Thirty-one years after I first read the Hart and Risley study in 1995, more than two thousand of us spent a morning on what I’ve been building on all along. Settled in at nine, ears on, coffee within reach. (Photo: Sandra Seitamaa, Unsplash) The Room I Wasn’t In At nine o’clock on a Wednesday morning I sat down at my desk in the glass-walled office with a cup of full-caffeine coffee (the real kind, because I knew I’d need it until quarter to twelve), turned on my listening e

On the days when the human you'd reach for is the bruise. The bagel was right there. So was the sunrise. (Photo: James Fitzgerald, Unsplash) The bagel came from my favorite shop, the one where it almost feels like I’m in New York City and the cream cheese goes on thick enough to need plenty of napkins when I’m eating. I ate it. I could not tell you what it tasted like. (This is not a figure of speech. I was present for the whole bagel and I simply was not "there.") Outside my

Envy taught me what I actually built, and who I built it for. The closeness I envied. Not the audience. (Photo: Priscilla Du Preez, Unsplash) The Photo I Couldn't Scroll Past 6:43pm on a Friday. Phone in hand at my desk. My partner Phil is out in the world working late on his own last venture before his retirement (we're both building toward a finish line at almost the same age, in almost the same solitary way). The dogs are fed and settled somewhere in the house. Sam is at h

The question every parent asks alone, and the two years it took to build something that could finally answer back. The question doesn't usually arrive in daylight. (Photo: Diana Light, Unsplash) The Question I Keep Hearing Twice this past week, on two separate occasions, a woman looked at me and said some version of the same thing. I only hear the scary stuff about AI. I wish I knew more about the good it can do. Neither of them was asking me for a lecture. They were asking,

Before you can trust what someone knows, it helps to understand how they came to know it. Q was always faster to find than the book itself. (Photo: Diego Marin, Unsplash) The library was a short drive from my house growing up, close enough to walk on a good day, far enough that a rainy Tuesday made you reconsider going at all. Inside, the card catalog stood in long wooden ranks, every drawer stuffed with typewritten cards, and somewhere in all that paper was a number that wou

She was seen once a month. They called three hours "more." Out of everything available, some families get less light than others. (Photo: Isaac Mitchell, Unsplash)] What Money Can Buy There's a piece that ran in the Wall Street Journal not long ago about parents who hire not one nanny but a team of them (a night nanny, a weekend nanny, sometimes a "family executive assistant" whose whole job is logistics). They called these parents "CEO parents," and I read it without judgmen

A diary holds what you write. This one writes back, and knows the trail besides. Jackson Hole, August 2021. Five years before the hug at eight inches, this one came without being asked. A week ago, my son Sam, 16, came and stood eight inches in front of me before school, gave me a sheepish grin, and angled his right cheek toward mine. Did he want me to put my cheek on his? What was he asking for in this strange stance he was taking? After those quick reflections, I seized the

There are a dozen versions of this ache this month. None of them need solving. An empty chair, still warm with light. (Photo: Behnam Mohsenzadeh, Unsplash) The Chair in My Office He comes and sits in the chair in the corner of my office most afternoons now. Doesn't say much. Scrolls on his phone while I work, one long leg hooked over the armrest, and every so often he'll read me something out loud that made him laugh, not because he needs me to laugh too, just because it's fu

A retreat buys you a weekend of it. LUMA helps you find it in the middle of a Tuesday. Some nights the only quiet left is the kind you scroll through. (Photo: Kev Costello, Unsplash) With an energetic teenager (and several of his friends around at any given point since it's summertime), the family room couch is the only quiet place left in the house by nine o'clock, and my phone is doing what phones do when the day is finally over, filling the last hour before sleep with othe

What Leonardo da Vinci, an empty inbox, and thirty years of Tuesdays have in common. A compass, an inkwell, a half-finished thought — the mess a mind makes when it refuses to stay in one lane. (Photo: Isa Bauptista, Unsplash) The Thing I Used to Apologize For For most of my career, I've had a version of the same conversation with people who ask what I do. I say speech-language pathologist, and then, almost involuntarily, I keep going — early interventionist, private practice/

What a very busy toddler, two paradoxes, and a man in a cardigan taught me about why relationship comes first. Different living room, different year — but similar enough to the one that held me still in 1968. (Photo: Joshua Coleman, Unsplash) I was, by every account my mother ever gave, a very busy toddler. Into everything. Always on the move, out the door before anyone noticed the door was open. And yet in February of 1968, at 14 months old, with

What a parenting AI search taught me about verification, caregivers, and the quiet work of separating what's true from what merely sounds true. A Sunday like any other — until it wasn't. (Photo: Jess Bailey, Unsplash) Every Sunday, Same Ritual Every Sunday I send the same notices — a gentle nudge to the families on my caseload that their early intervention visit is coming this week. Same time, same rhythm, years of Sundays behind this one. I had my planner open to check my we

On comparison-stress, two questions from 1771, and the tension our kids feel even when we don't say a word. A street like any other — where the math gets done quietly, behind closed doors. (Photo: Josue Michel, Unsplash) A Zip Code I Know by Heart I could draw you a map of 22101 with my eyes closed. Not because I studied it — because I lived it, twice, in different chapters of a life that kept circling back to the same square mile without ever quite meaning to. Steve's parent

On the children who fall through the space between a mother's instinct and a checked box. A quiet moment with a favorite book, one page at a time. (Photo: Curated Lifestyle, Unsplash) One Fish, Two Fish My daughter Stella, who is now 19, reports to me every now and again that she filled out her required reading log the same way every night in first, and then second, grade: One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. Not because it was her favorite. Because it was the only book she

What toddlers — and babies — actually need from the logical adult in the room Not every connection looks like rolling on the floor. Sometimes it looks like this — a real task, a willing child, and an adult who showed up for it. (Photo: Curated Lifestyle, Unsplash) The Voicemail My brother Ed is a CEO. He is precise, logical, direct, and not — by his own matter-of-fact admission — the goo-goo-gah-gah type. So when his wife had to fly to Arizona and left him to pick up his near

What your child is really asking when they want to help with dinner The dough will be uneven. The memory will not be. (Photo: Curated Lifestyle, Unsplash) You are twelve minutes from getting dinner on the table. The pasta water is almost boiling. The onion is translucent. You have successfully timed three things at once, which is a minor miracle, and you are — finally, briefly — on track. Then a small hand appears at your elbow. "Can I stir it?" And somewhere inside your very

When toddlers know exactly what they want — and don't yet have the words to say so. She has a very specific idea about this banana. (Photo: Luiza Braun, Unsplash) There's a particular kind of parental terror that has nothing to do with danger and everything to do with a banana. A mom I coached recently during an early intervention visit called it the "banana stage" — and she wasn't smiling when she said it the first time. With her older child, it had felt traumatic: hundreds

On the things we do that seem to disappear — and why they don't. W. Heath Robinson, The Moon's First Voyage (1916, reworked). Unpublished illustration, originally created for Peacock Pie by Walter de la Mare. Public domain. A Hospital Lounge. A Crescent Moon. A Hundred-Year Wait. It was Saturday late-morning this past weekend, and I was relegated to the hospital lounge while my daughter Stella's boyfriend, and then two friends, visited her. She was in good spirits, despite ha

You don't need a perfect boat to catch the wind. Two small paintings by my friend and artist Lucia — and the conversation they started. (@luartingk) Photo: Cindi Z. Stevens Copeland There is a moment many parents know but few name. It's not a crisis. No one is in the hospital. Nothing has shattered. The kids are fed, the permission slips are signed, the grocery order went through. Life, technically, is working. And yet. You're standing in your kitchen at 7

What 77% of parents are really asking — and the ancient Greek word that answers it. The metamorphosis is already happening. (Photo: Eva Zarpas, @aquariansecrets) The Number I Can't Stop Thinking About A new national report landed in my inbox recently and I have not been able to put it down. It's called Rattled: Tracking the Experiences of Families with Infants and Toddlers in 2025, published in May 2026 by Zero to Three. And one number in it stopped me completely. 77%. Sevent