It's Time to Embrace Being a "Just Right" Parent We all know that it is a really bad idea to use social media as a gauge on our own lives. It is an endless stream of "highlight reels". This is especially true when it comes to being a parent. If you relied on what everyone else was showing you, even the best of us would come up short. However, these messages can feel impossible to ignore or avoid. If you find yourself thinking,   “Everyone else seems to be parenting better than I am…” , you’re...

If you’ve ever looked at your child or student and thought,   “Why do they shut down the second something feels hard?”   — you are not imagining it, you are not alone, and you are definitely not failing. What you’re seeing might be something psychologists have been writing about for almost 60 years:   Learned Helplessness . Let’s start at the beginning. The term was coined in the late 1960s by psychologist   Dr. Martin Seligman , whose experiments revealed something unsettling: when living...

Every parent has been there: you ask your child to do something simple—put on their shoes, finish homework, come to the table—and instead...