Jessica Parenting Journal

  There was a stretch, maybe six months, where I got so focused on validating my son’s feelings during meltdowns that I stopped actually holding the limit underneath them. He’d melt down about bedtime, and I’d crouch down, acknowledge how hard it is to stop playing, ask what he was feeling, and then somehow bedtime would slide another twenty minutes because I was so busy honoring the emotion that I forgot to also just say: it’s time for bed now. It didn’t make things calmer. It made things worse, longer meltdowns, later bedtimes, and a kid who seemed genuinely unsure where the actual line was. Looking back, I think I’d absorbed the idea that setting a firm limit while a child was upset was somehow the wrong move, that the compassionate thing was to keep talking it through until he felt better on his own terms. What actually happened was the opposite of compassionate. He learned that upset feelings were a reliable way to move a limit, which meant he had every incentive to escalate...

  Last week I handed my son a tablet not because he needed it, not because there was a good reason, but because I was tired and it was the fastest way to get fifteen quiet minutes. I’m not telling you that to feel bad about it. I’m telling you because I think that exact moment, exhausted parent, easiest option, screen as default, is precisely what the "analog childhood" conversation happening everywhere right now is actually about. You’ve probably seen the phrase. Backyard play, board games, boredom treated as a feature rather than a problem, kids building forts instead of watching someone else build one on a screen. It’s easy to read all of this as another parenting trend with an aesthetic attached to it, and some of it certainly comes with one, the perfectly styled wooden toy shelves, the curated "no screens" playroom photos. But underneath the trend piece, there’s something worth taking seriously: a lot of families are quietly rethinking what "default...

My daughter potty trained in what felt, at the time, like a single weekend. One Friday she was in diapers, by Monday she wasn’t, and I remember feeling smug about it in a way I’m slightly embarrassed to admit now. I assumed I’d cracked some code. Then my son came along, hit the same age, and showed absolutely no interest whatsoever. We had false starts, a regression right after we moved his crib out for a sibling’s arrival, and a process that took months longer than his sister’s. Nothing about my parenting had changed between them. What changed was that I eventually stopped treating age as the deciding factor and started paying attention to what each kid was actually ready for. That shift is really the whole guide, so let’s start there. Why "Age" Is the Wrong Question It’s tempting to want a number. If someone could just tell you "18 months" or "2 years and 3 months," you could circle it on the calendar and plan around it, maybe even coordinate with ...

  I was sitting on the nursery floor at three in the morning with my daughter finally quiet against my shoulder, and I remember thinking, with total clarity, that I had no idea what I was doing. I typed the exact phrase into my phone that you probably typed to find this post: how to get newborn to sleep through the night. The search results were a mess of contradictions. One site swore by a strict schedule. Another insisted schedules would backfire. A third just told me to be patient, which, at three in the morning, was not the answer I wanted. Years and one more baby later, I can tell you what actually helped, and just as importantly, what "sleeping through the night" really means at each stage. Spoiler: the bar is much lower than the phrase suggests, and knowing that alone might let you breathe a little easier tonight. I also want to say, before we get into the steps, that none of this is a guarantee. Every baby’s temperament and biology are different, and the parent tw...