Jessica's Parenting Journal

  A few years ago, a friend called me in tears. Her 16-year-old son had been struggling for months — pulling away from friends, sleeping most of the day, quitting the soccer team he’d played on since he was eight. She’d chalked it up to “teenage laziness.” By the time she realized something more serious was happening, he’d been in crisis for almost a year. “I just didn’t know what I was looking at,” she told me. “I kept thinking he’d snap out of it.”   The Numbers Are Hard to Ignore Nearly 1 in 3 teenagers will experience an anxiety disorder during their teen years. Roughly 1 in 5 will experience a major depressive episode before adulthood. Suicide is currently the second leading cause of death among young people aged 10–34, according to the CDC. These aren’t fringe statistics. They’re happening in ordinary homes, to kids who seem fine on the surface — kids who go to school, have friends, and smile at the dinner table. The challenge for parents is that mental health st...

  I still remember the exact moment I realized the child who used to narrate every detail of his day — the lunch drama, the funny thing that happened in PE, the kid he thought was kind of weird — had completely stopped talking to me. He was 14. I'd asked about his day, and he said “fine.” Then nothing. I stood in the kitchen thinking: what just happened to my kid?   You’re Not Imagining It If you’re reading this, you’re probably nodding. The one-word answers. The shrug. The way they’ll have a twenty-minute animated conversation with their friends and then give you absolute silence over dinner. It’s one of the most disorienting parts of parenting a teenager, and it catches most of us completely off guard. Here’s the first thing I want you to hear: this is normal. Not “normal” in the dismissive “stop worrying” sense, but normal in the sense that it’s happening in virtually every home with a teenager. Research consistently shows that teen-parent communication drops signif...

  Every parent has had that moment of doubt — staring at a child who’s been crying for the third day in a row, or watching a kid who used to love school suddenly refuse to get out of bed. Is this just a phase? Or is something really wrong? The Question I Kept Getting Wrong For years, I thought mental health was binary: either a child was fine, or they had a diagnosable condition. Either you called a therapist, or you chalked it up to “just being a kid.” It wasn’t until I started researching childhood mental wellness for my book Positive Minds that I realized how wrong that framing was. And how much damage it does. Mental health, for children just as for adults, exists on a spectrum. And understanding where your child falls on that spectrum — on any given week, in any given season — is one of the most valuable skills a parent can develop. What the Spectrum Actually Looks Like Picture a long horizontal line. On the far left: thriving. A child who is sleeping well, connecti...

  I have to be honest with you: in 2019, my answer would have been no.   I thought we were a close family. We had dinner together most nights, we talked about our days, and I genuinely knew my kids. But when the pandemic hit and our world collapsed into four walls, I discovered how many invisible supports had been holding us up — and how quickly they disappeared. School routines. Playdates. Sports practice. The neighbor kids. The school counselor my daughter saw twice a month without me fully realizing how much she needed it. Gone, almost overnight. What I didn't have — what most of us didn't have — was a mental health foundation built to survive that kind of disruption. And we are all still feeling the effects. A 2025 systematic review of 21 studies involving 87,486 children across 10 countries confirmed what many parents already sense: the long-term decline in children's psychological wellbeing didn't end when restrictions lifted. For many kids, it is still go...

  I stumbled across a photo that made me question everything about preschool safety. Four-year-olds in Germany cooking lunch over a fire they built themselves. With real knives. In the rain. And instead of lawsuits, these schools have years-long waiting lists. The Photo That Stopped Me Cold I’m scrolling through early childhood education research when I see something that stops me cold: small children huddled around a campfire in a forest, completely absorbed in whittling sticks with actual kitchen knives. My first thought: “Someone’s getting sued.” My second thought: “This is an actual educational approach?” That’s how I discovered Waldkindergarten – German forest kindergartens that would terrify American helicopter parents. The shocking part? Research shows these “dangerous” outdoor preschools produce kids who dramatically outperform traditional preschoolers academically. What Are German Forest Kindergartens? The Radical Concept Taking Europe by Storm Imagine drop...