Emotions
How to Restore Emotional Resources in the Early Years of Motherhood
The first three years of motherhood drain something most people can't name until it's gone. You're the regulator for another nervous system. You're th...
5 min read
Emotions
Understanding and managing your child's emotional world.
Emotions
Restoring Mental Health After Childbirth
Postpartum depression affects roughly 1 in 7 mothers; postpartum anxiety is at least as common and often goes unnamed. If you're in either, recovery i...
6 min read
Emotions
How to Respond to Tantrums Without Punishment
The pull to punish a screaming toddler is real — to send them to their room, to threaten lost screen time, to raise your voice over theirs. It feels l...
3 min read
Emotions
The Role of Repetitive Rituals in Reducing Child Anxiety
Your three-year-old wants the bedtime story read in the same sing-song voice, with the same blanket tucked the same way. The morning goodbye at presch...
6 min read
Emotions
Emotional Regulation in Children Under Six Months
When people talk about emotional regulation in babies, they often mean the baby's own ability to settle herself. For the first six months, that frame...
4 min read
Emotions
How to Recognize When a Child Is Struggling
A small child rarely says, "I'm anxious about preschool" or "I'm having a hard time since the baby came." She doesn't have the vocabulary, and she doe...
4 min read
Emotions
Simple Ways to Reduce Daily Stress
Parenting young children is hard. Some of that hardness is unavoidable. A lot of it isn't — it comes from perfectionism, over-scheduling, and trying t...
5 min read
Emotions
Psychological Support in Early Childhood
A common worry holds parents back from seeking help for a young child: she's too little, she'll grow out of it, real therapy is for older kids. None o...
5 min read
Emotions
Emotional Reactions in Children Aged 6–12 Months
The stretch from six to twelve months is one of the most emotionally crowded in early development. The relatively simple distress-or-calm spectrum of...
4 min read
Emotions
Postpartum Depression: What Parents Should Know
Postpartum depression affects about 1 in 7 mothers, and it can affect fathers and non-birthing partners too. It is not the "baby blues" — the weepy, h...
5 min read
Emotions
Postpartum Adjustment: What Happens to a Mother's Mental Health
Most postpartum mental health conversations focus on depression. That focus is necessary, but it leaves a gap: the majority of new mothers don't devel...
3 min read
Emotions
How Physical Discomfort Influences Behavior
Most parents have lived through some version of this: three days of bizarre crankiness, blown-up sleep, refused meals, no obvious cause — and then a t...
4 min read
Emotions
Emotions and Personality Formation in Early Childhood
By the end of the first year, most parents can describe their baby's "personality" in a sentence or two — the bold one who wriggles toward every stran...
4 min read
Emotions
The Role of Physical Contact in an Infant's Emotional Development
"Are you spoiling her by holding her so much?" New parents hear this from well-meaning relatives and absorb the worry. Developmental science is unusua...
3 min read
Emotions
Patience as a Parenting Skill
If you've snapped at your toddler over a spilled cup and then felt guilty about it for an hour, you're in the company of basically every parent who ha...
5 min read
Emotions
The Role of a Partner in Supporting the Mother Emotionally
The first year after a baby arrives is one of the most physically and emotionally vulnerable periods in a woman's life. Her body is healing — perineal...
6 min read
Emotions
The Role of Parents in Supporting Emotional Stability
Parents often look for the right thing to say or the right technique to deploy when their child is falling apart. The research keeps pointing somewher...
4 min read
Emotions
The Role of Parents in Developing Emotional Regulation
"How do I teach my child to manage their emotions?" is one of the most common questions parents ask. The developmental science gives an unintuitive an...
4 min read
Emotions
When Parents Need Help Themselves
There's usually a moment a parent recognizes — sometimes for the first time, sometimes for the tenth — that what they're carrying is bigger than what...
5 min read
Emotions
Parental Stress and Its Impact on the Child
Most parents assume their stress stays inside their own head. It doesn't. By six months, infants reliably show physiological changes in response to a...
5 min read