Parenting

Parenting

Growing up, I remember my father coming home from the factory, his hands stained with machine oil that never quite washed off. He'd sit at our kitchen table, carefully counting out bills for the week ahead. Years later, when I asked him about those days, he just smiled and said, "You kids had everything you needed."

The parent or adolescent needs to find a better alternative, and the adult needs to lead and show that way. After all,now is later, an adolescent is just an adult in training, and part of the parental responsibility is modeling and teaching habits of spoken communication that the young person will carry forward into significant relationships to come. Ensuring safe speech means managing unhappy emotional arousal that can betray them into saying what can inflict serious injury.

My daughter is in an open relationship, but I can tell she's unhappy. When she first told me about it, I asked genuine questions out of curiosity, but she became defensive. She even tried to guilt me into being more progressive and open-minded. I know that in this day and age, there is a whole new way to date, but as a mother, it seems like my daughter has agreed to this dynamic because she likes her boyfriend.

Are you a bona fide cycle breaker, someone who grew up in a broken or even abusive family situation and has done the work and changed everything so that your kids can have a better, happier life? First off, I salute you - I, too, didn't have great examples of marriage growing up, but with some luck and a lot of discernment, I now find myself in a very happy and healthy marriage. My young son has a much different impression of how adults get along than I ever did.

I have an 8-year-old son who is autistic and non-speaking. He is in a special education class in our city's public school system. Our system is notoriously underfunded, but I've always felt that the teachers and therapists really care about the kids. I think he is getting what he needs out of school, and he is always happy to go (and happy to come home). But I'm not getting what I need.

My wife and I have two kids, boys aged 4 and 6. I'm very happy with our family as it is. The kids are both out of diapers and in school all day. They're sleeping, we're sleeping. I feel like we've got a handle on this thing. But now my wife is saying she wants another one. She's 40, I'm 45-it's not totally out of the realm of possibility that we could have another one.

"We've been dealing with Rusty and his temper tantrums," Dylan shared on TODAY on Jan. 20. "He's been kind of having this little bit of a temper where he wants to hit and punch."

"I think with my first, I didn't know what I was doing," Anne-Marie told podcast host Paloma Faith. "I just was like, I don't know how to be a mom, and I thought it would just come, because everyone tells you that. But I was like, no, it hasn't come to me. So what do I do?"

I was never grounded. I never got my phone taken away. My parents really never yelled at me, and I feel like they had a pretty controversial parenting style, but it's also the exact way that I would raise my kids if I were to have them. I was allowed to do whatever I wanted to do. I was allowed to go to parties. I was allowed to drink. I told my mom before I smoked weed for the first time.

Neither my husband nor I ever had hair like my son's, but somehow he has curls that women would pay hundreds for at the salon. I would know, because I've been told so over and over again. His perfectly bouncy ringlets have become his signature look. You know Spencer by his hair. I'm always shocked when I look back at old photos to see how it's grown.

When you fix the "problem," it teaches kids that you don't think they can handle it. Helping a child be flexible-to adapt when things don't happen as they expect or want-builds resilience. Resilience and flexibility are attributes that ultimately make kids happy. I call this the "taping the pretzel" trap: Your child flips out when something unexpected happens and demands you undo it,

Adolescence has always been a season of becoming. One of its most striking features is the dawning awareness that childhood is ending and adulthood is coming into view. This realization touches nearly every part of a young person's life: how they think, what they value, and, increasingly, how they understand the world beyond their own front door. Yet many teens encounter a familiar frustration as they begin to speak with more complexity-the sense of being dismissed, underestimated, or gently waved aside.

First, you have to facilitate through the situation, which means realigning your mindset and asking yourself what you need to do to effect change for the next time you see this behaviour. Once this mindset has been established, there is a sequence of steps we must avoid to be able to effect change. These are as follows: 1. Do not allow your reactions to be based on what your child is saying.

Growing up, the grandparents who raised me were a generation removed from me, and because of it, I never felt like I could go to them with real issues or problems. I hid the deep and dark stuff because children were to be seen and not heard. We did not talk about the big things like sex or drugs. Instead, the warnings were direct and often frightening.

"Life is chaos," she said. "Mornings in my house are unimaginable. I have to get the kids up and fed, more or less, and out to where the school bus picks them up. At the same time I'm getting myself ready so that I can leave for work once I know they're on the bus. I don't leave before, because if the bus doesn't come, which happens more frequently than it should, I have to take them to school."

Managing your relationship with an unreliable or uncooperative co-parent can be very challenging, especially if you worry about your children spending time with them. I have worked with hundreds of women navigating divorce and want to reassure you that there is a lot of research supporting the fact that one healthy parent can outweigh the impact of an unhealthy parent. If you feel there are true safety concerns (this does not include less nutritious snacks or a later bedtime), it is important that you consult your legal team about options. Speaking with a child therapist or checking in with your child's pediatrician are other helpful avenues. If you don't have safety concerns but your relationship with your co-parent is strained, or you're worried about their parenting style, here are six things that can help.

I didn't know him as he was growing up; I learned about him when he was already 18, and since then we've stayed in touch through visits, calls and texts. When his mother passed away, he asked to move in with me. My wife and daughters supported the decision, and he's been living with us for about a year now. He's 25, has a steady job and is even considering school, which I'm proud of. At home, however, he's become demanding and dismissive.

Moms, just like anyone else, can make mistakes. Sometimes, the weight of balancing parenting responsibilities, work, and personal life leads to moments of extreme frustration or maybe an accidental harsh word. However, what's important is understanding that apologizing isn't a sign of weakness - it's actually a sign of strength. Apologizing shows your kids that you are not perfect, and that it's okay to own up to mistakes.

On this episode: Lucy Lopez, Elizabeth Newcamp, and Zak Rosen get into a listener's question about whether or not to gift a gaming counsel to their college kid. They bought the gift when the kid was doing well in school, but now they're struggling again. Should that matter? But first, they share their latest triumphs and fails. Elizabeth is in her Worm Era and explains the wonders of vermicomposting.

Be safe. Have fun. Boys lie.

Even if a child seems relatively happy, that can lead any parent to be concerned that there is a problem - or else why would they be evasive? On the other hand, our teen patients tell us about how they try to avoid long car rides with their parents because it is inevitably seen by the parent as an opportunity to ask a lot of questions.

For years, my 8-year-old son has been asking for a phone. I'm sure he likes the idea of being social and playing games, but he also loves talking. Copper FaceTimes with friends on my phone (calling their Mom's phone) and regularly calls his grandparents to check in. We wanted to give him an age-appropriate amount of freedom and stumbled across a landline-esque phone for kids, the Tin Can.

When I told people I was taking more than eight months of parental leave, the main reactions I got were: What are you going to do with all that time? and won't you get bored? These questions came from every direction including health professionals involved in my wife's pregnancy and the arrival of our second child. More than halfway through my leave, I've been reflecting on what good parental leave looks like:

Many of the parents felt that their way of doing presents wasn't working. Their children were disappointed, overwhelmed, or both. One mother described it this way: "Everybody opened everything all at once. It was chaos. I had a headache." The second topic was relatives: When they came, how long they stayed, and how many presents they gave. One mother with three small children had tried to control the overwhelm by having everyone come to her house instead of having to travel. That too was chaos.