Beautifully Complex
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Latest episodes
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377: Parenting a Gamer, with Andrew Fishman LCSW
October 1, 2026 · 27 minMy own kid has told me for years that talking to people online is just easier than talking to them in person. I used to wonder if that was a red flag. Andrew Fishman helped me understand that it actually might be the opposite. Andrew is a…
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376: The Problems with Punishment, with Bryan Post
September 24, 2026 · 31 minPunishment feels like it's working. Compliance shows up fast, and for a minute it looks like the lesson landed. But according to child behavior expert Bryan Post, that quick compliance is often the opposite of learning, it's the brain…
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375: Co-Regulation Ideas for Real Life, with Penny Williams
September 17, 2026 · 29 minA grilled cheese sandwich turned into one of the clearest parenting lessons I've had in a long time. I was coaching a mom this week whose tween was trying to make her own grilled cheese, and it was a struggle. The butter wasn't spreading…
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374: Teaching the Body to Feel Safe, with Holly Bridges
September 10, 2026 · 36 minYour kid's nervous system is not a machine you can just tell to calm down. It is more like an octopus: sentient, sensitive, and completely uninterested in being managed. That is the metaphor body-based nervous system expert Holly Bridges…
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373: Overcoming The Wall of Awful, with Brendan Mahan, M.Ed.
September 3, 2026 · 32 minYour child isn't avoiding that task because they're lazy or defiant. They're standing in front of an invisible wall made of every past failure and hard feeling stacked on top of each other, and getting past it takes real emotional work…
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372: The Neurodivergent Learner, Emily King, Ph.D.
August 27, 2026 · 31 minAcademic learning is the cherry on top. Everything else has to be in place first before a child can even access the parts of their brain that do the reading, writing, and math — rested, safe, connected, not hungry, not overwhelmed. That's…
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371: How Honesty (Not Reassurance) Is What Gets Your Kid Through Middle School, with Dr. Kim Pinckney
August 20, 2026 · 32 minOne day my son was eye level with me. The next, he wasn't. His sense of who his friends actually were was now off. That's the thing about middle school and puberty: it feels sudden, but the buildup has been happening for a while, and if…
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370: When Silence is Louder than Sound, with Luke Williams
August 13, 2026 · 20 minHeavy metal calms my son down. That sentence still doesn't feel intuitive to me, even after nearly two decades of parenting a neurodivergent kid, but it's exactly what my kid shared with me several years ago. In this episode, my son Luke…