Researcher, therapist, and mediator Dr. Robert Emery is my guest on the show today. Dr. Emery is an internationally recognized expert on family relationships and children’s mental health, including parental conflict, child custody and divorce. His latest book is called Two Homes, One Childhood: A Parenting Plan to Last a Lifetime. In it he outlines a new way to share custody after a relationship ends.
As many of you know, this topic couldn’t be nearer and dearer to my heart. I have my own unique approach to co-parenting—I live next door to the father of my kids and his new wife and our kids go back and forth between our two homes in a very fluid way. Dr. Emery has himself been divorced and has been in this field of study for 35 years. He offers wonderful but realistic advice about co-parenting well, based on a Hierarchy of Children’s Needs in Divorce, his own take on the famous Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs.
We’re delighted to welcome Dr. Stuart Shanker to the show today. A world-renowned psychologist, Dr. Shanker is a professor at York University and an expert in child development. His new book Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break The Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life came out recently. His previous book, Calm, Alert and Learning, written for teachers, is one of the top-selling Canadian education books of all time. But in this book he turns his attention to parents with an aim to helping us learn how to recognize when our kids are under stress and teach them to deal with it effectively. The key? Encouraging our children to develop the ability to self-regulate. Yes, self-regulation has become a bit of a buzzword in recent years. Today we get to the heart of what it really means.
Our guest on the show today is Vanessa Vakharia, founder and Chief Inspiration Officer of a unique tutoring facility in Toronto called The Math Guru. She’s a teacher with a Bachelor of Commerce, a degree in Graphic Design and a Masters in Mathematics Education. Interestingly, though, there was a time when Vanessa believed she was just not “a math person.” In fact, her masters thesis was titled, Peace, Love and Pi: Imagining a World where Paris Hilton Loves Mathematics. Vanessa specializes in teen engagement in STEM (that’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics), with a specific focus on encouraging young women to embrace STEM as a part of their identities. Now, in general, girls are doing better in the education system than ever. Young women are out-graduating men from university, for instance, and we’re going to tackle that issue on an upcoming episode. However, we know that women are still woefully under-represented in STEM careers, which is particularly outrageous given how many of them attend university. Vanessa shares her insights into how to encourage girls to pursue these subjects, while also offering concrete advice on how parents can fight the impression that math is a dreaded subject for either boys or girls.
We’re thrilled to have child sexuality expert Amy Lang back on the show for this episode. Amy helps parents talk to their kids about sex, love and relationships. She has a great website called “The Birds and Bees and Kids.” The last time Amy was on to chat to us about how to answer that age-old question, “Where babies come from?”, the episode kinda went viral. It was shared a tonne of times on Facebook and had 10 times the normal downloads. And that’s because Amy just has a great, light-hearted approach to these topics that can make parents a little squirmy. So today she’s back today to help us figure out how to talk to our kids about puberty. Everything you might be find awkward or embarrassing about this—we tackle it here.
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