How to Talk to Kids About Anything

We’ve all heard the labels. Strong-willed, spirited, explosive, and highly sensitive. As parents of kids who have been marked as “difficult” we need an alternative road map to guide us where conventional parenting tools have failed. We need a way to calm the chaos. My next guest explains that there are five steps to calming the chaos, each step bringing us closer to family success even as emotions run high so that we can build a sa...

The world today can feel overwhelming- complicated, overloaded, moving at the warp speed! What do kids need to thrive—so that they catch their breath before facing the next hurdle, cope gracefully with the ups and downs of life and bend not break? My next guests provide 10 essential, actionable strategies that we can use to raise kids who can. Who can roll with punches, connect, deal with frustration, bounce back and ultimately thr...

Special guests: Joanna Faber & Julie King. What do you do with a little kid who won’t brush his teeth? Screams in his car seat? Pinches the baby? Refuses to eat her vegetables? Throws books at the library and runs rampant in the restaurant? We’ve all been there. How many of us have seen the parent with the child at the supermarket who is throwing one big tantrum in the cereal aisle because s/he won’t buy the super sugar rainbowloop...

We live at a time when many parents, out of love, do so much for their kids—so much so that kids are not learning the skills they need in order to thrive. This is one of the reasons why I created one of my free bonuses for the How to Talk to Kids about Anything book launch—118 Skills to Teach Kids by Age 18—a checklist of 118 skills that allows you to ensure your children are ready to thrive on their own by the time they leave your...

This podcast will focus on how to help struggling kids reach their full potential.

Approximately 5% of school aged children have a learning disability and 13% of all public school students receive special education services. Another 15% are struggling due to an unidentified learning or attention issue. Struggles can look different in different children at different times of their childhood. Their struggles may be an issue with list...

I’m so excited today for this special podcast where Dr. Robert Melillo is interviewing me on my new book, How to Talk to Kids about Anything! It’s out now wherever books are sold and I hope you have yours—it’s currently #1 on Amazon in the School-Age Children Parenting Category—and that’s because of all of you. Thank you for your support- and please review it- those 5-Star reviews make a huge difference in the algorithm. So TODAY- ...

We have a lot of TOUGH talks on this podcast. We’ve talked about sex, porn, suicide, bullying, neurodiversity, failure, death and so much more. It was always my aim to present you with the entire child development pie and invite amazing guests on the show, bestselling authors and top experts, who could dig deep, providing you with the deep slices of that pie so that you can have these conversations with your children and teens—and ...

This episode of How to Talk to Kids about Anything focuses on effective communication tools that parents can use to best reach their children as they enter middle school and the teen years. How do we engage in respectful and effective dialogue, give constructive feedback, problem-solve and provide boundaries and still navigate the complex terrain of teenhood? Dr. Robyn Silverman interviews William Stixrud and Ned Johnson in this li...

What to do when your child throws a tantrum? How to react when your child hits, punches, or bites? How do we help to co-regulate our child’s nervous system? And how do we head-off tantrums before they happen? As you know, we’ve entered a new way of helping our children through big emotions—moving far away from the ways our parents used to parent us and their parents used to parent our parents. Instead of pushing big feelings under ...

Well folks, we are in a digital age where we track our children’s every move through apps—access their grades within minutes of the teachers posting them, send photos at a push of a button before we’ve even considered whether or not we should share or have consent to share—yikes. I was interviewed on Good Morning America about this topic because of how the number of likes affects how a tween and teen feel about their worthiness! Th...

We’re probably all felt it—this ever-more competitive race that today’s students run each day towards the best possible future—feeling the crushing pressure to do more, more, more, jamming their schedules full of resume-padding activities, AP classes, tutoring and whatever else that can give them an edge over the rest so that they can get into the right colleges, that gets them on the right path towards the right future. At the sam...

Kara Kinney Cartwright – This podcast will focus on teaching boys to recognize the humanness in everyone—to be kind and to NOT be an assh*le. How can we teach our sons to have positive interactions, make good decisions and recognize when they are being jerkfaces? We talk about all of it on the How to Talk to Kids about Anything podcast with guest and author, Kara Kinney Cartwright.

The post How to Talk to Boys about Not Being A$$ho...

This podcast is about how to parent without perfection. While we may have pictured smiling, complaint-free kids frolicking in meadows, taking out the trash without prompting, and feeling carefree ease as we baked cookies in a clean and organized home before we had kids-this is not reality. Kids are not perfect and neither are we. Far from it. The quicker we accept that life is messy, with spills, frustration, disorganization, and y...

Special guest: Katie Hurley

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, approximately one out of five teens has a mental health disorder, diagnosable by clinical methods, and nearly one-third show symptoms of depression. Now you might be thinking- well, many teens seem depressed to me, their moods and their emotions are all over the place! Stress is overwhelming! Yes, that can be true- symptoms of depression in ado...

Childhood is supposed to be filled with good times and laughs—but of course, some children may experience a significant loss during their childhood or adolescence. It’s actually more common than you might think. According to the Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model, as of 2021, one in 14 American children will experience the death of a parent or sibling before the age of 18. Still, it’s not easy to talk about grief with adults, l...

Parents have struggled with how to manage their time for generations. There is so much to do— so much to balance! In the age of extracurriculars— from travel baseball, soccer, gymnastics, piano, to tutoring classes, art and enrichment, the question of how to fit everything in, complete the car pool, get dinner on the table, help with homework, get to the store, get some work done, give your kids undivided attention—and still take c...

Imagine getting a knock on your door from someone who could derail your whole life and take away your child. That knock came for my next guest—not because she was abusing or neglecting her child, actually, quite the opposite- it was because she was listening and responding to her child in the most loving way possible. She was allowing her child to live life as the gender she felt she was—a girl. The topic of transgender youth has b...