Hey, and welcome to The Upgrade, the podcast from the team at LifeHacker, where we help you improve your life one week at a time. I'm Jordan Calhoun, editor-in-chief of LifeHacker.

And I'm Megan Walbert, LifeHackers Managing Editor. And this week we're talking about some tough parenting questions, specifically how to raise kids who aren't assholes. Yeah, we really are.

And we're going to try to answer the questions that seem unanswerable. And we're going to do that

with science journalist, Melinda Wenner Moyer. Most parents are worried about their kids being bullied, but they never, ever think that their kids are going to bully.

And there's really interesting research, too, that suggests that actually the parents of kids who bully are the least likely to think that their kids bully.

So that's a real problem.

Melinda is an award-winning journalist who writes about science, parenting, and medicine,

and she's a contributing editor at Scientific American, The New York Times, The Washington Post,

and several other national outlets.

She's also a faculty member at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute,

and she just published her first book, How to Raise Kids Who Aren't Asholes, which is full of science

fact strategies for raising kids of all ages to hopefully not turn out to be assholes.

So my question here for you, Megan, our former parenting editor, is do you think parents know when their kids are assholes?

Kids are assholes a lot is the problem.

Right.

And, you know, I think what's tough is you start off with them.

Well, they're not assholes when they're babies, but by the time they're toddlers, they can be pretty assholeish.

They get there real quick.

And they kind of keep it going.

You know, it's like every different phase that they go through, you know, kids are great in lots of ways, but they can also be very self-centered, which is just a normal developmental thing.

They can, you know, sort of play around with being disrespectful, pushing boundaries, then they're teenagers and they don't want anything to do with you.

So, yeah, it's kind of hard to, it's kind of hard to see into the future sometimes and ask yourself, you know, what is normal?

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