Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw

How to Talk to Your Kids About Your Partner’s Mental Illness: A Modest Guide for the Tender, the Tired, and the Trying

Let’s not sugarcoat this: Parenting in 2025 is already hard.

Now try parenting while your partner is cycling through depression, or struggling with panic attacks, or sobbing quietly in the bathroom while your kid finishes their math homework at the kitchen table.

You love your children. You love your partner.

But when the weight of mental illness seeps into your daily life like a fog that doesn't lift, you start asking yourself impossible questions:


“Should I tell them?”
“What if I say the wrong thing?”
“Are they already scared?”
“Am I failing them?”

Here’s the good news, friend: You are not failing.

You’re just in the thick of a very human story—one in which truth, care, and gentle honesty can do a lot more good than silence ever could.

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Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw

When Love Turns Loud: How Parental Fights Make Mom Meaner, But Dad Just Shrugs

In a study that reads like the diary of a quietly unraveling suburban home, researchers peeked under the hood of 235 families and found something unsurprising—but still worth saying out loud: when Mom’s feeling unloved, she’s more likely to swat Junior’s behind.

And Dad? Well, he’s apparently still fine watching SportsCenter.

Published in Developmental Psychology (that’s the journal, not your Aunt Linda’s Facebook rant), this study suggests that when couples argue like middle schoolers with mortgages, it doesn't just ruin dinner—it subtly changes how mothers discipline their kids.

Not consciously, mind you. It’s sneakier than that.

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Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw

Why Some Parents Doubt Themselves: A Wound That Echoes Across Generations

Let’s say you’re a mother standing in the frozen food aisle while your child has an existential crisis over the shape of dinosaur nuggets.

You feel judged. Inadequate.

Not just by strangers, but by some deep internal critic who sounds suspiciously like your own mother.

If you’ve ever felt that your parenting manual is missing a chapter—on how to feellike a good parent—you're not alone. And now, we have science to thank for explaining why.

A new study out of Belgium (Delhalle & Blavier, 2024) gives us a tidy psychological nesting doll: inside some struggling parents are anxious partners; inside those anxious partners are wounded children.

And while this may not come as a shock to anyone who's lived through both a dysfunctional childhood and a chaotic PTA meeting, what’s novel here is how clearly the mechanism was tested and statistically verified.

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Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw

Passenger Parenting: When Dad Is Just Along for the Ride

Franz Kafka never had children.

But if he had, he might have written something eerily familiar to modern mothers scrolling TikTok: a scene in which the father is present but not quite involved, lovingly useless, narratively adjacent.

In today’s digital parenting memes, he’d be the guy holding the diaper bag like a defeated sherpa while the mother sprints behind a tantruming toddler.

This phenomenon has a name now: passenger parenting.

It’s not exactly negligence. It’s not even intentional.

It’s more like a kind of soft resignation—a sleepwalking through fatherhood. And while it’s getting laughs online, it’s costing families something real and measurable.

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Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw

How Anxiety and Anger Shape Italian Satisfaction With Life—Grazie... Immagino., Mom and Dad

By the time you’re 22, your frontal lobe is just barely open for business, your student debt has metastasized into a personality trait, and you’re beginning to suspect that your so-called adult life might be an elaborate payback plan for how your parents raised you.

Welcome to Italy, land of espresso, existential dread, and—if recent research is to be believed—overprotective parenting that can quietly fry your nervous system.

A recent study by Italian researchers Martina Smorti and colleagues (2024), published in the Journal of Psychology, took a magnifying glass to the Italian family dynamic and discovered something unnervingly elegant: the way your parents bonded with you—whether they coddled you like a houseplant or cared for you like a sentient being—echoes forward into your adult life through the neurotic relay race of anxiety and anger.

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Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw

Thinking in Speech (TiS): A Promising New Approach for Emotional Dysregulation in Autistic Children


A new study in Autism Research shows that a novel self-talk therapy called Thinking in Speech may reduce emotional distress in autistic children.

Let’s explore why strengthening inner speech might support emotional regulation—and why this approach could transform autism therapy as we know it.

What if the missing link in helping autistic children manage their emotions isn’t stricter rules or more behavioral charts—but language?

Not scripted language. Not “use your words” when the meltdown is already happening.

But the private kind of language: the inner monologue most neuro-normative folks take for granted.

Such as:

“This is hard, but I’ve got this.”
“I feel overwhelmed—I need help.”

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Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw

How Power Shapes Empathy: Authoritarian Parenting and the Developmental Cost to Children’s Minds

Let’s start with a quiet moment that happens in thousands of homes every day. A parent points to a character in a picture book and says, “He’s sad because he lost his toy.” Or: “She thinks her mom is mad at her.”

These little acts of storytelling are more than just teaching moments. They are micro-rehearsals for a cognitive capacity that underpins empathy, cooperation, and social justice.

That capacity is known as theory of mind—the ability to recognize that others have thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires that may differ from our own.

This isn’t about political slogans. It’s about what happens when rigid ideologies quietly constrict the early architecture of empathy.

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Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw

Soft Prepper Parenting: Raising Kids in Collapse Without Making Them Weird About It

The End of the World as Bedtime Routine

Your child asks, “Why is the sky orange again?”

You respond, like any good post-apocalyptic parent:

“Because Western Canada is on fire, sweetie. Let’s read Goodnight Moon.”

Welcome to Soft Prepper Parenting—the emerging meme, mindset, and possibly moral obligation for raising children in a world where the infrastructure is shaky, the vibes are feral, and yet… you still have to pack lunch.

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Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw

Breaking the Chain: How to Interrupt the Abuse-to-Addiction Pipeline in Teens

Why early intervention isn’t just a strategy—it’s a moral imperative

When a child is abused, their nervous system learns the world is dangerous.

When that same child becomes a teenager, they don’t magically unlearn this lesson. They learn to cope—often in the only ways they know how: smoking, drinking, scrolling, numbing.

In my last post, I discussed a recent study out of China which mapped a troubling pathway: childhood abuse → irritability and impulsivity → teen addiction.

It’s a heartbreaking chain reaction. But chains, by definition, can be broken.

The real question is: where?

This post is your roadmap—for parents, therapists, educators, and anyone who refuses to believe that addiction is inevitable.

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Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw

From Hurt to Habit: Mapping the Pathway from Childhood Abuse to Teen Addiction

Why impulsivity, irritability—and a lack of early protection—can steer young lives toward self-destruction.

A study out of Zhejiang Province, China, recently published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, offers a sobering look at how childhood abuse doesn’t just haunt the past—it actively shapes the emotional wiring that guides adolescent behavior.

Through a cascade of emotional dysregulation—specifically irritability and impulsivity—early maltreatment seems to lay the groundwork for addictive behaviors in teenagers, including smoking, drinking, and internet addiction.

In other words: abuse doesn’t just leave scars. It leaves blueprints

.

And while many studies have made the statistical link between childhood trauma and addiction, this one goes a step further.

It begins to map the psychological mechanism—a route from adversity to addiction paved with emotional volatility.

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Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw

How to Meet Your Partner’s Kids Without Screwing It Up: A Guide for the New Plus-One

You’ve fallen for someone amazing. There's real connection, maybe even a future.

But they come with kids—and now it’s time to meet them.

Your stomach’s in knots, your outfit feels wrong, and no one tells you how to handle it when a 9-year-old says, “You’re not my dad.”

Welcome to the emotional obstacle course formerly known as meeting the kids. It’s not about winning them over instantly.

It’s about showing up as an adult with humility, steadiness, and patience.

Here’s how to do it right, backed by research and wisdom from yours truly who’s often sat with a stepfamily in meltdown.

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Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw

Work, Love, and Empty Cradles: How Labor Culture Is Quietly Sabotaging Birth Rates in China — and Beyond

What If the Real Birth Control Was the 50-Hour Workweek?

China’s demographic nosedive is no longer a story of population control. It’s the slow collapse of future planning under fluorescent lights.

While Beijing scrambles to undo the legacy of the one-child policy with baby bonuses and ads that could double as recruitment campaigns, young people are staring down 60-hour workweeks and choosing… not to reproduce.

A new study in Biodemography and Social Biology offers a clear villain: time scarcity.

Researchers Zhao, Li, and Li used data from the 2020 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) — a massive national survey — and found that those who work more than 40 hours a week are significantly less likely to plan for children. And it’s not just the hours, but the type of work: weekends, night shifts, and 24/7 on-call expectations are particularly corrosive to fertility intentions.

And no, this isn’t just a China problem. This is the canary in the coal mine for every nation where hustle culture has become a second religion.

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