Have you ever watched your child throw a tantrum in the grocery store and thought, "There HAS to be a better way"? NPR journalist Michaeleen Doucleff felt exactly that way. As a science reporter with a PhD, she dove into the parenting research—and found it frustratingly limited. But when she visited a Maya village in the Yucatan Peninsula on assignment, something shifted. She witnessed parents raising extraordinarily kind, generous, and helpful children without yelling, naggi

No one tells you that the hardest parenting moments might come after your children are grown. It was Christmas Eve. Twenty-three people in my parents' house in Ohio. Different generations, different perspectives, different backgrounds—even within a family. The chaos was joyful until it wasn't. My adult son and oldest adult daughter started arguing. Not the mild disagreement kind. The kind where my son called my daughter names—one of the destructive relationship habits we'd st

A reflection on witnessing, wondering, and learning to love across the gap As a speech-language pathologist, I've spent 30+ years helping children find their voice. But Annie Ernaux, the Nobel Prize-winning author, wrote something that stopped me cold: "I will never hear the language my mother spoke." She wrote it in A Woman's Story , her tender and unflinching account of her mother's life and death. It's a meditation on the unbridgeable distance that can exist between people

You know that feeling when you're drowning in the daily chaos of parenting - the negotiations over vegetables, the battles over bedtime, the endless "but WHY?" questions - and you just want someone to tell you you're doing it right? Here's what I've learned after 30+ years working with families: sometimes the answer isn't about doing it "right." Sometimes it's about stepping back far enough to remember what you're actually doing. The Astronaut's View of Parenting When astrona