I keep struggling with how to be a good parent to my toddler. I peacefully parent, but keep being afraid that I'm letting my toddler "walk all over me" and that I'll end up raising a narcissist. What are your suggestions to either allay this fear or avoid that fate?

for further context, my mother and father are both narcissists, as is my husband's brother. That's why I have this specific fear.

one example is when we are at the park and I say it's time to go, he's started resisting more often. I always make a deal with him that he has to listen if I say something isn't ours, if I say something is dangerous, and when I say it's time to go. I give a 10 minute and 5 minute warning before we go. I've had to resort to picking him up and carrying him to the car which I really don't like. I explain that if I can't trust him to keep deals we can't go to the park as often. I also let him climb up on the kitchen table all the time, or he throws food, or feeds the dog people food, or pours the dogs' food all over the floor. It feels like I should do more than explain why I don't like it/why it's a bad idea and clean up. At story time at the library he was doing well, now he runs around knocking over chairs or pulling books off the shelf, or throwing crayons on the floor. Certain things I make inaccessible to him like usually with the dog food and water, but I also want him to have freedom to explore and experiment. I don't overly praise though. I use observation over praise, i.e. "look at you! You made it to the top! Look at all the red squiggles you drew! You kept trying until you opened it!". That kind of thing.

Is the very idea of ideology pathological or such labels are applied by the ruling class to competing thoughts? It's sometimes said that people fill their emotional void and lack of sense of belonging with ideology, thus kind of diminishing it as something legit. But can you even build something political without an ideology? Isn't ideology at the very basis of civilization?

How are sibling rivalries created and can they be resolved?

• one listener said: Abusive parents will parent in a way to cause sibling rivalry because your focus will be on the sibling's wrong doings instead of theirs.
  A sibling has the potential to be your most potent team mate against your parent's evil.
  The typical dynamic is to love one child more than the other (golden child), which causes envy by the child that is the problem child (scapegoat).

Hey Stef. Do you think that parents intentionally neglect guiding their children on how to make friends and relationships so that when the children grow up they won't have a circle outside their immediate family of origin and the parents will have the children as companions when they get old? Thanks and cheers.

We often talk about how divorce affects young children. But, how about young adults? Say parents divorce in their 50-60's, but the children are already adults at ages 25-30. It should be easier with greater brain maturity and independent lives, right?

Reconnecting with healthy anger is quite an uplifting experience, even though "anger" is usually understood as a negative emotion. However, there's a temptation to overdo it. "Hey, I didn't get shamed, humiliated or punished for expressing my needs and discontent. I might do this more often!" How can one avoid becoming a bully and set healthy limits for long neglected emotions?

Why do some people commit suicide after severe abuse? For example, there's been reports of male on male rape in Russian army and victims of this abuse committing suicide out of shame (sometimes taking the perpetrators with them). But, isn't that the shame of the abuser? Did the abuser inflict his shame and self-contempt on others to avoid feeling it himself? How could one live his life having committed such heinous acts? By murdering and burying his conscious?

What are the ethics/morality of manufacture's preventing the end consumer from repairing their purchased products. Instead the consumer has to rely on the manufacturer for repair or just having buying a brand new product. How would a free society solve this issue and would circumnavigating repair/copyright protections be considered immoral?