Becoming a parent is commonly imagined to be a joyful and “natural” life event. The reality is often very different. In the early weeks and months of life with a first baby, parents must master new skills…
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Parenting – Analysis and Comment
In a piece in The Conversation, Bernadette Saunders described positive discipline. Parents who practise positive discipline or gentle parenting use neither rewards nor punishments to encourage their children…
Tony Abbott is spending this week in North East Arnhem Land, part of his long-held hope “to be not just the Prime Minister but the Prime Minister for Aboriginal Affairs”. We asked our experts: what stories…
It’s summer and Facebook news feeds are awash with idyllic, sun-drenched snapshots of family life. This kind of “sharenting” is bigger than ever but we rarely stop to think about whether it is appropriate…
Are you a helicopter parent, hovering around your offspring at all times? Perhaps “snowplow” or “free range” is more your style. Or maybe, you should give medieval parenting a shot. Much of the advice…
Learner drivers and parents are often thrown in the deep end when it comes to learning to drive and recording hours in the logbook. As part of a unique approach to improving young driver road safety, I…
For decades, child-care advice claimed that motherhood was a natural quality: the task of the parenting expert, it was claimed, was to help mothers to realise their “natural” mothering potential. In practice…
Australia has kicked off the Commonwealth Games with a bang, winning 17 medals in the first day of competition, including five gold medals. The women’s 4 x 100m freestyle relay had a particularly successful…
According to NatCen research, British fathers are among the worst in Europe at making time for their families. Spending huge amounts of time at work is seen as a sign of discipline and commitment, while…
Not long ago, an email went around some of the academic lists I subscribe to entitled “New parenting study released”. Heart sinking a little as I clicked the link to a New Yorker article, I expected to…
It’s often suggested that children with same-sex parents have poorer outcomes because they’re missing a parent of a particular sex. But research my colleagues and I published in the journal BMC Public…
Many professional authors are also parents, but recently, there have been a number of success stories of parents simply writing for their own children and becoming very successful. And this recent surge…
A recent report from the Sutton Trust is the latest in a line of recommendations for family policy to focus on promoting secure attachment between parents and their children. What puzzles me is why the…
How confident are you that the man you call dad is really your biological father? If you believe some of the most commonly-quoted figures, you could be forgiven for not being very confident at all. But…
Student achievement has been found to be most influenced by parents’ aspirations and expectations for their children’s development along with active involvement in their learning. Parents must be supporters…
It seems there is an emerging cross-party consensus on the need to change the criminal law on child neglect in this country. The most recent manifestation of this new consensus are new proposals to criminalise…
A newly proposed “Cinderella law” seeks to make parents’ “emotional abuse” of their children a criminal offence in England and Wales. Under it, parents who deliberately ignore children, subject them to…
The UK government and many other interested international bodies are duly concerned about the proliferation of internet pornography. The latest development under consideration is the use of licenses to…
Pop culture parenting styles like “Helicopter” and “Snowplow” have received a lot of recent media attention. Such coverage tends to overlook the findings of decades of parenting research. Much of this…
Overly positive, inflated praise such as “terrific!”, “you did incredibly well!”, “perfect!” is very common in western countries. At first glance this might not seem a bad thing; heaping praise can only…
Stop press! Actress Julia Roberts has been spotted in a Prius and is reportedly into reusable coffee cups and solar panels. According to media reports, it was the birth of her twins, rather than her Oscar-winning…
Your eye gets caught by the dried apples slices and pistachios but your child, sitting in the trolley, sees the Percy pig sweets. The queue is moving slowly, how well do you resist? A commentary by Deborah…
I recently asked my University of Melbourne undergraduates to answer the following hypothetical: your child is sick at school. Who would usually pick him or her up? Their response was as expected – a third…
If you grew up in the 1970s or before, you probably have fond memories of traipsing around the neighbourhood with your friends and siblings, going to the shops or the park, and walking to and from school…
Most parents want what’s best for their children. But when it comes to discipline, some misguidedly use physical force to punish or intimidate. Let’s be clear: hitting and unnecessarily hurting children…