a while, and when I mentioned this to my community...

Do you worry about the state of the Earth? Climate change perhaps above all else, but also resource extraction, air pollution, and the injustice that goes along with the ways the impacts of these things are distributed? You're not the only one. I know not everyone goes this far, but one of the reasons I waited so long to have a baby, almost didn't have a baby, and will only have one child is to reduce my impact on climate change. We all know we're supposed to fly less, drive...

Hunter Clarke-Fields is back with us again! She's the author of Raising Good Humans, and now the new book Raising Good Humans Every Day. Why does the world need two books with such similar titles? Are they even different?! Yes, they are! Raising Good Humans Every Day is small! And short! And the chapters are short! Each one contains just one practice, described in a few pages. If you've got five minutes you can read a chapter and then put the idea into practice immediately. ...

Do you ever feel triggered by your partner's behavior? (No? Just me? 😬) Many parents who join the Taming Your Triggers workshop sign up for help navigating their children's behavior...and then once they're inside they confess that their partner's behavior is even more triggering than their child's. As you might imagine, many of the participants in the Taming Your Triggers workshop are women. (Classic patriarchy at work: caregiving is women's work, and so is managing the...

  In 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...

Polyvagal 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...

Parenting 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 graduating from either of those places either (in fact, I think I was in the car driving away from each of...