🌟Let Your Kid Experience Summer Boredom!
Plus, how (and how not) to respond when your child's lying.
Jed Baker
July 26, 2026
🌟 TRENDING
If Your Kid Is Lying to You, Your Response to It Might Be Making It Worse
Every parent has had the moment: you catch your kid in a lie and your instinct is to come down hard, because surely that's how you teach them that honesty matters. But new research published in the journals Child Development and Developmental Psychology suggests that approach may be backfiring in ways most parents don't expect. Drawing on two long-term studies of thousands of families, researchers from the National University of Singapore found that children exposed to harsh, authoritarian discipline were consistently more likely to lie and cheat over time, not less. And the mechanism is telling. It wasn't defiance driving the dishonesty. It was self-criticism. Children raised in high-control, low-warmth environments began to internalize the belief that they had to perform flawlessly to be loved, and when they inevitably fell short, lying felt safer than admitting a mistake. One researcher put it plainly: the punishment wasn't shaping a child's values, it was shaping their fear. And fear, it turns out, is a very poor foundation for honesty.
What the research points toward instead is a shift in how parents frame the whole conversation around truth-telling. The children most likely to be honest were those who felt genuinely safe admitting mistakes, where a misstep didn't trigger a storm but a conversation. That doesn't mean no consequences. It means the consequences are connected to the behavior, not to a child's worth. Researchers noted that the pattern had a self-reinforcing quality in the data: a child who lied faced harsher punishment, which deepened the fear, which led to more lying, which led to more punishment. Breaking that cycle requires going upstream, helping a child feel secure enough that the truth doesn't feel like a threat. For parents who have been relying on a firm hand to stamp out dishonesty, this research is a useful reset: the goal isn't to make kids afraid to lie. It's to make them feel safe enough that they don't want to.
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🌟 SCREEN/LIFE BALANCE
The Science of Summer Boredom (and Why Your Kid Needs More of It)
Every summer, within about two weeks of school letting out, it happens. The "I'm bored." The slumping. The gravitational pull toward screens. And most parents, out of guilt or exhaustion or both, reach for something to fix it. But child development researchers have been building a pretty strong case that boredom in childhood isn't a problem to solve. It's actually one of the more valuable experiences a kid can have, and summer is one of the last remaining contexts where they're likely to encounter it. Studies consistently show that unstructured time, the kind where nothing is planned and no one is directing the activity, is where children develop self-regulation, creativity, and the ability to generate their own motivation. A child who learns to move through boredom without a device or an adult intervening is building a skill that will matter far more than almost anything they could be doing in a structured class.
The reason this feels counterintuitive to most parents is that boredom looks, in real time, like nothing. It looks like a kid lying on the floor staring at the ceiling, or wandering around the backyard with no apparent goal. It can feel like wasted time, especially for parents who have been conditioned to see productivity as the measure of a good summer. But researchers who study play and childhood development describe that fallow period as essential setup. The complaining phase, the "there's nothing to do" phase, is often the last thing that happens before a child figures out something genuinely absorbing to do on their own. The intervention that derails it, the suggestion, the screen, the organized activity, short-circuits exactly the internal process that makes boredom valuable. This summer, the most developmentally sound thing you can do for your kid might be the hardest: nothing.
🌟 TLDR
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Malcolm Gladwell opened up to Craig Melvin about becoming a dad in his late 50s and says the timing was a gift: "When my kids freak out, it doesn't freak me out" the way it would have at 25, and he admits he has become the person he once would have "despised" and has never been happier.
Dylan Dreyer is going deep on the parts of parenting that don't come naturally to her this week, including imaginative play on the playground and why so many high-achieving moms struggle to just get on the floor and play with their kids without an agenda.
A girl named Cinderella was teased mercilessly as a kid for her storybook name, and then grew up to find her real-life happily ever after in a story that has parents reconsidering whether a bold, unconventional name is really such a burden after all.
