Balancing Work and Family (According to Science)

Dr. Yael Schonbrun shares research-backed tips for thriving as a working parent

Source: Pexels/Sarah Chai

Nearly every working parent has experienced tension and stress in juggling the demands of working while being a parent. In today’s newsletter, I interview Dr. Yael Schonbrun. Dr. Yael Schonbrun is a licensed clinical psychologist, professor at Brown University, and author of the book Work, Parent, Thrive: 12 Science-Backed Strategies to Ditch Guilt, Manage Overwhelm, and Grow Connection (When Everything Feels Like Too Much). This book reframes the challenges of working parenthood and provides practical, research-backed tools to help working parents. Dr. Schonbrun is also the co-host of popular podcast, Psychologists Off the Clock, and a working parent herself to three young boys. You can find out more information about Dr. Schonbrun through her website, Instagram, or Twitter. In this interview, Dr. Schonbrun shares with us how to use research to manage stress, reduce guilt, and learn to thrive as a working parent.

Read or listen to the full interview below:

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Parenting Translator Newsletter. I'm Dr. Cara Goodwin, and I'm so excited because today I have as a guest, Dr. Yael Schonbrun. She is the author of a book that I absolutely love called Work Parent Thrive. The purpose of this book is to help working parents or really any parents to understand how to balance the different roles we might have in our lives.  I have a lot of questions for her about the overwhelming aspects of being a working parent and managing different roles as a parent. But first, Yael, could you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

Dr. Yael Schonbrun:  I'm a parent of three. My three boys are ages six, 10, and 12.  I'm a clinical psychologist by training. I hail from academia, but I've since moved into some non-academic settings. I write popular books and articles, and I also co-host a podcast on ideas and evidence-based psychology that I try to make accessible for non-academic, non-psychology audiences. The podcast is called Psychologists Off the Clock.  I also have a small private practice where I specialize in marital therapy and parent coaching. So I wear a lot of professional hats and love parenting and love the science of parenting. I'm a huge fan of yours as well. That should probably have come first!

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Thank you so much. That's so nice. Why don't we dive right into the questions since I have a lot of questions for you! We hear so much negativity about being a working parent. I feel like everything you see out there is negative. One of the things I really love about your book is that you emphasize the positives of being a working parent, which is so great because I think we're all too familiar with the negatives. What does research and your clinical experience tell us about working parenthood that can give us a more positive spin?

Dr. Yael Schonbrun: I just want to first say that that's like the biggest compliment. That is really the driving force behind this book.  When I became a working parent and was really struggling and turned to the bookstores and libraries for guidance and reassurance, it felt so negative. Everything that I picked up just felt so disheartening.

This book really came out of a desire of mine as somebody who's into positive psychology and who's not a natural optimist, but a very dedicated one, to offer something to working parents that was realistic.  I wanted to offer something that wasn't pie in the sky, Pollyanna rainbows and sunshine, but that was really grounded in science and reality, and that didn't feel so depressing and disheartening. I think of this book as the parallel to how positive psychology fits into the field of mental health. Just as in the field of mental health, we need to be working to reduce the problems of working parenthood.

This guide focuses on building the positive, and part of building the positive is recognizing that the conflict between roles is real. It's just one part of a much more interesting story of lives that involve multiple demanding roles, and that even some of the discomforts that we feel inside of the challenges are sometimes not as bad as we might assume.  Sometimes we have gifts embedded in them that we can take advantage of.

This book is about Work Family Conflict and its sister, which is called Work Family Enrichment.  That's a science-backed construct that is basically defined as the way our roles can help each other out. Now I talk a lot in the book and we'll probably talk in this conversation a lot about work and parenthood, but this is true about any kinds of competing demanding roles.

The idea is that there are different pathways through which our competing roles can actually feed each other, and sometimes in kind of surprising ways. I’ll describe them as three distinct pathways. 

1. The first is the transfer effect, and that's the idea that resources developed in one role can transfer back into another. So if you're home parenting and building patience and compassion, in most of our work roles, friendship roles, or our partnership roles, those are skills that are also quite beneficial. Therefore, skills that we build in one role help another out.

2. The second pathway is something called the buffering effect, and that's the idea that stress in one part of life can be eased by experiences in the other. So if you have a tough day at work, you can go home and have a hug with your kids. If they're going through a difficult developmental milestone, you can go out to dinner with your partner and have a positive evening. 

3. And then finally, there's the additive effect. And that's the idea that the more meaningful roles we have, the better chance we have to have a greater breadth of life experiences and more opportunities to experience a sense of purpose. So more meaning comes from more roles. 

And again, all of these ideas, these pathways are really science-backed. There's a lot of evidence for them. But one of the things that we know from research is that if we're not looking for those experiences, we overlook them and do not harness the positivity that comes with the experience.

This is because what we pay attention to is what we experience. This book is calling our attention to the ways that positivity can come from the tension between roles so that we can harness more of that goodness. 

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Yes. I love this concept of Work Family Enrichment. I feel like it helps put such a positive spin on it and also helps us to understand how being a parent can help us in our job and vice versa, how our job can help us as a parent. My favorite example you give in the book is of the exotic dancer who said that her experience with negotiating with her toddlers helped her to deal with her clients at work. I thought that was a hilarious example! It helps us to understand that even if your job is very different from parenting, they can have these positive influences on each other.

Dr. Yael Schonbrun: Absolutely. It's one of my favorite examples too, and I love how the dancer expressed it because she said, now that I'm a mom, when my customers misbehave, I talk to them the way I talk to my toddler.I say, “Honey, that's not how we behave in here.” It was such a great example. There are some roles that more naturally go together, like as a psychologist it makes more intuitive sense that our jobs can help our parenting and maybe even that our parenting can help our jobs.

But through this book, I interviewed dozens and dozens of working parents from very different kinds of backgrounds. People that were in customer service at utilities companies, people who worked as ship cruise attendants, people who were doctors and physicians and lawyers and engineers. 

In every case, people were able to identify ways that their roles helped each other, sometimes in really surprising ways. What is pretty cool is that often people would say, I never thought about it before, but now that you're asking, it's coming up to me. Later, when I would be in touch with some of these individuals after the interview, they would say, now that I'm thinking about it, it's much more obvious and available to me to see those benefits. That's really the mindset shift that we're going for. 

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Yes. I love that idea of intentionally focusing on the positive. I'm wondering if you can touch on this idea that I feel like we hear a lot about –achieving this perfect balance of work and family or work and life, and this idea of having it all?

A lot of us going into working parenthood had this image that I can do it all. I can be a super parent, a super employee, and achieve some sort of perfect balance. What do you think about these myths? And is there a better way to think about it?

Dr. Yael Schonbrun: I will say first that I bought into that myth “hook line and sinker,” which was one of the reasons that after becoming a working parent, I really struggled with a severe identity crisis. I worked so hard to get here, I sweat blood to achieve professional success. I worked so hard to establish exactly what everybody said, if you do all these things then you'll be happy. I was really miserable and thought, “What went wrong here?”.  I do think it's this myth that there is a way to just feel happy, which is a general myth that we have in our Western society. If you do all the things you'll just feel good, but that isn't what it is to be human.

If you're alive and you're human, you're going to feel the full gamut of emotions, and feeling sad or disappointed or frustrated. Having role tension is not a bad thing, it's just being alive. The more important outcome to seek is to be aware of how it is that you want to show up moment-to-moment. It is important to think about what it is that you want to be contributing to the world. How is it that you want to be living your life to be more focused on the process? 

The answer to your question is that it is a myth that we can have it all, and it is a myth that we can balance this outcome-focused idea of how we're supposed to do life. Because life is a journey, life isn't an outcome. I think about the mistake that we often make in how we think about balance. When we use the word “balance,” we often are using it to describe an outcome, but it's far better used as a verb or a process. 

Think of it like skiing down a mountain. This is a common metaphor. As you move along this slope, you're always balancing, but you're never done being balanced until the journey is totally complete. So as you're taking the journey, you're shifting from side to side, sometimes more significantly on the steeper slope or icier terrain. And sometimes you fall down and you have to get back up again.

And sometimes the terrain is so hard that you need to call for help or slide down on your butt, and none of that is a problem. It's just the fact of life sometimes having tougher patches and you might not have the right resources to get through it. And sometimes it's because you haven't learned enough or built the skill, and sometimes it's because it's just not possible to get through that terrain. It's just too thick with trees or too icy for anybody to get down. 

So you're going to have to find a way to give yourself grace that it isn't possible to do this balance thing in the way that you might optimally want to. You might need to be flexible and figure out what you should do given what's going on around you and given what resources you do have available. I do think moving from an outcome-oriented idea of achievement and balance to a more process-oriented one gives us a lot more wiggle room to work with what we have. 

Dr. Cara Goodwin: I love that idea. I think that's so helpful for parents. 

I would really love to also dig into the idea of guilt. So this is something I personally struggle with a lot. I have these thoughts sometimes that I'll never be as productive in my work as somebody who doesn't have children.  Or I sometimes feel like I'll never be as good of a mother as somebody who devotes their whole life to their children, which is not something I'm currently doing.

So I just wonder, how do we handle this guilt? How do we handle feeling both that we aren't as good of employees as people who don't have children, and this feeling like we aren't as good of parents as people who don't have any other obligations in their lives?

Dr. Yael Schonbrun: It's a great question and I love this question for somebody who's gaga for research because there's lots of science-backed ways that role tension actually helps us do better as workers and as parents.

But here's the thing, it doesn't stop this emotional reflex of feeling guilty. The guilt is a part of the human experience too. What we know about guilt from functional emotion research is that it's an inherently interpersonal emotion whose function is to protect our most important relationships and rules from anticipated harm or from harm that's actually been done. So as a parent, guilt prompts us to make sure that our kids are safe physically and emotionally, and that we're ensuring the best possible outcomes for them. And as workers, it prompts us to do right by our employer, colleagues, clients, and even the mission of the company. But emotions - none of them, not guilt, not any of them - are not perfect indicators. 

So we sometimes feel guilty even when our kids are technically safe. The reason for that is that our emotions are evolutionarily hardwired into us. So in pre-modern times, guilt was much more likely to protect your children's survival.  So if you felt guilty because they were out of your sight, or they were giving cries of distress, you were much more likely to pull them in and protect them from a predator.

But imminent danger is no longer the issue. And so when your kid gives a cry of distress because you gave them the white mac and cheese instead of the orange mac and cheese, they're not actually in danger. But that higher hard wiring hasn't evolved as quickly as our culture has. And so you're going to have that reflexive response.

For example, we think “Oh, they're not happy, right? Because I didn't show up to their school play. I must be falling short of protecting their emotional wellbeing.” But what we know from science is the way that guilt can sometimes prompt us as parents is it pushes us to do helicopter parenting, which we know is not so good for our kids because it interferes with them learning how to handle the emotions that come along with being human– how to handle disappointment, how to creatively problem solve when their parent isn't there to swoop in and give them the lunch that they forgot or the homework that they left at home. So there are opportunities for us to notice the guilt and not respond to it that are actually quite beneficial.

And in fact, sometimes when our guilt says I'm a bad mom, that isn't the truth with the capital T at all. It's quite the opposite that when you're taking a step away doing your work and they're doing their thing, that's actually very good parenting because it's giving them space to be resilient and learn independence and creatively problem solve, and even become attached to other caregivers, which is really good for kids as well as for parents.

The same is true with work, and I don't have to go into as much detail, but often guilt prompts us in ways that are inaccurate, but here's the trick. Sometimes it prompts us in ways that are accurate. So for example, if you've been working really hard on a project and you've missed dinner every night for a week, and your kids are really missing you and you're really missing them, guilt might be a really important cue to say, ”Okay, Cara, I need to pause and rethink my work hours and really check in with my kids and have some quality bonding time.”

We don't need to and we shouldn't throw the guilt out with the bathwater. We can't stop feeling it. But what we can do is learn to relate to it differently. And so to come back to your initial question of what do we do with the guilt is to develop practices of relating to it differently.

The practice goes something like this, pause when you feel guilty, get curious. How much is this guilt informing me in ways that are productive, that line up with the way that I want to be as a parent, with what science says is the most helpful for my work or for my kids? And then choose a behavior that is cued by your guilt, but more directed by your values. How you want to show up moment-to-moment, given what you know and what's important to you. So it's pause, get curious, and then choose a behavior based on that. 

Sometimes, you choose to keep working. For example, sometimes I feel really guilty because my kids really love jumping on the trampoline, and I hate jumping on the trampoline. I feel like good moms would enjoy that. They'd want to get out there and play with their kids. But I've learned to just notice that, get curious - okay, is this telling me that my kids are missing me? Or is it just a social comparison that doesn't really help me at all? My kids are fine by themselves and there's lots of things I like to do with them that doesn't involve jumping on a trampoline.

I can let them do their thing, get some work done, and then when they're done, then I'll be ready to really mindfully return to being connected with them and that actually serves me much better. My guilt doesn't go away. I allow it to be along for the ride, but I don't let it drive the choice. That's kind of a silly example, but hopefully people can relate it to other more personal ones. 

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Yes. I love that reframe. That's so helpful. It's so funny because I used to feel guilty when I would hear mothers who were homeschooling their kids and I would think, “Why can't I do that? That would be such an amazing thing, a way to bond with my children.”  And then during COVID I learned that was not something I was capable of. So sometimes you need evidence to refute whatever the guilt is telling you. Now I have evidence that I am not made to homeschool and it was actually really bad for our relationship when I was trying to homeschool my kids. Looking at the actual evidence is - is there anything to back up this guilt? I think that's so helpful. 

Dr. Yael Schonbrun: As you're saying, we adopt these socially driven myths about what good parents do and what good parents should enjoy doing that don't necessarily map onto what works for us, and we are naturally social creatures. So again, we can't stop having those thoughts, but we can learn to pause and reorient, and think, what works for me? 

I'm the same. I'm a terrible homeschooler and I adore my kids, but I actually see a lot of value in them having teachers who have areas of expertise that aren't mine. So I don't even think it's necessarily a bad thing. There's pros and cons with everything and somebody who loves to homeschool their kids probably is going to have a certain kind of relationship with their kids that I won't have, but my kids will have access to areas of expertise that their kids won't have.

We have to pick and choose. There's always opportunity cost, and figuring out for you what's going to work best is so critical. And by the way, that's what I love about the science that you share because you're always very clear–here's what the science says. And at the end of the day, science only goes so far. You need to also tailor it to personal needs, to your family's needs, to your context and circumstances, and that's just as important as what the science says. 

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Yes, exactly. So speaking of that, I would love to dig into how your own values play into this. So obviously all of us as parents make different decisions, even those of us who know all the research, and a lot of that is based on what our individual values are and what our goals are for our family.

How do you use values to guide your decisions as a working parent in a way that you're not just reacting to guilt or doing what's easiest in the moment? How do you step back and think about these bigger values?

Dr. Yael Schonbrun: It's a great question and maybe I'll start by just defining what values are and what they're not. In the therapy that I practice, which is called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, they're defined in a particular way as a quality of action. So they describe how it is that you want to show up moment-to-moment, which is different from a goal. So if you have the goal of getting to the top of the mountain, that kind of gives you a direction that you want to go in.

Values describe how you want to take the journey. And values are also influenced by what's going on around you and what's going on inside of you. So if you’re going up the mountain with a friend, how you might want to travel is very different than if you're traveling alone. If you're feeling really good that day and, and looking to get a workout, how you travel up the mountain might look really different than if you're really tired. You just think it's important for your health to get outside. So values are going to vary depending on what's going on around you, what's going on inside of you, and really distinctly what is important to you in that phase of life. 

If you are a working parent or somebody who's juggling multiple demanding roles, how you want to show up really is going to change based on the phase that your kids are at or where you're at in your work trajectory.  This could be based on how many demands are on you, how much you're sleeping at night, whether you have a partner who's supporting you, whether you're facing racism or misogyny. It's going to depend on all of that. But what's really helpful, and this gets to the core of your question, is when we clarify what is most important in our various roles in terms of how we want to show up. It is helpful to be clear on that because moment-to-moment, various emotions are going to come up, and emotions are there to drive reflexive action.

So when we're in danger and we get angry, we're much more likely to protect ourselves or those we love. And if we're clear on our values, then we can pause before responding to that anger and be more deliberate about allowing values to guide. 

And so again, coming back to the question of how is it that you clarify what your values are so that you can act on them moment-to-moment. There are lots and lots of different exercises that I use in the therapy room, but one of my favorites is just to kind of ask these reflective questions and they're often perspective-taking questions. 

So I'll give you a few examples. So one might be, consider a difficult patch of life in the past. What is it that you are most proud of having done or having stood for? And based on that, how would you want to handle it the next time? So that's a way to use your past experience to pull out what worked well, what was consistent with how you most want to show up, and to bring it forward. 

Another one is to use your kids to help you clarify what's important. So what are the main ways that you'd like your children to see or remember you? For a lot of parents that can be really helpful. For example, I don't want them to see me flying off the handle. I do want them to see me experiencing difficulty and kind of really persisting through or having some humor or having a cry with them and being able to move on. What are the ways that you want your kids to see you handling a tough moment? And when it comes to juggling multiple roles, you can think about, what are the ways that would make me most proud to have my kids remember me as a working parent? 

The other one that I really love is to travel forward, say 30 years, and imagine your older self looking back at your current self in this current patch of life or in this current role. And what are the ways that looking back on yourself in this moment that you showed up that would make you most proud? So these are different ways to pull out the qualities of action that are most consistent with how you want to show up moment-to-moment in a given role or in a given circumstance.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: That is so helpful. Yes, that makes a lot of sense. So we've talked a lot about changing your mindset about being a working parent, but you also mentioned in the book what you call intentional activities - activities to improve your happiness as a working parent. Can you give us some examples of some intentional activities you can do that might make our lives a little as working parents a little bit better?

Dr. Yael Schonbrun: The idea of intentional activities comes from the research from Sonja Lyubomirsky, who's a positive psychology researcher, and she looks at predictors of happiness, and she groups them into three different predictors. 

1. One is life circumstances, how much money you have and where you live and your partnership status.

2. The second is your genetics, and both of those count for a good amount of the predictive capacity for how happy you're going to be in general.

3. But the third category is intentional activities. And these actually count for a lot more than we might anticipate. 

By the way, life circumstances count for less than we might anticipate because we adapt. It's called hedonic adaptation to good things. So if you win the lottery, you get used to it much faster than you might think. 

So what counts as intentional activities in the positive psychology research are things like acts of kindness or gratitude or mindfulness or self-compassion or values clarification.

In the book, I don't talk so much about gratitudes, but I do talk about more generally working on our narratives, so the stories that we tell ourselves and the labels that we adopt for how we describe things and growth mindset is really consistent with those kinds of intentional activities.

There's also other kinds of active happiness fostering activities that you can do. For example, making sure that you have daily experiences of agency, so independent choice, competency, experiences of mastery or experiences of connection. And really focusing on using whatever role is most likely to make those kinds of experiences available to you to have those kinds of daily experiences.

Subtracting. So this is not necessarily out of Sonja Lyubomirsky’s lab, but I think it's an important one for super busy people - understanding that we have a tendency to add to overly full plates. In fact, when we're really busy is when we're less likely to take things off our plate, which is unfortunate because really busy people are exactly the people who need to subtract.

Being more deliberate about taking the things that are more trivial out of our daily plans and making sure that we make time to slow down so that we can savor the good things and take care of the things that are hard in ways that are effective. 

I think values clarification really is one of the intentional activities that's most important because it can provide a guide for happiness and for subtracting, for managing our stress response and all the things that help us to feel like we're living life in the ways that feel right to us. 

Dr. Cara Goodwin: I love that. I really personally need to work on my subtracting. When you said that, I was like, yes, that is exactly what I need to do.

So as a parent of three little kids, I have to ask you, does working parenthood change as children get older? Please. I’m begging you. Tell me it gets easier. That's the answer I want. How does it change as your children get older? 

Dr. Yael Schonbrun: So a hundred percent I think it gets easier.

I'm sure it depends for lots of people, but I have a memory. When I had a brand new baby in the doctor's office, some woman with an older child looked at me and said, enjoy these moments, it only gets harder. And I was like, so discouraging. I'm so sleep deprived and angry right now.

So what I will say is the physical is so intense when you have little kids because you're not sleeping and they can't walk, they can't change themselves. They need help toileting, feeding. It's exhausting. And most of us, this is just human. We don't do that well when we're completely depleted physically.

When we're not sleeping and not able to take care of ourselves. And in fact, humans are not wired to rear children alone because it is so demanding. We are wired to rear children in community, and that is just not how our modern world works. We do most of our parenting inside our homes in a very isolated way.

And so no wonder it is so hard, so painfully hard when our kids are young. So what I will say is that part gets so much easier. And then of course, you know, bigger kids have bigger problems and it's more complicated and you worry in different ways. And that's certainly been true for me. But for me as somebody who does not operate well on no sleep - I'm somebody who needs both sleep and like a little bit of time to myself, to think my thoughts. Parenting young kids was so beautiful and I loved it and I wouldn't have changed it for the world, but it is much, much easier. Like I just feel better in my skin on a day-to-day basis. 

Dr. Cara Goodwin: That is so helpful to hear. So to end, I would love to hear a personal example you have of a struggle you've had as a working parent and how you've worked through it based on your expertise in this area.

Dr. Yael Schonbrun: I think that one of my biggest challenges when I first started my life as a working parent was delegating child care to people outside of myself and my spouse. I had this idea that only families should take care of my children. It was real. It was something I struggled with and felt terribly guilty about. I was handing my infant off to a virtual stranger so that I could go to work.

And it was one of those things that I fought a lot about with my husband, because he didn't really get it, why I was so torn up about it. I had yearnings to live near family. We didn't, because it didn't make professional sense, but I really wanted us to uproot and be near family. So it was this very long-standing challenge for me.

And the way that I handled it was to turn to the research, which surprisingly says that it is good for kids to be cared for by people outside of the family, even non-kin, both because it gives them an opportunity to connect with other caregivers, which is really good for social skill building. For example, there's a study that looked at kids who were a little bit socially anxious and those that went to child care early versus those that didn't actually did better over time with the social anxiety.

You give your kids a chance to be exposed to this discomfort and learn the skills of connecting with other children and caregivers. It's also good for parents, especially parents like me who need their time alone to think, to have a reprieve from parenting. So it's one of those things where now I'm kind of glad because if I hadn’t been a working parent, I probably would have kept my kids with me all the time. And I imagine that that would've been not so great for my mental health and not so great for my kids who probably, because they're related to me, have some risk for anxiety and other mood fluctuations. So I actually think changing my frame, going to the research, and finding ways to appreciate what is available within the circumstances that I do have. Which is again, really a part of what the book advocates working parents do was quite helpful. 

Dr. Cara Goodwin: I totally relate to that. I really struggled giving my children, especially as infants, over to a child care provider and feeling guilt and terrible about that kind of separation. But I totally agree with you on the reading of the research that this is positive for our children. There are some parents that never want to separate from their children, and that's what works for them, and some parents who need a little bit of space, whether it's working or self-care or whatever it is. So just knowing that that's okay. You're not harming your child in any way. And in some ways you could be giving them some experiences they wouldn't have otherwise. 

Dr. Yael Schonbrun: A hundred percent. And I will say too, that even if you are a parent who loves to be around your kids all the time, that's so awesome and I still think that all parents need breaks and that we should encourage one another to not feel guilty about it. So even if you don't have to go to work outside of the house, ask for help and get a break once in a while because it's good for everybody and allows you to relish the time with your kids if you enjoy it.

But it is so normal and healthy and human to need a break from kids. They need a lot from us and, and there's something so wonderful that to be needed like that and so beautiful and connecting and life affirming, but the heart can only beat 24 hours a day because it gets rest between beats. We need to parent like that too. 

Dr. Cara Goodwin: I love that metaphor. Well, thank you so much. This has been so incredibly helpful for me personally, and I know it will be for my audience, so I cannot thank you enough. Can you tell us one more time where to find you?  

Dr. Yael Schonbrun: Sure. So you can find me on my podcast, which is Psychologists Off the Clock and you can get that wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find me at my writer's website, which is WorkParentThrive.com. And then I'm on social media, you can just find me by looking up Yael Schonbrun. 

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Well, thank you so much, Yael. I really appreciate you and your time and your expertise, and I know everybody else will as well. 

Dr. Yael Schonbrun: Thank you so much for having me. It was such an honor to speak with you.

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Welcome to the Parenting Translator newsletter! I am Dr. Cara Goodwin, a licensed psychologist with a PhD in child psychology and mother to three children (currently an almost-2-year-old, 4-year-old, and 6-year-old). I specialize in taking all of the research that is out there related to parenting and child development and turning it into information that is accurate, relevant, and useful for parents! I recently turned these efforts into a non-profit organization since I believe that all parents deserve access to unbiased and free information. This means that I am only here to help YOU as a parent so please send along any feedback, topic suggestions, or questions that you have! You can also find me on Instagram @parentingtranslator, on TikTok @parentingtranslator, and my website (www.parentingtranslator.com).

DISCLAIMER: The information and advice in this newsletter is for educational purposes only and is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical, mental health, legal, or other professions. Call your medical, mental health professional, or 911 for all emergencies. Dr. Cara Goodwin is not liable for any advice or information provided in this newsletter.