I Hate You. What's For Dinner?

If you don’t want to be an old-school style parent, but you also don’t want to be overly permissive and raise kids who lack resilience, it can be hard to figure out what to do. And easy to slip into modes of parenting that aren’t helpful for us or our kids. Reverend Susan Nason, who goes by the Parent Whisperer, joins us today to talk about parenting from a place of calm, compassion, and co-regulation without feeling like you’re constantly capitulating. In our conversation, Susie shares how her

What was your school like? How similar or different is it from how your kids’ school functions now? Like pretty much everything, the way we experienced school as kids –– the systems, the power dynamics, the methods –– informs our expectations when our own kids enter school. But if we never question our internalized templates and whether or not they were harmful to us or others, we can perpetuate models that cause unnecessary hardship or pain. It sucked for us, so why wouldn’t it still suck? Bu

There are many points in the course of our relationships with our kids when the dynamics will shift. That’s how it’s supposed to happen. But as parents, we don’t always realize or own up to the fact that we have relational needs that we’re trying to meet in our relationships with our kids. So when shifts happen –– smaller ones like a younger kid wanting to spend more time with peers or big ones like a kid going off to college –– we’re not always great at separating how our behavior is serving o

A lot of us end up spending a significant part of our adult lives unpacking our childhoods. We obviously do a lot of that in therapy, for ourselves and the parents we work with. Some, like our guest, use their creative work as part of processing their past. Today, we’re talking with Rob’s lifelong friend, author Jamie Beth Cohen. In our conversation, we revisit Jamie and Rob’s coming of age on the East Coast in the 80s and 90s, and do some speculating on what it’s like to be a kid these days.

Every parent has moments when they look at their kid and wonder, “Are they gonna be okay when they head out into the world?” In the day to day struggles that come up with school, homework, activities, chores, siblings, we can lose sight of the big picture. Which makes it all the more delightful when you get to have conversations with your kid that make you realize that yeah, they’re going to be fine. Today’s episode is the result of one of those conversations. We’re joined by Rob’s son, Teddy,

At its most distilled, disappointment is just noticing a negative difference between what we expected and what actually happened. It’s a moment for recalibrating our expectations and learning from an experience. Of course, we throw a lot of other feelings and experiences into the mix along with that gap, and that’s especially true when expectation and reality involves our kids. In this episode, we theorize about the purpose of disappointment, how it gets twisted up with how we were parented, a

There are deep biases embedded in the literature and therapist training for how therapy is supposed to be done. Some of those norms have evolved and some of the rules still feel very rigid. Old school rules say that an adult who is working on issues from their childhood might talk about their mother every week for five years, but a therapist would never suggest the client bring their mom to a session. But if both the adult child and parent are willing, why couldn’t we do things differently? T

June is a time of transition for a lot of families. The end of the school year, graduations from one phase of schooling to the next –– endings and beginnings have a way of surfacing the feels. And no one likes to process endings more than psychoanalysts. So as we’re at the end of the school year, and Rob has a child who just graduated high school — how?! –– we decided to spend some time today talking about endings. Rob shares some wisdom from his son’s head of school, Gillian talks about naviga

In our society, we’re not good at openly talking about death. We’re even worse at speaking openly about death by suicide. The silence that so often accompanies suicide–what our guest calls “the shroud of suicide”–creates additional burdens for surviving family members, especially women who survive their spouses. The expectation to shield others from the full weight of the death, to even erase the facts of the experience, is an enormous pressure that has long-term consequences across generations

Everyone struggles sometimes when their kids have strong opinions or feelings and they need them to just do the thing already. And when frustrations are high, it can be easy to slip into the kind of old-school parenting a lot of us were raised with and that we might be trying not to replicate. Our guest today, Kirk Martin, host of the Calm Parenting Podcast, knows those struggles intimately. In our conversation, he shares his journey with his son, Casey, and how he came to realize that he neede

All of us have some level of innate desire for autonomy and equality. But for some, the need for autonomy and equality tangles with Survival Brain in ways that have major impacts on their well-being, even overriding basic survival needs like food, sleep, hygiene, or physical safety. Though it can sometimes look that way from the outside, PDA (Persistent Drive for Autonomy or Pathological Demand Avoidance) is not just a knee-jerk, “You can’t tell me what to do!” PDA causes outsized reaction

There are many ways to do therapy, and many reasons why people gravitate to certain modalities, both as patients and practitioners. And while there are some who will insist that their way is the way, we’re happy to acknowledge where our preferred methods overlap and diverge with others, and how different therapies can help people arrive at the same place of better self-understanding and moving through the world with more ease. Today, we’re chatting with Gillian’s longtime friend and