MSI Press Blog

Excerpt from  Clean Your Plate!  (Bayardelle)  -   Chapter 1 Do You Need Any Money?   The trope of Mom or Dad being a child’s ATM has gotten so common it’s not even a funny Internet meme anymore. (And if you’re at all familiar with the Internet, that’s really saying something.) Every parent knows that it’s probably bad just to hand their kid money whenever they want something, but that doesn’t mean we’re actually good at resisting the urge to do just that when the situation arises.  Why We Say It  If it helps assuage your parental guilt at all, this isn’t a bad impulse to have. You’ve spent the entirety of your child’s life trying to provide for all their needs, even trying to anticipate your child’s needs before they even occur so your little kidlet doesn’t have to want for anything. Do any of you moms out there have a purse whose sheer heft equals your body weight due to the abundance of granola bars, spare socks, and just in case toys?3 It’s because you want to make sure yo

  Excerpt from Clean Your Plate! (Bayardelle) -  Don’t Be a Quitter Your kids want to try out ice skating. They’re jittery with excitement for their first class. They come home glowing and talk of little else for the next week. They ask for new ice skates for Christmas, they start saving up their allowance for new gloves to wear during their lessons, and you start Googling how to be the parent of an Olympic ice skater. As the weeks turn to months, the excitement slowly starts to wear off. After a few weeks, they no longer look forward to classes with as manic a level of excitement, and after a few months, they start outright complaining or asking not to go. If this is your first rodeo (i.e. the first sport or extracurricular your kid has tried), it’s probably no big deal. You let them stop and pick another activity because you don’t want to drag them to something they no longer enjoy. So, they decide try soccer. You see the same manic excitement and the same letter to Santa requestin

  Here is the back story behind Clean Your Plate! , provided by author Liz Bayardelle: It ’ s a common joke amongst parents to compare the parent you thought you were going to be (before you had kids) to the parent you actually end up being.  Things you thought you would never do or say become commonplace…because we parents say them for a reason.  When I became a parent and heard some of these things (things many well-meaning, truly good parents say) start coming out of my own mouth, I wanted to do a deep dive on the psychological impact of some of these common  ‘ parentisms ’ .  Why do we tell kids to clean their plate? What effect does telling a child to get straight A ’ s have on their academics?  I wanted to know the answer, and thus this book was born.   Each  chapter is about a different common  ‘parents’  and is presented like the  label on a bottle of prescription medication: you have the reason parents say that specific thing to their kids, what effect it’s  supposed  to have,