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We are told that training our baby to settle alone builds independence. That picking them up too quickly will spoil them.

That a baby who learns to self soothe early is a baby who is thriving.
Erica Komisar says we have this backwards.

In most of the world a baby is held against someone’s body almost all day. Carried on a mother’s front, then her back, rarely separated for long. And in those cultures, distress in babies stays low. In the west, babies cry more than anywhere else on earth.

Komisar explains that skin to skin contact is not comfort for comfort’s sake.
It is regulation. A baby’s nervous system is not yet capable of managing its own breath, its own heartbeat, its own stress hormones. They borrow that regulation from the body of an adult holding them. When that contact is removed too early and too often, in the name of building independence, a baby is left trying to regulate processes it is not developmentally able to manage alone.

Research confirms it. Infants who experience consistent physical contact and co-regulation in early life show significantly lower baseline cortisol levels and stronger long term stress regulation than infants raised with early separation practices. (Feldman, Mother Infant Skin to Skin Contact and Stress Regulation, 2017)

Independence is not built by training a baby to settle without you. It is built later, on the foundation of having had you.

Save this for every parent who has been told that training builds independence.

Credits:
Video: @modernwisdom @chriswillx
Speaker: @ericakomisar

#sleeptraining #childdevelopment #parentingtips #attachmentparenting #babywearing by @parentingilluminated

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4 months ago

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Most new mothers do not have the words for what they needed in those first six months. They just know they felt alone in it.

A new baby does not arrive equally for both parents. The mother is physically recovering from birth, hormonally wired to the baby, and operating on a level of vulnerability that most fathers have no framework for understanding.
And into that space steps the father.
Often well meaning.
Often lost.

Jordan Peterson sat down with Chris Bumstead who was about to become a father for the first time.

What he told him is something most men never hear before the baby arrives.

Your job is not to be a second parent in those first six months.
Your job is to take care of her while she takes care of the baby.
To watch.
To step in before she is overwhelmed.
To protect the conditions that allow that bond to form.

Research in attachment theory confirms that the quality of the mother infant bond in the first six months provides the foundational scaffold of security for the child’s entire emotional development. When that bond is protected it changes everything. When it is disrupted the consequences are long and real. (Bowlby J. Attachment and Loss. 1969. Ainsworth M. Patterns of Attachment. 1978.)

The father who understands this does not feel sidelined in those early months. He understands he is holding everything together so that the most important relationship of his child’s life can take root.

Share this with every new father and every mother who needed someone to say this out loud.

Credits:
Video: @jordan.b.peterson - Dr Jordan Peterson Esq.
Speaker: @cbum - Chris Bumstead

#attachement #consciousparenting #childdevelopment #newparents #parentingtips by @parentingilluminated

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5 months ago

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You are doing everything the court told you to do. And it is quietly breaking your child.

The 2-3-2 custody schedule feels fair.
Equal time. Equal love. Equal access.

But Erica Komisar, psychoanalyst and parenting expert, says what feels fair to adults is often destabilizing for children.

Because children do not experience time the way adults do. They experience it through consistency. Through knowing which pillow they are going to lay their head on tonight.

Research in developmental psychology shows that environmental stability is one of the most critical factors in a child’s emotional security, particularly during periods of family disruption. (Wallerstein, J. The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, 2000)

The children who grew up in 2-3-2 arrangements are adults now. And when they are asked what the hardest part of their childhood was, the answer is rarely the divorce itself.

It is the back and forth. The never feeling fully home anywhere.
Komisar’s solution is controversial. One primary residence. One consistent pillow. Parents come to the child. Not the other way around.

This is not about one parent winning. It is about the child having a home.

Save this and share it with every co-parent who is trying to get it right.

Credits:
Video: @chris.willx -Modern Wisdom Chris Williamson
Speaker: @ericakomisar

#coparenting #consciousparenting #childdevelopment #parentingtips #raisingkids by @parentingilluminated

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5 months ago

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Every mother has done it.
Dad gets on the floor.
Things get loud. Someone is going to get hurt.
You step in and tell him to calm it down.

It feels like the right call.

Jordan Peterson says it might be the most costly instinct a mother has.

Fathers are not just playing when they throw their kids in the air wrestle with them and push them to their limits. They are doing something that a child’s developing brain is desperately wired to receive. Something that cannot be replicated by any toy screen or structured activity.

Research in developmental psychology confirms that rough and tumble play between fathers and children builds emotional regulation stress tolerance physical confidence and the ability to read social cues in ways that no other form of play can replicate. (Paquette D. Theorising the Father Child Relationship. Human Development, 2004)

But here is what most parents never consider.

When a father pushes a child to the edge of their physical limits they are not just building resilience. They are teaching that child what discomfort feels like from the inside. What pain feels like from the inside. And unless a child knows that in a deeply embodied sense they cannot understand it in anyone else.

Rough play is not just how fathers bond with their children. It is how children learn to feel what other people feel.

Let dad play.

Share this with every mother who has ever told dad to take it down a notch.

Credits:
Video: Jordan B Peterson Esq.
Speaker: @jordan.b.peterson

#father #consciousparenting #childdevelopment #raisingkids by @parentingilluminated

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17 hours ago

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If you have ever lain awake replaying the moment you snapped, the promise you broke, or the day you simply weren’t there, you are not alone.

Most of us carry a quiet fear that every mistake is leaving a mark on our child. And some of them will.

Trevor Noah says this out loud about a mother who risked everything to raise him under apartheid. She was remarkable. She also wounded him. Both are true.

Right now, stories of adult children going “no contact” with their parents are everywhere online. A study led by sociologist Rin Reczek in the Journal of Marriage and Family estimated that 26% of adult children become estranged from their father, and 6% from their mother.

Psychologist Joshua Coleman, who has worked with estranged families for decades, says adult children rarely cut contact without years of distress and failed attempts to repair the relationship.

That word matters. Developmental psychologist Ed Tronick found that ordinary, loving parents were out of sync with their babies roughly 70% of the time. Coming back after those moments is what builds a child’s trust. Repair is what keeps the door open.

Your child does not need a perfect parent.
They need one who notices, returns and repairs, so that one day they can hold both truths about you, the way Trevor does about his mother.

Send this to a parent who needs to hear they don’t have to be perfect.

Credits:
Video: @doacpodcasts - Steven Bartlett
Speaker: Trevor Noah

#nocontact #ruptureandrepair #goodenoughparent #generationalhealing #trevornoah by @parentingilluminated

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19 hours ago

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Most of us have been in the room with our children and somewhere else entirely.
Replying to a message. Running through tomorrow’s to-do list. Scrolling while they play beside us.

It doesn’t feel like absence. We’re right there. But a child doesn’t measure presence by whether we’re in the room.
They measure it by whether we notice them, respond to them, and are there when they reach for us.

A 2025 study by Aleksandra Mikić and colleagues at the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin, published in Frontiers in Psychology, put this to the test. Mothers played with their babies, then answered text messages while staying right beside them.

While texting, mothers responded to around 75% of their babies’ signals, down from 96% during play, and they responded more slowly.

Their sensitivity dropped, and the babies showed less joy.

Same room. Same mother. A very different experience for the baby.

That is exactly what Erica Komisar is pointing to.
Quality time can’t be squeezed into the gaps, because children don’t experience love in neat blocks. They build their sense of safety from thousands of small moments where someone is truly there to meet them.

Nobody gets this right every moment. What matters is noticing when we’ve drifted, and coming back.

Send this to the parent who needs to hear that being there means more than being home.

Credits:
Video: @lilaroseofficial
Speaker: @ericakomisar

#secureattachment #presentparenting #phonefreeparenting #earlychildhooddevelopment #childmentalhealth by @parentingilluminated

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2 days ago

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The photos are always beautiful. The proud new parents, the tiny baby, the celebration.

What the camera never shows is the newborn who has just been taken from the only mother they know.

Celebrities are normalising surrogacy, and it is fast becoming just another way to start a family.

The conversation centres almost entirely on the adults: their longing, their journey, their joy. The newborn’s experience in those first hours is barely mentioned.

The research on those first hours is striking. In a study published in Science, Anthony DeCasper and William Fifer found that babies only days old would work to hear their own mother’s voice over another woman’s, a voice they had learned in the womb.

Heili Varendi and colleagues found that newborns cried less when they could smell their own amniotic fluid, and Luc Marlier and Benoist Schaal showed that newborns can pick out their own mother’s scent from another mother’s. A baby is not born a blank slate. They arrive already knowing one woman.

We tend to believe bonding begins at birth. The research shows the bond is already there. By the moment of birth, a baby knows the voice, the scent and the body of the woman who carried them, and they turn to her for comfort, safety and calm.

So before we celebrate the next surrogacy announcement, pause and think about what that moment means to the baby at the centre of it.

Share this so the baby’s side of the surrogacy story is finally heard.

Credits:
Video: @dadsavesamerica
Speaker: @katyfaustofficial

#surrogacy #newbornbaby #motherhood #childrensrights #motherandbaby by @parentingilluminated

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2 days ago

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If you end most days running on empty and quietly wondering why everyone else seems to cope better, it helps to know that most mothers throughout history never did this on their own.

There was always someone nearby.

A neighbour who kept an eye on the kids playing outside, a grandmother around the corner, a friend who would take your little one for an hour so you could breathe. Nobody called it support.

It was simply how families lived.

For most parents today, that network has thinned out or disappeared.

Families move for work, grandparents live hours away, and many of us barely know the people on our own street.

The work of raising a child hasn’t shrunk, but the number of hands sharing it has.

The research points the same way. A 2025 study of mothers by Tharner, Oosterman and colleagues, published in Parenting: Science and Practice, found that lower social support was linked to higher parental burnout, and that support from a wider social network appeared to matter most, even more than help from a partner. tandfonline

That matters, because so many exhausted parents assume the answer is more patience or trying harder.

Often what is missing is people: a couple of families you trust, a babysitting swap, a friend who takes the school run once a week.
It doesn’t take a whole village to make a real difference.

Share this with a mother who keeps telling everyone she’s fine.

Credits:
Video: Logos University
Speaker: @jordan.b.peterson

#itakesavillage #parentalburnout #momburnout #mentalload #motherhood by @parentingilluminated

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3 days ago

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Once children arrive, most couples quietly measure their marriage by what has faded.
Less time alone. Less touch. Fewer nights that feel like the early days. And underneath sits the worry that the love is running out.

Dr Arthur Brooks points to something harder to see. The couples who end up hating each other discover, often years in, that they never actually liked each other.

They shared a bed, a home and their secrets, and there was no friendship underneath to fall back on.

Research published in the Journal of Happiness Studies drew on surveys of more than 350,000 people in the UK. It found the well-being benefits of marriage were about twice as large for people whose spouse was also their best friend. (Grover S. and Helliwell J. How’s Life at Home?, 2019.)

That friendship is the part most of us neglect when life gets busy. The silly jokes. The real conversations once the kids are asleep. Choosing each other’s company because you want it, and not only because you share a calendar.

Your children are watching all of it.
The way you speak to each other in the kitchen is teaching them what love looks like, long before they choose a partner of their own.

Send this to the person you are raising your children with.
Credits:
Video: @johndelony
Speaker: @arthurcbrooks

#marriageadvice #healthyrelationships #marriedlife #relationshiptips #awareness by @parentingilluminated

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3 days ago

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When we look at a daycare, we ask about meals, nap times and fees.
Very few of us ask the question that matters most: ratio of caregivers to babies.

A baby can’t calm themselves down.

They need an adult to notice, pick them up and stay until they settle, every single time.
That is how a baby learns the world is safe.

One adult can only hold one baby at a time. With five babies, sometimes more, someone is always waiting.

Research points in the same direction. A 2024 study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), published in Early Education and Development, measured the stress hormone cortisol in toddlers at childcare and at home.

Children in groups with more than three children per carer had higher cortisol during their childcare day and lower levels at home.

The difference was small, but their bodies were telling the same story Erica Komisar describes, when each adult has more children to care for, the day is harder on every child.

Share this with a parent who is choosing childcare right now.

Credits:
Video: @lilaroseofficial
Speaker: @ericakomisar

#daycare #motherhood #newmom #attachmentparenting #childdevelopment by @parentingilluminated

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4 days ago

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Most of us said yes to Roblox for the same reasons. Every child in the class was on it, it looked like bright cartoon blocks, and we checked the settings once and moved on.

What we rarely picture is who else is in there. Our children are not playing in a closed room with their friends.

They are sharing a space with millions of strangers, and the people who most want access to children know exactly where to find them.

This year, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner put Roblox’s protections to the test. Its investigators found that adult strangers could still send connection requests to young children without any parental consent, and that children’s profiles, interests and friends lists were visible to anyone on the platform.

Roblox has since been legally required to close those gaps.

These were not settings parents forgot to switch on. They were how the platform worked.

That is what Chris McKenna means when he says no company on earth can police a universe that big.

The risk was never a setting you missed. It is the size of the place itself, and the fact that your child walks into it alone.

A careful child and a careful parent cannot watch every corner of a world that big. Nobody can.

Share this with a parent whose child is on Roblox tonight.

Credits:
Video: @protectyoungeyes
Speaker: Chris McKenna

#roblox #childonlinesafety #digitalparenting #onlinesafetyforkids #parentingtips by @parentingilluminated

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4 days ago

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This is not a political statement.
It is a data point that every parent needs to sit with.

The United States has more children growing up without both parents than any other country on earth. Not slightly more. More than three times the global average.

Jordan Peterson is not saying this to shame single parents. He is saying it because the data on what two parent households provide for children is unambiguous. Children raised with both parents present are less likely to live in poverty, less likely to struggle academically, less likely to experience emotional and behavioural difficulties.

That is not ideology. That is research.

And yet we are not having this conversation. We have been so careful not to make single parents feel judged that we have stopped talking about what children actually need.

Research confirms it. Children growing up in single parent households are nearly four times more likely to live in poverty and show significantly higher rates of academic struggle and behavioural difficulty than children raised by two biological parents. (McLanahan and Sandefur, Growing Up With a Single Parent, 1994)

This is not about blame. It is about awareness. It is about asking the harder question of what kind of society we are building for our children and whether we are honest enough to look at the answer.

Save this for every parent who needed someone to say it out loud.

Credits:
Video: @jordan.b.peterson
Speaker: Jordan B. Peterson Esq

#consciousparenting #childdevelopment #parentingtips #raisingkids #familyfirst by @parentingilluminated

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5 days ago