I Hate You. What's For Dinner?

Survival brain is a universal feature of parenting. When our inner cave person is activated, fear dominates, as we worry about our kid’s ability to survive a dangerous world. When survival brain comes online, everything is an emergency, our ability to think rationally is short-circuited, and molehills become mountains. As our brains quickly spiral, we imagine that the kid who isn’t doing his homework tonight will be doomed to a lifetime of failure and destitution. 

While the threat-mitigation behavior coded in our DNA helps us protect our offspring from the most dire threa...

Duration: 00:52:22

If you came into our therapy rooms, we definitely would be asking you about your family of origin. It’s where it all starts.

As psychologists who work with families and who are currently raising kids, we’re obsessed with how childhood experiences impact caregiving, and how parenting transforms us. Where did our parents come from? How were they raised? How did they bring us up? And how do we parent our kids as a consequence of our family history? These are the questions that hold the key to what we do well and wher...

Duration: 00:58:26

Your kid slams his bedroom door in your face, and five minutes later, he's giving you puppy eyes asking for a snack. Why is he like that?

On I Hate You. What's For Dinner?, we explore whether childhood explains everything.

We're Gillian Boudreau and Rob Galligan—two clinical psychologists in private practice who met in our psych PhD program a couple decades ago. Since then, we've been mulling over what hurts and what heals in people. As psychologists who work with kids and families, we're constantly mining childhoods past for memories and clues.

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Duration: 00:02:05