For parents of school-age kids
Parenting writing for people who already read too much parenting writing.
You don’t need another expert telling you to trust your gut while selling you a course. We read the research, name the people who did it, and try to write the way a thoughtful friend would — one who happens to keep up with developmental psychology and isn’t trying to sell you a meal-planning app.
We’re skeptical of sanctimony, allergic to mom-influencer voice, and uninterested in pretending parenting is a brand.
Start here
Three pieces we wrote first, because they’re the conversations parents we know keep coming back to.
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Development & behavior
Your kid isn't a 'bad listener' — here's what's happening neurologically at ages 4, 8, and 12
"Bad listener" is one of those phrases that sticks to a kid. Most of the time it isn’t a character problem — it’s a developing brain doing exactly what brains at that age do. Here’s what the research actually shows, and what changes when you stop reading it as defiance.
14 min read
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Screens & digital life
The screen time limit that actually stuck in our house (and why the AAP numbers felt wrong)
The AAP retired its "two hours a day" rule in 2016, but most of us are still arguing with it in our heads. Here’s what the current guidance actually says, what the research actually shows, and the rule we landed on after the limit-setting conversation became a nightly fight.
13 min read
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Money & chores
Allowance, chores, and the quiet question of whether to pay your kid for either
Half the parenting internet says never pay kids for chores. The other half says of course — that’s how they learn money. Both are sort of right. Here’s the developmental research on what kids actually learn from each setup, and the version that’s working in our house — including the part where we changed our minds.
12 min read
A piece on sibling dynamics is in progress. We’re writing slowly and on purpose.
What we cover
- Education choices
- Public, private, charter, homeschool, hybrid — what the actual research shows about each, and the questions we wish someone had asked us before we picked.
- Screens & digital life
- Limits, content, kid phones, Roblox, group chats, school-issued Chromebooks. The actual research, not the moral panic and not the tech-positive contrarianism.
- Sibling dynamics
- What’s developmentally normal versus what needs intervention, age-by-age — and what therapists call the silent middle child without using that phrase.
- Money & chores
- Allowance, jobs, the family economy. The research on extrinsic rewards, plain-English age-by-age numbers, and the version that’s working in our house.