ParentWhys is more than just a podcast. It’s a community of parents who are eager to question, support, learn, and laugh on the way to creating healthy, balanced, strong, contributing adults.

The podcast format consists primarily of interviews with parents of all kinds, with children of all sorts, discussing the challenges they face, and then receiving practical advice (and comic relief!) from Dr. B, and her daughter Carrie J. The podcast follows-up with parents to see why the advice worked and why, perhaps, it didn’t.

ParentWhys is built on the belief that your parent whys will make you parent wise.

Join us on Facebook and Instagram, and join our newsletter for news and update.

Barbara Waldman, PhD

Barbara’s journey as a burgeoning therapist and parenting expert started at a young age. The oldest of seven children, she was the First Assistant Motherer - a role that came with much responsibility.

As is often the case, her parents learned from the mistakes they made with their first child. As soon as they started to experience difficulty managing Barbara’s behavior (and difficult she was!) they were directed to a local parenting expert, Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs.

Though her family endearingly called him ‘Dr. D,’ he was the esteemed primary student of Dr. Alfred Adler, himself a colleague of Sigmund Freud and the founder of the school of individual psychology. Dreikurs took Adler’s theories from Europe and made them relatable to parents throughout the United States.

So, as the first generation of Adlerian raised children, Barbara ultimately made her “helper” status official by attending University of Chicago to become a Social Worker. She completed her Doctorate in Psychology once her children were school-age.

Dr. Waldman has worked in a variety of settings; an adoption agency, a high school, on the “street” working with teenage drug users, in a community mental health center, a boarding school, as supervisor for new clinicians, as a parenting trainer and as a clinician in private practice.

Her best and most important training was with her own children, two from birth and one ‘born’ to her through fostering. She quickly found: it is one thing to know theory and quite another to use it effectively with your own kids! Having young children she worked hard (first as a co-parent and later as a single mother) to integrate these techniques into her daily life. She thought that if she could just get her kiddos to adolescence, it would be “all good and downhill from there”.

She mistakenly believed that since she worked with teenagers in her practice and had good success with them, she would somehow not have the same issues with her children! That was when she discovered that many of the issues of adolescence were both natural and necessary to the healthy process of separation and individuation that teens must go through in order to be healthy adults. She developed and tested this and other paradigms with her teenage clients and came home to do the personal work raising her three children.

For years she had been told by clients and by people attending her lectures that they wished they had had this information earlier. They found it not only interesting but practical and effective within their families.

While she had many ideas about how she could get this information to a wider audience, she ultimately decided to begin with a podcast, ParentWhy’s. This, in addition to blogs on the website will eventually move into more speaking engagements, webinars and professional training.

She’s excited to see how the ParentWhys community can benefit from her professional training and her daughter’s experience (having been raised by these methods and her firsthand experience of raising her two daughters) coupled with her irreverent, honest, and comical take on parenting. Both Dr. B and Carrie J hope that ParentWhys will help more families become Parent Wise and help them raise happy functional balanced adults!

Carrie Jordan

Do you know parents who think they're doing a good job raising their child by sending them to the "right schools" (so they get into the "right college" and get the "right job"), getting them violin lessons (or piano, or guitar, or trombone), putting them on sports teams, and giving them all the belongings and experiences they, themselves, didn't get when they were growing up.

Unfortunately, history and research has shown that while some children raised this way grow up just fine, the majority struggle with serious issues including impulsivity, poor self-esteem, depression, and drug and alcohol dependence.

Carrie's greatest passion is researching, developing and teaching methods that greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the possibility of parents raising a person who will struggle with these problems.

Through ParentWhys Carrie is excited to offer parents the tools they need to raise successful, optimistic, contributing adults. The happy side effects of using these tools is that they also reduce misbehavior in children as they grow, lessen parenting stress, and create a profound and unbreakable bond between parent and child.

Carrie understands that no single approach is the right one for every child so she has trained in a range of parenting philosophies including, but not limited to, Positive Parenting, Conscious Parenting, The Whole Brain Child parenting techniques, Emotionally Intelligent Parenting, The Parent Effectiveness Training Program, and the Rudolf Dreikurs Parenting Theory (which also happens to be the approach her psychologist parents used to raise her and her siblings).

Carrie has a Bachelors of Science in Business, is a certified Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Coach, Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy Practitioner, and has an accredited certification in Positive Psychology.