2.8 | Engaging the Challenge of Children’s School Avoidance (with Ahmed Tohamy & Samantha Pilcher)

After more than four decades each of walking alongside parents, children and families, Maggie Dent and Jenny Brown come together for an honest conversation about what time, experience and countless conversations have taught them. Their perspectives have been shaped not only by their professional work, but also by their own journeys as parents—and now as grandparents. While they've traveled some different professional paths, they've arrived at many of the same conclusions about what chil...

David and Dr Jenny Brown reflect on the previous episode with Michael DeRuyter, “Hope Beyond Repair” and what his experience of foster and adoptive parenting can teach us. How can we honour the impact of trauma and adversity for children experiencing multiple placements without allowing trauma to become the whole story? They explore what a Bowen family systems lens adds—shifting attention from fixing the child to understanding their range of functioning and the part parental anxiety and press...

Hope Beyond Repair: Parenting Foster and Adoptive Children Without the Pressure to Fix A conversation with a family systems leadership coach, pastor, and foster and adoptive parent Michael DeRuyter about parenting children who have joined our families through fostering and adoption—and why these lessons matter for every parent. Drawing on both professional expertise and lived experience, we discuss the powerful pull to "repair" our children through doing more—more services,...

Real Questions, Grounded Reflections (for Season 4 - Episode 6): 4.6 | The Parenting Paradox: Can Too Much Love Actually Get in the Way of Raising Resilient Children? “Just Tell Me What to Do!” Helping Parents Find Their Own Way Through Parenting Dilemmas In this Grounded Reflections episode of the Parent Hope Podcast, David Brown talks with Jenny about a familiar parenting plea: “Just tell me what to do!” The conversation follows the previous episode, in which Dr Kathleen...

Recorded live at the Washington, DC launch of The Parenting Paradox, this special episode features Dr Jenny Brown in conversation with author, therapist, and Bowen family systems faculty member Dr Kathleen Smith. Drawing on decades of clinical experience and family systems research, Jenny explores why modern parenting has become increasingly intensive, how anxiety fuels the "worry cycle," and why our greatest influence as parents comes not from doing more for our children, but from mana...