Jessica's Parenting Journal

  I wasn't snooping. I was charging her phone. The kitchen was quiet — that particular kind of Sunday-morning quiet where the house hasn't decided yet whether it's going to be a slow day or a busy one. Her phone was on the counter, plugged into the wrong cable. I went to swap it. The screen lit up. The text was to her dad. It wasn't a crisis. It was something small — something funny that had happened at school on Friday, told in the loose, half-typo way she texts people she's comfortable with. The kind of thing I would have wanted to hear over breakfast. I felt something I didn't expect. And then, instead of letting that feeling sit on the counter with the phone, I went looking for what the research actually says about how kids choose which parent to confide in — and when, and why. What I found wasn't the story I expected. The earliest years: when one parent becomes the default In the first years of a child's life, one parent typically beco...

  My daughter handed me a drawing when she was six. A house, a tree, a sun, four stick figures — completely standard stuff. Except one of the figures had no arms. I stared at it for a solid minute, wondering if I was supposed to know what that meant. Turns out, psychologists have been wondering the same thing — and studying it — for over seventy years.   Children draw before they can write, before they can articulate complex feelings, and long before they understand that their art might be communicating something beyond the image itself. What they put on paper — how they put it there, where, how large, how dark — has fascinated developmental psychologists for decades. The science is real. It's also more nuanced than any internet checklist will tell you.   The Test That Started It All In 1948, American psychologist John Buck published the House-Tree-Person (HTP) test — a structured assessment that asked people to draw exactly those three things, then asked them q...

When I was pregnant with my first, I received a lot of gifts. A monogrammed blanket. A tiny pair of shoes she wouldn't fit for months. A sound machine I still use. What I didn't receive was a cardboard box. Which is a shame, really. Because in Finland, that cardboard box might be the most meaningful gift a baby ever gets.   Here's the thing that stopped me mid-scroll when I first read about it: Finland has been giving every single newborn the same cardboard box since 1938. Not a symbolic gesture. Not initially a program for everyone — it started for low-income families — but by 1949 it had become universal: every baby, regardless of circumstance. The child of a surgeon and the child of a janitor arrive home in the same box. And that box — humble, practical, slightly absurd if you describe it out loud — helped transform Finland from one of Europe's most dangerous places to be born into one of the safest.   It Started With a Crisis In the 1930s, Finland had one ...

  I finished watching Adolescence on a Tuesday evening and couldn't sleep. Not because it was scary — though it's deeply unsettling — but because of one line the father says near the end. He's a good man. He was paying attention. And he still didn't see it.   If you haven't watched the Netflix limited series yet, here's the premise: a 13-year-old boy from a normal English family is arrested for the murder of his female classmate. The show isn't really about the crime. It's about the question underneath it — how does a child from a loving home end up there? And why didn't anyone see the signs? The show won eight Emmy Awards and became one of Netflix's most-watched series ever, reaching 96.7 million views in its first three weeks across 93 countries. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer watched it with his teenage children and called it essential viewing. British secondary schools were given free access to stream it. Whatever else you think about i...

  I was having my morning coffee when the notification came through: Australia had just banned social media for everyone under 16. World first. Effective immediately. I put down my cup and read it twice.   Whatever you think about government intervention in parenting, this is the biggest children's digital policy story in history — and it didn't stop at Australia's border. Within weeks, Denmark, France, Spain, the UK, Malaysia, Portugal, and several others announced they were developing similar legislation. The global conversation about what social media is doing to our children has shifted permanently. As parents, we need to understand what that means.   Quick Answer: What Is Australia's Social Media Ban? Australia's ban came into force on 10 December 2025. It prohibits children under 16 from holding accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Snapchat, YouTube, X, Reddit, Twitch, and Kick. Platforms face fines of up to AU$49.5 mill...