Teaching Kids to Manage Big Emotions: What Actually Helps

The instinct to protect children from failure is understandable. Watching a child struggle, lose, or fall short is genuinely uncomfortable. The problem is that children who are protected from failure consistently enough do not develop the capacity to recover from it — and the protection never lasts, because life does not cooperate. The research on…

Few parenting questions generate more confident opinions with less research behind them than allowance. Everyone has a system, a philosophy, and a conviction that it is correct. The actual research on how allowance affects children’s financial understanding, motivation, and behavior is messier and more nuanced than any single system’s proponents suggest. Here is what the…

Site: groverfamily.orgCategory: ParentingSchedule: 2026-06-12 08:00 MDT — Money is one of the topics parents most consistently avoid with their children, and then wonder why their adult children struggle with it. The research is fairly clear: kids who receive explicit financial education from parents — not just observation of financial behavior, but actual conversation and instruction…

Site: groverfamily.orgCategory: ParentingSchedule: 2026-06-12 14:00 MDT — Homework is one of the most contested topics in education research — and one where the popular narrative (“homework helps kids learn”) diverges significantly from what the data actually shows. The honest answer is more nuanced and more age-dependent than most parents or teachers acknowledge. What the Research…

Sleep is one of the highest-leverage health behaviors for children, and the bedtime routine is the primary parental mechanism for supporting it. The research on what makes routines effective is more specific than the general advice most parents receive — which amounts to “be consistent.” Consistency matters, but the content, timing, and structure of the…