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The New Family Podcast

The New Family Podcast is the show that explores what families really look like today and the issues that matter to us most. Twice a week we interview some of the most compelling people whose stories represent the many forms family can take today. And we chat with top parenting experts with great insights on the challenges of raising kids in these interesting times. This podcast comes from the creators of the popular website, thenewfamily.com, which explores and celebrates modern family life. Our series, the 1,000 Families Project, tells the first-person stories of people with families of every shape and size. In this show we interview some of the most interesting people who contribute to the #1000families series, as well as authors, family therapists, parent educators and other experts with practical advice to share that's relevant to families of every kind.
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Now displaying: March, 2016
Mar 31, 2016

My guest on this episode is best-selling author Rebecca Eanes, the founder of positive-parents.org and creator of the very popular Facebook community Positive Parenting: Toddlers and Beyond. Her book The Newbie's Guide to Positive Parenting has been a #1 best seller in its category on Amazon and her latest book, coming out June 7th, is called Positive Parenting: An Essential Guide. But Rebecca is quick to say that she’s a messenger not an expert. She writes from a parent-to-parent perspective and shares her own shift from more conventional parenting to positive parenting, which as she explains, honours our basic human needs for love and for belonging, and respects the mind, the body and the spirit of children. It seeks to build healthy positive relationships between parent and child, which becomes the model for healthy relationships life long, and gives parents influence that’s strengthened through a strong connection with our kids. Rebecca’s here to explain how we can work these principles into our own family lives.



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This episode is brought to you by Wise Bites, makers of healthy, allergy-safe snacks that are perfect for the whole family. To get free shipping on a case, go to wise-bites.com and use promo code THENEWFAMILY at checkout!

Mar 28, 2016

What if there was a better way to raise our children than the nuclear family? My guest on the podcast for this episode is long-time journalist and author Vicki Larson. She and her co-author Susan Gadoua were on the show way back on episode 12 “Are We Doing Marriage Wrong?” to discuss the findings of their book, “The New ‘I Do’: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels,” which is one of our most popular episodes so far. Vicki and I discuss something that’s a pet topic for me—the limitations of and problems with the nuclear family, and the fiction we’ve built up around it. Vicki has a book on the subject in development, and she explains how a form of shared parenting—sometimes called “alloparenting”—is deeply ingrained in how we evolved and learned to thrive as a species. In fact, though we still put it on a pedestal, the nuclear family is already no longer the norm. Fewer than half of children under the age of 18 are living in households with married heterosexual parents in their first marriages. She shares some thought provoking ideas about how we could really learn to live accordingly to the “it takes a village” philosophy.

Show Notes

Sponsor:

Wise Bites

This episode is brought to you by Wise Bites, makers of healthy, allergy-safe snacks that are perfect for the whole family. To get free shipping on a case, go to wise-bites.com and use promo code THENEWFAMILY at checkout!

Mar 24, 2016

Today’s show covers a really important topic—how to respond in a supportive manner when your child comes out to you. My guest, Dr. Jen O’Ryan, completed her doctorate in human behaviour with a focus on the experience of childhood and adolescence for sexual minorities. Jen provides coaching and guidance for parents to help them navigate their child’s coming out process, as well as questions about sexuality and gender. But our chat today doesn’t just apply to the parents whose kids have revealed they’re gay. Aunts, uncles, coaches, teachers, community leaders, even supportive family friends—as caring adults we can all benefit from knowing more about being inclusive and sensitive toward LGBTQ youth. She explains how even one caring, tolerant adult can be tremendously protective for kids through the coming-out process. And she provides great, tangible advice on how to provide a safe, helpful environment for LGBTQ kids.

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Show Notes

Sponsor:

Wise Bites

This episode is brought to you by Wise Bites, makers of healthy, allergy-safe snacks that are perfect for the whole family. To get free shipping on a case, go to wise-bites.com and use promo code THENEWFAMILY at checkout!

Mar 21, 2016

This episode tackles quite an interesting question. Should we be raising kids to be romantically competent? And what does that mean? My guests on the show today are Kaycee Lashman and Dr. Joanne Davila, authors of The Thinking Girl's Guide to the Right Guy: How Knowing Yourself Can Help You Navigate Dating, Hookups and Love. Their advice on knowing what makes a healthy relationship, on knowing what you need from a relationship really applies to anyone. And for parents bringing kids up in world where the dating landscape—or at least the vocabulary around dating—may have changed significantly from when we were young, it can be a little hard to know how to encourage our children to form healthy attachments. Joanne and Kaycee identify the skills that make up romantic competence and explain how to encourage our children to develop them.

Show Notes

Sponsor:

Wise Bites

This episode is brought to you by Wise Bites, makers of healthy, allergy-safe snacks that are perfect for the whole family. To get free shipping on a case, go to wise-bites.com and use promo code THENEWFAMILY at checkout!

Mar 17, 2016

One aspect of contemporary family life that has touched all of us is the prevalence of autism, and today we’re going to explore a fascinating new area of study that could potentially improve our understanding of autism. My guest today is journalist and author Kimberly Stephens, coauthor of a new book called The Prodigy’s Cousin: The Family Link Between Autism and Extraordinary Talent. Her coauthor, psychologist and researcher Joane Ruthsatz, who just happens to be Kimberly’s mother, has spent 18 years studying child prodigies. This research represents the largest research sample of these exceptional kids in the world. Incredibly, Dr. Ruthsatz’s research has found that many of these child prodigies have autistic family members. In fact, around half of child prodigies have a close relative that is autistic. Interestingly, they also have a lot of behavioural and cognitive things in common as well.

Show Notes

Sponsor:

Wise Bites

This episode is brought to you by Wise Bites, makers of healthy, allergy-safe snacks that are perfect for the whole family. To get free shipping on a case, go to wise-bites.com and use promo code THENEWFAMILY at checkout!

 

Mar 14, 2016

It seems that nearly every day there’s another news story about what kids are doing online and a lot of it is quite alarmist. If you believe these reports, all of our kids are either cyber bullying or sexting each other, possibly both, and that it will soon be the end of days. My guest Andrew Campbell is here to assure us that this isn’t the fact the case and to chat about how we can ensure we’re up to speed with how—and why—are kids are using social media. Andrew is an educator, speaker and writer who blogs about education and technology. His thoughts on education have been published in The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and The Hamilton Spectator among others, and he speaks on education at conferences throughout Canada and the United States. Andrew teaches Grade 5 in Brantford, Ontario, and he’s expert on the relationship between kids and technology, including social media.

Show Notes

Sponsor:

Wise Bites

This episode is brought to you by Wise Bites, makers of healthy, allergy-safe snacks that are perfect for the whole family. To get free shipping on a case, go to wise-bites.com and use promo code THENEWFAMILY at checkout!

Mar 10, 2016

I’m excited to welcome Dr. Timothy Pychyl back to the show today. Tim is a professor in the department of psychology at Carleton University. An expert on goal setting, he was on Episode 32 for a chat about New Year’s resolutions for families and on how to teach our kids to overcome procrastination. But while we were chatting it came up that he became a dad for the first time at age 50. Now a father of two, Tim jokingly refers to himself as a “dinosaur dad.” I just had to have him back on to chat about becoming a dad later in life and what that’s been like.

Show Notes

Sponsor:

Wise Bites

This episode is brought to you by Wise Bites, makers of healthy, allergy-safe snacks that are perfect for the whole family. To get free shipping on a case, go to wise-bites.com and use promo code THENEWFAMILY at checkout!

 

Mar 7, 2016

My guest on the show today, Rebecca Traister, has been called “the most brilliant voice on feminism in this country.” A writer at large for New York Magazine and a contributing editor at Elle, Rebecca has written about women in politics, media and entertainment for a host of top-notch publications including Salon, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post among others. Her latest book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, chronicles not only the recent dramatic decline in marriage rates and rising average age of marriage, but the important points in history that have helped women establish independent adulthood that is not defined by marriage.  She shares her observations about the changing face of marriage in our culture, and what this means for how we’re forming families today.

Show Notes

Sponsor:

Wise Bites

This episode is brought to you by Wise Bites, makers of healthy, allergy-safe snacks that are perfect for the whole family. To get free shipping on a case, go to wise-bites.com and use promo code THENEWFAMILY at checkout!

 

Mar 3, 2016

For this milestone episode—number 50!—I’m telling the story of my own unique family structure. My guest is the father of my kids, Derek DeCloet, who lives across the driveway from me  with his new wife. The kids alternate nights between our places in a very fluid ways, usually seeing us both of us at some point in any 24 hour period. It’s our unconventional lifestyle that inspired me to start thenewfamily.com and this podcast. Please join us in the first conversation we’ve had publicly about our next-door-neighbours co-parenting relationship.

Show Notes

Sponsor:

Wise Bites

This episode is brought to you by Wise Bites, makers of healthy, allergy-safe snacks that are perfect for the whole family. To get free shipping on a case, go to wise-bites.com and use promo code THENEWFAMILY at checkout!

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