Family Life
Family as a Source of Emotional Safety
"Emotional safety" can sound abstract, but it's one of the most measurable variables in child development. John Bowlby's attachment theory, Mary Ainsw...
7 min read
Family Life
Creating a nurturing family environment and daily routines.
Family Life
A Stay-at-Home Dad: Features of Family Life
A father at home with the children isn't unusual any more — roughly one in seven primary caregivers of pre-school children in the UK and US is now the...
9 min read
Family Life
How Children Learn Social Skills Within the Extended Family
A lot of social-skill development before age five gets attributed to peers and preschool, but the evidence is that some of the most formative learning...
7 min read
Family Life
How Single Parents Build a Stable Routine
The same family-routines research that benefits any household (Spagnola & Fiese, 2007; the broader Fiese family-rituals work) shows up even more stron...
6 min read
Family Life
Single Parenting and Daily Organization
The mental load of single parenting is the part that's most invisible from the outside and most exhausting from the inside. You're not just doing the...
6 min read
Family Life
Support Systems for Single-Parent Families
A persistent and unhelpful idea among single parents is that asking for help is a sign of failure. The data says nearly the opposite. Mavis Hetheringt...
7 min read
Family Life
Support Systems for Single-Parent Families
The most consistent finding in research on single-parent family outcomes is unsexy but important: it isn't single-parent status itself that determines...
8 min read
Family Life
Single Parenting and Daily Organization
The day-to-day reality of single parenting is structurally harder than two-parent parenting in ways that aren't a personal failing. You are running bo...
7 min read
Family Life
How Single Parents Build a Stable Routine
Single parenting is partly a logistics problem. There's no one upstairs you can hand the baby to while you make the call. There's no second adult cove...
7 min read
Family Life
Sibling Relationships in Early Childhood
The most thorough body of work on early sibling relationships comes from Judy Dunn at Cambridge and a generation of researchers (Howe, Volling, Brody,...
7 min read
Family Life
Sibling Jealousy: Causes and Signs
The first time your two-year-old hits the new baby, or "accidentally" sits on the bouncer, or sweetly whispers "go back" — most parents are surprised...
7 min read
Family Life
How Attachment Between Siblings Develops
For most people who have siblings, that relationship will outlast both their parents and most of their friendships. It's also one of the most under-st...
6 min read
Family Life
Why Shared Responsibilities Strengthen Connection
The connection most parents are reaching for tends to be confused with quality time set aside for it. In practice, some of the strongest bonding happe...
6 min read
Family Life
Setting Limits With Grandparents
Almost every couple I meet hits a version of this conversation in the first two years. A grandparent feeds the toddler something the parents don't all...
6 min read
Family Life
Family Rules and Their Role in Stability
"Rules" sounds like a stiff word for a household with a toddler in it. But families function on rules whether or not they're stated — and when they're...
6 min read
Family Life
Family Routines and Stress Reduction
The stress in early-childhood family life is rarely about one big problem — it's the accumulating weight of dozens of small decisions made fresh every...
6 min read
Family Life
Why Predictable Routines Benefit Young Children
The clinical evidence on routines for young children is unusually consistent. The big review by Spagnola & Fiese (2007), the broader work by Barbara F...
6 min read
Family Life
How to Create a Family Routine That Works
The idea of "a family routine" sounds like an enormous project — a color-coded chart, a rigid schedule, a system. In practice, the routines that actua...
6 min read
Family Life
Why Preserving Childhood Moments Matters
The instinct to preserve early childhood is universal — it's the one stretch of your child's life that genuinely accelerates past you. The complicatio...
6 min read
Family Life
Why Preserving Childhood Moments Matters
Childhood between birth and five moves faster than any other period of a person's life — a baby gains roughly three pounds and ten inches of height in...
6 min read