Toughlove with Lisa Stiepock
Dr. Dan welcomes author/editor/expert Lisa Stiepock of ToughLove to the Parent Footprint podcast. Among other achievements Lisa Stiepock was the Editor of Disney’s award winning parenting magazine Wondertime and she is currently the editor of UCONN magazine.
Dr. Dan and Lisa discuss the new parenting anthology (Dan is a contributor) toughLOVE: Raising Confident, Kind, Resilient Kids (published by Simon & Schuster) and the companion online platform. Lisa’s vision as editor was to bring together amazing parenting experts in an advice book and online for tackling the many different parenting challenges.
In addition to a book ToughLove is also a thriving unique online community. Lisa explains that the book and community provide balanced, practical advice for parents from child psychology experts on how to handle almost everything — from picky eating to media consumption to the homework wars. Questions such as:
How do we set limits on what our children are exposed to without sheltering them too much? How do we raise them to be resilient, empathetic, upstanding adults?
How do we get them to put down their smartphones and have a conversation with us?
How do we spend time with our teenagers when it appears that they don’t want to be with us?
Dr. Dan and Lisa dive into several chapters in detail and discuss how the challenges of parenting evolve as the world becomes more complex. The book offers advice from professors at Ivy League medical schools, New York Times bestselling authors, and top parenting coaches who have appeared on the Today show, Good Morning America, The Oprah Winfrey Show, CBS Evening News, 20/20, CNN World News Tonight, and NPR. They address many issues, from the timeless (picky eating, homework battles, how to have The Talk) to the timely (social media safety, feelings of entitlement, ways to balance schedules). Their breadth of clinical expertise and years of coaching real families will help parents build a commonsense framework for approaching all kinds of dilemmas in a way that reflects their personal values and preferred parenting styles.
Lisa distills all of her own incredible experience and work and gives us some parenting advice that will work for every age – listen. She’s takes this one-word concept with her every day of her own parenting journey and Dr. Dan explains why.
Finally, the show ends with Lisa’s Parent Footprint moment – which is actually made up of many moments. As a Mom her favorite (and recent) moment was with her teen daughter participating in a local Women’s March movement and it represented the culmination of Lisa’s parenting by modeling the importance of giving back, taking a stand, and the importance of being part of social causes and the political community. And perhaps most of all Lisa reflects on how she taught her daughter about the importance of family.