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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