Repair
8 articles
How to Talk to Your Child When You're Exhausted
The everyday research on parental sleep loss is more sobering than the parental research literature on almost anything else. A sustained sleep deficit...
Repair After Conflict: The Single Most Useful Skill in Parenting
The bar isn't to avoid conflict with your kid — that's not possible and wouldn't be healthy if it were. The bar is to come back. Half a century of att...
What to Do If You Lose Your Temper With Your Child
There is a very specific kind of shame that arrives the moment after you have shouted at a 3-year-old. The flush, the stomach drop, the urge to either...
How to Apologise to a Child (and What Counts as a Real Apology)
A generation of British parents was taught — sometimes explicitly, often by absence — that parents do not apologise to children. The argument was that...
When You Lose It With Your Child: What Repair Actually Looks Like
You yelled. You said something sharp you didn't mean. You slammed a cupboard door and saw your child flinch. The first response, which is the wrong on...
Healthy Conflict Resolution Modeled for Children
Research by E. Mark Cummings and Patrick Davies, who have spent decades studying how marital conflict affects children, makes an important and somewha...
How to Discuss Disagreements in Front of Children
Most parents believe they should never argue in front of their children. The research says something more nuanced: it's not the arguing that harms chi...
Managing Your Own Temper as a Parent: Why It's Hard and What Actually Helps
Most parenting books focus on what to do with children. Relatively few address the more uncomfortable truth that the adult's behaviour in moments of a...