Latest issue
The Sleep Training Debate Assumes a Home. Half of Toddlers Aren't There.
7/30/2026
Every argument about cry-it-out — whether it harms attachment, whether it works, whether the cortisol data is damning or overread — takes place in the same imagined setting: a nursery, two parents, one baby, one night. The research largely assumes this too. Which is part of why a…
Recent posts
I've covered this ground before. Back in April, I wrote about the research consensus on physical punishment — that spanking reliably fails to improve behavior and reliably increase…
Every pediatrician's office has the same laminated poster: no screens before 18–24 months, under an hour a day for ages 2–5. Parents internalize the number. They count minutes. The…
When a toddler refuses broccoli for the fourteenth consecutive meal, the parental instinct to push — "just one bite," "you won't get dessert," "how do you know you don't like it?"…
When I wrote about cry-it-out in June, the headline finding was reassuring: the evidence doesn't support the fear that letting babies cry damages attachment. But the follow-up ques…
A new UK study just handed researchers one of the clearest natural experiments in corporal punishment research — and the findings are uncomfortable reading for the roughly 1 in 4 c…
Last May I wrote about how the AAP's screen time limits are real recommendations built on genuinely messy science. The core finding held up: the guidelines exist, but the research…
Your three-year-old has eaten the same four foods for six weeks. You've tried hiding vegetables in pasta sauce. You've tried the "one bite" rule. You've tried making the broccoli l…
There's a particular kind of 3 a.m. guilt that belongs exclusively to sleep-training parents. You've put the baby down, walked out, and now you're standing in the hallway listening…
Here's the conversation that happens in roughly every pediatrician's waiting room, every family holiday, every parenting group chat: How far apart should we space our kids? Two yea…
Every pediatrician's office has the poster. Under two: no screens except video chat. Two to five: one hour a day, high quality only. The American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines r…
There's a particular kind of parenting that looks, from the outside, like devotion. Every problem intercepted before it lands. Every teacher emailed before the grade posts. Every s…
There's a version of this story every preschool parent knows. A neighbor's kid is reading chapter books at four. The kindergarten teacher mentions that some children already know t…
The research on physical punishment is about as settled as pediatric behavioral science gets. A meta-analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour examined 195 studies across 92 low…
Start with what's new. The 2026 EWG Dirty Dozen report, released in March, tested 54,344 samples across 47 fruits and vegetables. After washing and peeling — mimicking what you'd d…
Every spring, the Environmental Working Group releases its Dirty Dozen list, and every spring, a version of the same parental anxiety cycle plays out: strawberries go in the cart,…
The American Academy of Pediatrics says no screens before 18 months (video chat excepted), limited high-quality programming from 18 to 24 months, and one hour per day for ages 2 to…
Your pediatrician says no screens before two. The AAP has a chart. Every parenting article you've read treats this as settled science. And there is real research here — longitudina…
