Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive

• Why Barkley's bell curve, which labels one tail "gifted" and the other "disordered," leaves out some important questions
• Why some researchers argue ADHD doesn't meet the standard definition of a disorder
• Why kids with ADHD face so much higher rates of peer rejection, and what that rejection does to their long-term wellbeing
• What classroom accommodations and peer-focused programs reduce ADHD stigma and improve how kids with ADHD are treated by classmates
• Why the outcomes Barkley warns about - reduced life expectancy, failed relationships, substance use - have a lot more steps in the causal chain than his model accounts for 

• Why having the opposite temperament from your child can make things hard, and why having the same temperament can make things just as hard in a different way
• How the attachment style you learned as a kid shapes what irritates you most in your child's behavior today, and what to do when your patterns don't match
• A real story of a parent whose years of trying to forgive her mother in her head finally shifted somewhere else entirely, and what was different about the moment it happened
• The two questions to ask in the first ten seconds of a hard moment, before you try to do anything else
• Why the thing you think you need in a stressful moment is almost never your actual need, and how to find the one underneath it
• How this same approach works even with a child who can't tell you in words what's wrong

• What made Terese realize the way she was talking to her kids was starting to sound like her own mother, and what she did about it
• Why trying to be logical and calm in the moment didn't work for her, and what did
• How identifying her kids’ needs, instead of taking the toy away, helps them navigate fights more easily
• What Terese says to her kids on the far fewer occasions when she still yells, that they now say to other people as well
• The specific phrase Terese still uses to quiet the voice telling her she's a bad mom

• How Magda Gerber's RIE approach and Alfie Kohn's bookUnconditional Parentingreshaped how I saw my daughter, and which of Kohn's 13 principles I still use with parents today
• Why the authoritative parenting research that's been cited over 26,000 times was built on 146 white, middle-class preschoolers in one town, and what that means for how much weight it should carry
• The medicine fight that showed me the difference between forcing a behavior to stop and understanding what my daughter needed to do it differently
• How a recurring fight with my husband over the four-month sleep regression led me to understand what a need is, in my marriage and in my parenting
• What happened during a live interview when I realized one of my biggest triggers wasn't about my daughter at all, and how that became Taming Your Triggers
• Why I now think parenting was never supposed to happen inside one house with one set of parents, and what building a village looked like for my family

• 020: How do I get my child to do what I want them to do?

• 148: Is spanking a child really so bad?

• 183: What I wish I’d known about parenting

• 069: Reducing the impact of intergenerational trauma

• 209: How to get on the same page as your parenting partner

• Why a preschool classroom is often the first place in a child's life where an adult besides a parent controls almost everything about their body, and why that loss of autonomy can come out as hitting or kicking
• The story behind a child who hit a teacher during circle time, and what came out only after the fact about what led to it
• How to tell whether a child's hitting or kicking is coming from a sensory issue, an autonomy issue, or something else, and how that changes what actually helps
• What teachers are usually working to protect when they enforce rules like Circle Time, including their own needs for competence, ease, and children's safety
• How I worked out a nap-time standoff with my own daughter's preschool that met her needs and her teachers' needs at the same time
• A different question to ask instead of "how do I get this behavior to stop"

• What changed when Sara stopped trying to teach her son and started following his lead instead
• The specific question that became Sara's compass whenever self-doubt crept back in
• How a four-year-old connected something he'd never seen before to something he already understood, using nothing but his own reasoning
• Why Sara calls her son's way of taking in the world his "lantern consciousness," and what that idea comes from
• The difference between stepping in to teach and stepping back to scaffold, and how to tell which moment calls for which
• What happened when a frustrating moment over a package of cheese turned into one of Sara's favorite examples of exploratory learning
• Why documentation is still the hardest part of this approach, even a year in

• Why starting young gives kids a different relationship with failure than starting as a teenager or adult
• How a 10-year-old built her own system for managing client information, without being taught to
• What it looks like to teach entrepreneurship by asking questions instead of giving answers
• The specific signs that tell a parent when to step in and when to let a struggle continue
• How a custodial Roth IRA works, and why business income is what makes one possible for a child
• Why a child setting her own boundaries with a paying client is not the same as being difficult
• How entrepreneurship connects to skills most parents are already trying to teach through chores and consequences, and why it works differently

Many mothers go to the doctor because they feel exhausted, overwhelmed, and they aren’t sleeping - and leave with a depression diagnosis and a prescription. The message is: your brain isn't working right, and medication will help you cope.

But what if the problem isn't your brain at all? In this episode, I talk with journalist Bob Whitaker, who has spent decades investigating psychiatric treatment in the U.S. We look at how women's distress has been medicalized instead of taken seriously as a response to impossible circumstances.

We look at how antidepressants work, which is quite different from what the drug companies have been telling us for years. He also shares the results of a New Zealand study on postpartum depression that should have changed how we support new mothers - but didn't.

Is it burnout or depression? Burnout and depression share a lot of the same symptoms - exhaustion, low mood, difficulty functioning - but they have different roots. Burnout is a response to sustained, unmanageable circumstances. Depression, as it's currently diagnosed and treated, is framed as a brain malfunction. This episode looks at why this difference matters, and why so many mothers get a depression diagnosis when they’re experiencing burnout.

Why are mothers more likely to be diagnosed with depression? Mothers in the US are frequently carrying an unequal share of household work, childcare, and mental load - often while also working full time - with little support. When that situation becomes unsustainable, the distress it causes is then treated as an individual brain problem rather than a response to a broken system.

What prevents postpartum depression? A study out of New Zealand found that consistent, practical support - help with the actual work of running a household - significantly reduced postpartum depression. But even though the findings were significant, more support has not become the standard of care.

Should I take antidepressants? Antidepressants may reduce symptoms for some people, but research shows they are far less effective than we've been told - and for mothers whose distress is rooted in unsustainable circumstances, medication addresses the symptom rather than the source. If antidepressants are helping you, that's OK (and do keep taking them!). But antidepressants should be used to help create space for other interventions to work, rather than used long-term.

How does society affect women's mental health? When we treat women's distress as a potentially life-long medical problem rather than a signal about unsustainable circumstances, we direct attention away from the structural changes that would actually help. This episode traces how that pattern developed - and what a different approach might look like.

• Why the mental load of motherhood is a structural problem, not a brain problem that medication should fix
• How psychiatry functions as social control when it diagnoses individuals instead of the broken systems they're living in
• What the New Zealand postpartum depression study found - and why its results were largely ignored
• How drug advertising has shaped what we believe about women's distress - from Valium in the 1960s to antidepressants today
• How to shift from asking "what's wrong with my brain" to "what would actually need to change in my situation"

If you want to learn more about Bob's work and the research on depression and antidepressants, go to https://madinamerica.com/.

The full one-hour conversation with Bob is available to Parenting Membership members. In it, Bob traces exactly how depression came to be understood as a chemical imbalance - not because research proved it, but because psychiatry in the U.S. wanted to rebrand itself as a legitimate medical discipline in the 1980s.

He walks us through how pharmaceutical companies funneled money to academic psychiatrists to become "thought leaders," how Prozac was marketed as making people "feel better than well," and how the industry captured the entire profession so thoroughly that by 1998, the New England Journal of Medicine couldn't find a single academic expert on depression in the US who wasn't taking money from pharmaceutical companies.

We went deep on the STAR*D trial - the largest antidepressant study ever conducted. The public was told 70% of patients got better. The actual stay-well rate at one year, once a researcher used a Freedom of Information request to get the raw data: 3%. Bob walks through exactly how that number was inflated - the protocol violations, the patients who were already in remission when they enrolled, the switched measurement scales - and why he calls it a straight-out public betrayal.

The whole episode is available to you in your private podcast feed immediately after joining the Parenting Membership.

Inside the membership, you'll find research-based modules on the specific challenges that make family life hard - from navigating parenting as a team to raising siblings who get along. Monthly group coaching calls give you a chance to talk through your specific situation directly with me. And you'll find a community of parents who share your values and are working through parenting challenges together, and with my support.

If you've been told the problem is your brain, and something in this episode made you wonder whether that's the whole story - the membership is where you get help to figure out what’s right for you and your family.

Click the banner to learn more

Jump to highlights:

01:50 Introduction to today’s episode and guest

05:04 Just remember what the disease model does. It focuses on the problems in the head of the individual, not in the social way we arrange our society.

06:25 From hysteria and electroshock therapy (mostly given to women) in the 1800s, to marketing benzodiazepines to wives in the 1960s, the pattern of pathologizing women's distress has been consistent.

08:32 When benzodiazepines were recognized as addictive in the late 1970s, psychiatry reframed anxiety as a type of depression and switched women to antidepressants, another numbing drug that keeps women quiet and functioning in an impossible situation.

13:31 In the New Zealand study, it says that when women got daily help with housework for six months, postpartum depression was prevented. Yet this support became standard care nowhere, because the system still believes the problem is in people's brains, not in their circumstances.

14:17 Wrapping up today's topic

• What the MTA study - the largest ADHD treatment study ever conducted - found when it followed children for six to eight years, and why the results don't support what most parents have been told about long-term medication use
• What kids themselves say about being on stimulant medication - in their own words, from research interviews - and why the majority stop taking it within a few years
• What evidence-based classroom approaches actually helped kids with ADHD learn in a controlled study - and why those findings matter more than most parents have been told
• Why almost two-thirds of people diagnosed with ADHD in childhood move in and out of the diagnostic category - and how that contradicts about the medical model's central claim
• The gap between what children report about their own ADHD symptoms and what their parents report, and what that tells us about whose perspective the diagnostic process was built around
• Why the diagnostic process excludes children under 16 from both the interview and the feedback session - and what that means for whose experience is considered during diagnosis
• Why medication improves short-term compliance but doesn't translate to better learning - and what the difference between a performance effect and a learning effect means for your child

• The six characteristics of playful learning and why each one connects to how the brain actually builds knowledge
• The difference between free play, guided play, and direct instruction - and when each one serves kids best
• Concrete play-based learning examples from everyday life at home: the kitchen, the laundry room, the backyard
• Why the research on high performers shows that early specialization and intensive enrichment rarely produces the outcomes parents are hoping for
• What the arrival of AI means for the skills kids actually need to develop - and why those skills come from play, not flashcards
• Why downtime is not wasted time, and what it does for the developing brain
• The questions Jen asked Dr. Hirsh-Pasek at the end of the conversation - about who research serves and what it leaves out - that don't usually get asked in interviews like this one