Emotions
How Parental Emotional Stability Influences Child Behavior
You've probably seen this firsthand. On the days you're stretched thin, your three-year-old falls apart over the wrong colored cup. On a calmer Saturd...
6 min read
Emotions
Understanding and managing your child's emotional world.
Emotions
How Infants Respond to Overtiredness and Overstimulation
An overtired baby and an overstimulated baby look almost identical from across the room: fussy, rigid, crying past the point of exhaustion, and someho...
4 min read
Emotions
The One-Year Crisis: Psychological Explanations
The word "crisis" sounds alarming, but in developmental psychology it means something more like "turning point." Old strategies stop working because t...
3 min read
Emotions
The Link Between Nutrition and a Child's Emotional State
The toddler who melts down at 11:30am isn't necessarily having a behavioural crisis. They're often just hungry — and a 2-year-old's blood glucose can...
4 min read
Emotions
How Older Children Experience the Arrival of a New Baby
A new baby arrives and your three-year-old, who was thrilled in theory, suddenly hits the bassinet, refuses the potty, and asks if the baby can go bac...
5 min read
Emotions
Normal Versus Concerning Emotional Responses
Is this tantrum normal? Is this much anxiety a problem? Should I be worried that my 3-year-old hit another kid at the park? Most parents cycle through...
5 min read
Emotions
Why Newborns Respond to Stress Through Crying
A newborn's cry is one of the most biologically gripping sounds humans can hear — engineered by evolution to be nearly impossible to tune out. Once yo...
4 min read
Emotions
Emotional Adaptation of a Newborn to Life Outside the Womb
Most newborn guidance is about feeding, sleep, and weight gain. Less of it covers what the baby is actually experiencing — being moved, in a few minut...
3 min read
Emotions
How to Help a Child Navigate the One-Year Developmental Crisis
Somewhere between 12 and 18 months, your easy baby becomes an opinionated, unpredictable small person who wants to do everything themselves and also w...
4 min read
Emotions
How Expectations of Motherhood Affect a Woman's Emotional State
You expected the rush of love at first sight, the deep fulfilment, the sense of having arrived where you were always meant to be. You got something me...
5 min read
Emotions
Maternal Emotional State in the First Weeks After Childbirth
The first weeks after birth are usually painted in two colours: blissful or brutal. The actual experience is messier — wonder and dread in the same ho...
4 min read
Emotions
A Child's Mood and Its Relationship to Daily Routines
Most parents notice it: the toddler is fine on Tuesday, falls apart on Saturday. The difference often isn't temperament or sleep — it's structure. Rou...
3 min read
Emotions
How a Child Experiences a Mother's Absence
Working parents, parents who travel, parents who just need to use the bathroom — the question is the same. What does it actually feel like to my child...
4 min read
Emotions
Maternal Emotional Health as a Factor in Child Development
A mother's mental health and her child's development are tied together at the level of biology, behaviour, and relationship. Decades of research — inc...
5 min read
Emotions
Why Postpartum Anxiety Often Has No Obvious Cause
You're up at 3 a.m. with your sleeping baby beside you, watching them breathe, certain something is about to go wrong. Nothing is wrong. The baby is f...
6 min read
Emotions
Emotional Learning Happens in Everyday Interactions
Parents looking for the right emotional intelligence app, the right "feelings" curriculum, the right structured activity to do with their toddler are...
5 min read
Emotions
How Children Learn to Assert Boundaries
You're trying to put your two-year-old's coat on. They are deeply, vocally not interested. The instinct is to overpower the resistance — you're runnin...
5 min read
Emotions
What to Do When a Tired Child Cannot Be Reasoned With
A 2-year-old who missed their nap is on the kitchen floor screaming because the banana broke in half. You're trying to explain that broken bananas are...
5 min read
Emotions
How Lack of Support Drives Up Parental Stress
The phrase "it takes a village" is now mostly used ironically by parents who don't have one. Across most of human history and most of the world today,...
5 min read
Emotions
Why Emotional Volatility Is Part of Toddler Development
"He was fine five minutes ago." Every parent of a toddler has said this and been confused by it. The fact that toddler emotions can flip in seconds, p...
5 min read