I’ve heard that phrase no less than 1,000 times as a parent.

Sometimes it’s when I’m trying to help one of my kids get dressed. Sometimes it’s bedtime. Most often it’s after they’ve fallen down and gotten hurt, and I’m literally standing right there ready to comfort them.

But nope.

They only want Mom.

When I talk about this online I often get some version of “Well, no surprise here. Mom’s are basically ALWAYS the default parent.”

But that’s not true in my case.

On pure hours alone I probably do more than 50% of the hands-on parenting in our household...

Not to mention, I’m also a parenting educator, I wrote a best-selling book on parenting, and a doctoral researcher in developmental psychology. I have literally spent YEARS studying how children’s brains develop and teaching parents how to build stronger relationships with their kids.

But do you think my kids care about my resume? Do you think they carefully considered my qualifications before deciding to put me in second place?

I mean, you would this that if ANYONE could figure out how to become their child’s preferred parent, it would be me.

Apparently not.

And while I’d love to tell you that all my education and understanding the developmental psychology behind this phenomenon makes it easy for me to shrug off, that wouldn’t be entirely true.

Being rejected by your own child hurts. Even when you know, intellectually, that they’re not really rejecting you…

But there’s also another side to this that we don’t talk about enough. While the non-preferred parent is often feeling rejected, the preferred parent is usually EXHAUSTED.

They’re the only one who can do bedtime, or help with a scraped knee, or sit next to the child at dinner. The non-preferred parent might be desperate to help, but even a whiff of that will send some kids into hysterics.

So one parent feels rejected and the other feels totally overwhelmed… and neither feel like they can do anything about it.

But actually they can.

What if I told you that your child’s parental preference isn’t necessarily evidence that anything has gone wrong? In fact, there’s good reason to believe that these preferences are a normal and potentially adaptive part of human development and research gives us ways we can help balance this out.

First let’s talk about why kids default to parent preference.

Attachment hierarchy is a feature, not a failure

There’s a concept in Evolutionary developmental psychology called an attachment hierarchy, and understanding it has completely changed how I think about parental preference.

Attachment theory proposes that children can develop meaningful attachment relationships with multiple caregivers but tend to organize those relationships hierarchically, particularly when they’re distressed.

In other words, when children are frightened, hurt, or overwhelmed, they often have a specific person they prefer to seek out for comfort and protection.

And from an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense.

Imagine you’re a three-year-old living fifty thousand years ago. You’re playing outside the cave (or more likely the camp) when you suddenly, something large moves in the bushes.

Before deciding where to run, you stop and carefully evaluate every adult around you. Who is closest? Who is strongest? Who has the most experience protecting small children from predators? Perhaps you could compile a quick list of pros and cons before making your….. Crunch… you took too long. Game Over. Now you’re lunch.

Alternatively, you immediately run toward the person your subconscious has programmed itself to rely on for protection before your conscious mind even perceives the threat.

And, morbid as it sounds, that’s what we call “Natural Selection.”

When your safety might depend on getting to a trusted caregiver quickly, having a preferred person to turn to could be an incredibly useful feature, not a failure.

In a 2013 study published in Infant Behavior and Development, researchers looked at which parent two-year-olds preferred when they were upset.

And what they found was fascinating.

When kids were happy and content, they didn’t show much preference for one parent over the other. But when they were upset, they tended to seek out the parent who did most of their caregiving.

And here’s the really interesting part: That preference DID NOT depend on how securely attached they were to either parent.

They could be JUST as securely attached to the non-preferred parent

In other words, a child could have a perfectly secure, healthy attachment to one parent and STILL scream for the other when they got hurt. It was just the parent they were most conditioned to rely on.

I think that’s an incredibly important distinction for parents to understand.

Just because your child prefers the other parent doesn’t mean they love you less, trust you less, or even feel less safe with you.

How we accidentally make the preference worse

Imagine Mom is trying to put her three-year-old to bed but the kid is dead set that they want Dad.

Mom explains that Dad is busy. The child cries. Mom tries to read a book, and the child cries harder. Eventually, after 20 minutes of escalating frustration, Dad comes upstairs.

He takes over bedtime, the child settles down, and everybody breathes a collective sigh of relief. Problem solved… for tonight.

Except, what happens tomorrow night?

Well, assuming nothing changes, probably the exact same thing.

Every time Mom attempts bedtime, the child protests, Dad eventually takes over, and the child never gets much opportunity to experience Mom as the person who helps them through the bedtime routine.

Meanwhile, Mom gets less practice doing bedtime, Dad becomes increasingly indispensable, and the preference potentially grows stronger.

In family systems theory, we might understand this as a self-reinforcing pattern.

So what do we do about it instead?

Here’s four things research and theory tell us:

1. Stop trying to convince your child to choose you.

When you’re the non-preferred parent, it’s incredibly tempting to try to persuade or even guilt your child that you’re just as good as the parent they’re asking for.

“Come on, buddy! Daddy can do bedtime too!”

“Don’t you want to read with me?”

“What if we read your FAVORITE book?”

And when that doesn’t work, maybe you start offering increasingly ridiculous incentives or even threats until what began as a simple bedtime routine has turned into a negotiation in which you’re either offering two extra books, a pillow fort, and possibly a trip to Disney World or telling them that if they don’t like it, “NO READING; NO SONGS; STRAIGHT TO BED!!”

Here’s the problem: You’ve made your child’s preference the subject of a negotiation.

And they have already made their side of that abundantly clear.

Instead, we acknowledge their preference without treating it as something you need to change.

“I know you really wanted Mom tonight. It’s disappointing when things don’t go the way we want. Tonight I’m doing bedtime, and I’m right here with you.”

That’s it.

You don’t need to explain why you’re equally qualified to tuck them in. You don’t need to convince them that they should enjoy being with you. And you DEFINITELY don’t need to make them feel guilty for wanting the other parent.

Remember, their preference is not a rejection of you.

It’s just brains doing brain things.

They can want Mom. They can even be disappointed that they didn’t get Mom.

And you can still be the person who lovingly puts them to bed.

2. The preferred parent has to stop being the rescue squad.

This is where things tend to go off the rails for a lot of families…

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You see, they had to be big because these sticks are pretend monster slaying sticks. And as any kid knows, you can’t slay a monster with some pathetic little twig.

You need a big, hulking, heavy, beast of a stick; preferably sharpened on one end to turn the pretend monsters into a imaginary monster shish kabob.

The problem is, a good imaginary monster slaying stick can easily become a very real sibling hurting stick whether the wielder of said stick intends it or not.

And, as you might imagine, this is exactly what happened…

Despite repeated warnings about swinging sticks near other people, one enthusiastic swing eventually connected with a sibling instead of the imaginary monster it was intended for.

Suddenly, the game was over. One kid was crying, another was upset, a third staring in shocked silence, and I was left dealing with a situation I had explicitly warned them about.

And here’s the thing that made it so frustrating.

They knew better.

They knew they weren’t supposed to swing sticks around other people. We’d talked about it. I’d explained why it was dangerous. They understood that someone could get hurt.

And yet, someone got hurt anyway.

I think this is one of the most frustrating experiences we have as parents. It’s one thing when our kids do something wrong because they genuinely don’t know any better. We can explain the rule, help them understand why it exists, and move on.

But when they do something we’ve explicitly told them not to do, particularly when someone ends up getting hurt, it feels very different.

It feels like defiance. Disrespect. A refusal to listen and obey.

And when we interpret behavior that way, our response tends to change. We get louder. We repeat ourselves. We start threatening consequences, usually with increasing intensity, as though the problem is that our children somehow missed the first seventeen explanations.

It took every ounce of my self-control to not start my response to the accident with, “See this is why….”

But I think this response misunderstands something fundamental about how children’s brains work.

We assume that because our children know what they’re supposed to do, they’re capable of doing it.

And those are actually two very different things.

Think about the last time you lost your temper. You probably knew that raising your voice wasn’t going to help. You knew that taking your frustration out on someone else wasn’t going to improve the situation.

And yet, sometimes, you did it anyway.

Not because you didn’t know better, but because knowing better and doing better require different cognitive abilities.

Developmental psychologists call these abilities executive functions. They include the capacity to inhibit impulses, regulate attention, and make choices that serve our longer-term goals.

And here’s the thing I’ve had to learn:

A child can understand a rule, agree with a rule, and still struggle to follow that rule in a tough moment.

And this is precisely why our instinctive response actually makes things worse.

What NOT to do…

When we say, “See! This is why I told you not to swing that stick!” we’re not giving our child any new information. The crying sibling has already made the consequences pretty clear.

What we are doing is shifting their attention away from the person they hurt and toward US. Suddenly, instead of thinking about whether their sibling is okay or how they might make things right, they’re thinking about how angry Dad is, how much trouble they’re in, and what they can do to make the punishment stop.

And the more shame and emotional intensity we pile onto the situation, the harder we make it for our kids to do the very thing we want them to do: slow down, think clearly, and take responsibility for their actions.

We end up demanding more self-control from our children while creating conditions that make self-control even harder.

Worse, we risk teaching our kids that the most important thing about making a mistake is avoiding the consequences, rather than understanding the harm and learning how to repair.

The stick probably still needs to go away. The hurt sibling still needs attention. An apology of some sort is probably in order. None of that changes.

But making our kids feel worse about what happened isn’t the same thing as helping them do better next time.

So what does a response that actually teaches those skills look like?

What to do instead…

In a 2013 review of executive function research, one of my favorite developmental psychologists, Adele Diamond, explained that inhibitory control, our ability to stop ourselves from acting on an impulse, is one of the foundational skills of self-regulation.

And while these skills develop throughout childhood, they’re particularly immature in young children.

So what does this actually mean for how we respond when our children do something they know they’re not supposed to do?

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What starts out as a fun quickly becomes another thing for parents to control and manage… and that can bring out the worse in us. But it doesn’t have to!

When our kids are little, we worry about how much candy our kids eat, whether they’ll get too scared, and, as I wrote about last week) the social anxiety around whether they’ll remember to say thank you.

Meanwhile, we’re overlooking something pretty remarkable.

Halloween is one of the few remaining childhood traditions that combines imaginative play, independence, manageable fear, generosity, and community participation into a single evening.

And developmental research suggests, as parents, we should be taking advantage of that.

Last week I wrote: “As a “Parenting Expert” These Are the 5 Things I’d Never Do With My Own Kids on Halloween”

This week, here are seven things research says every parent should make room for this Halloween.

1. Let your child choose their own costume (even if you hate it).

My wife and I have four kids and we spend a lot of time on Instagram so naturally, that means the fantasy of a coordinated family Halloween costume is significantly more appealing than the reality of negotiating one.

But actually there’s a developmental reason to let your child pick their own costume.

Psychologists who study motivation have consistently found that children benefit from opportunities to exercise autonomy. When kids get to make meaningful decisions, they develop a greater sense of ownership over their experiences.

A Halloween costume is a wonderfully low-stakes opportunity to practice that.

Your child wants to be a dinosaur wearing a princess dress? Great. A firefighter with a Spider-Man mask? Fine… Or even a home-made skibidi toilet…

There will be plenty of opportunities in your child’s life when their choices are constrained by expectations, responsibilities, and circumstances beyond their control.

Halloween shouldn’t be one of them.

2. Let them get a little scared.

I don’t mean forcing your terrified four-year-old into a haunted house or making your ten year old watch Paranormal Activity... I mean allowing children to experience fear in circumstances where they have some control over what happens next.

Developmental researchers who study adventurous risky play have identified that manageable encounters with frightening situations help children develop confidence in their ability to cope with fear.

Think about a child approaching a house with a motion-activated skeleton.

They stop. They hesitate. They squeeze your hand.

Your instinct might be to immediately reassure them that there’s nothing to be afraid of, or to steer them toward a less frightening house.

But the best move is to say nothing at all… Just wait.. DO NOTHING.

Let them decide whether to approach. Let them take a step forward and then retreat. Let them scream and then laugh nervously when the spider suddenly JUMPS.

The goal on Halloween isn’t to convince children that nothing is scary. It’s to give them opportunities to discover that they can sometimes feel scared and still choose what to do next.

But most of Halloween’s most interesting developmental opportunities have less to do with the costume and scary decorations and more to do with what happens when your child actually reaches the neighbors front door…

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Most parents spend the entire year telling their kids not to take candy from strangers, and then the last night in October we dress them up as fictional characters and send them door to door asking strangers for candy.

We tell them not to eat too much sugar, then hand them a pillowcase and encourage them to collect enough Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to survive a nuclear winter.

It’s ridiculous. And that’s why I’ve ALWAYS loved it.

Even more now, as a dad of four, Halloween is one of my favorite nights of the year.

But as someone who spends an unreasonable amount of time studying child development, I also think it’s one of the most interesting opportunities we have to help our kids learn.

Halloween puts children into situations they don’t encounter very often, Situations EXCELLENT for their development.

They have to navigate unfamiliar adults, manage excitement, deal with disappointment, make decisions, and figure out how to handle having a small fortune in chocolate suddenly placed in their possession.

Unfortunately, some of our most well-intentioned parenting instincts can get in the way of that learning.

So here are five things I try to avoid doing with my own kids on Halloween.

1. I would never force my child to say “trick or treat” or “thank you.”

I can already hear the objections…

“Jon, are you seriously saying we shouldn’t teach our kids manners?”

Of course we should teach our kids to be respectful. I’m raising four children who I am working hard to help grow up to be thoughtful, considerate, respectful adults.

But teaching someone to be grateful and forcing them to perform gratitude are two very different things.

When a shy four-year-old freezes in front of a stranger and refuses to speak, demanding that they say “thank you” doesn’t teach gratitude. It just teaches them that an adult’s expectations matter more than their own discomfort.

Instead, I model it.

“Thank you so much! Happy Halloween!”

Chances are, by the third house, they will be habitually chorusing along with you. Kids love a good trope/routine; especially if they are joining in rather than out there standing in the porch light (that feels like a spotlight) all alone.

So in summary of #1: Politeness, while being an important social skill, is caught not taught. Children develop social confidence through positive experiences, not simply by being required to perform on command.

2. I would never force my child to approach a house that scares them.

There used to be a Bernstein Bears book about this one that made a generation of parents feel like this is a good idea…

If your five-year-old is standing frozen at the end of a sidewalk, staring at a twelve-foot skeleton surrounded by artificial fog and motion-activated zombie clowns covered in fake blood with a 25 foot grim reaper hovering ominously above the door… in other words my neighbors.

DON’T FORCE THEM TO GET CLOSER!
Just like numbers 4 and 5 on this list, sometimes good ideas can backfire and do real harm.

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Australia has become the most recent hotbed of discussion. Beginning December 10, 2025, age-restricted social-media platforms operating in Australia were required to take reasonable steps to prevent children younger than 16 from creating or maintaining accounts. Platforms identified by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner include…

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It happened the day before my oldest’s 10th birthday. I was cleaning out the upstairs porch, a catch-all for everything coming out of a bedroom that doesn’t have a home, and in the corner of the room was a gray XL inflated yoga ball.

Without really thinking about it,…

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I’ve received a lot of questions about “restorative parenting,” so I decided to dedicate an article to what I believe is the BEST way to discipline your kids in a restorative way, something I call Collaborative Discipline.

If you’re here, chances are, you’re done with the punishment and control, “command and demand,” paradigm for parenting... even if sometimes you slip back into that once in a while. You want a better way that doesn’t look like compounding threats, escalating conflict, and doesn’t turn “get off your iPad” into something rivaling mutually assured destruction.

But how do we do that? How do we break the cycle of control that almost always backfires during the teen years without going full on “permissive parent”?

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We all have moments in life that change the way we think about a problem or even the world. In fact, it’s such a fundamental human experience, that half the movies you’ve seen revolve around this “perspective shift.” The protagonist begins to see that the problem all along was the way they were engaging the conflict, not the conflict itself. They change the way they’re thinking about it and it all drops into place: Neo freezes time and stop bullets; Luke surrenders, stops trying to seek revenge and lays down his weapon; Mulan stops trying to overcome her place as a woman in a patriarchal society and leverages it as her greatest strength. Perspective shift.

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I’m a nerd

I’ve always been a nerd and loved nerdy things. Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, you name it. I don’t just like nerdy stuff for the epic action and impossible magic and tech, I love it because I’ve often found that the simplest and deepest truths of life are best explored in the realms of the impossible.

When I eventually embraced the ultimate nerd right of passage and read Dune (long before Timothée Chalamet made it cool) the litany against fear immediately intrigued me. The protagonists of Dune, in moments of fear, often repeat the litany in order to not act rashly out of their own fear and return to a regulated state.

The litany begins:

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

Bringing it to Parenting

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I am the first to say there’s more than one way to peel a potato. It’s why I don’t like giving “scripts” or “quick fix” parenting advice. The method you use to teach (aka discipline) your kid might be quite different than what I use for my 6 year old... which is totally different than what I use for my almost 3 year old... or my one year old.

So if you’re following people who give you info that works, GREAT! Keep doing it. But if it seems like some of there stuff just doesn’t stick... well this might help you understand why.

The problem with MOST methods of discipline

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Kids get scared. They get anxious. Sometimes they probably should be. But nevertheless, as their parent, it’s our job to help them navigate it.

In this week’s article, we’re diving in head-first into some of our kids’ most vulnerable emotional places...

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I recently encountered a mom overwhelmed with four young kids. Although I’m no better parent than she is, especially not for her kids, my experience in researching effective strategies for tantrums helped because her two-year-old was in a meltdown. She had her hands full, managing four kids under the age of six, a challenging situation for anyone.

It’s hard not to help when you see that.

But with our partners, it’s counterproductive.

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Your kid comes home from school, slams the door, and collapses onto their bed or the couch (usually buried in a phone or tablet). You know something’s wrong.... but when you ask, all you get is a muttered, “Nothing.”

If our kids are more in the 2-5 range, maybe this plays out differently. When they arrive at home, they either bounce off the walls or just melt down over how you sliced their sandwich.

For many parents, the knee-jerk reaction is to either press for answers or let them stew in their emotions, hoping they’ll come around eventually. But what if we could approach this differently?

Introducing... Empathy. You’ve probably heard of it and, yes, it lives up to the hype.

Gone are the days of parents just reigning themselves to the old cliche’s “You’ll get over it” or “It’s just a phase”. Empathy is about connecting with your child on a deep emotional level, fostering trust, and most importantly, helping them navigate their feelings and recognize them....

Here’s a brief rundown of how you can be empathetic with kids of ALL ages with five simple rules:

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