When we think of successful kids, many of us picture straight-A students, sports trophies, and college acceptance letters.

But after years of studying over 200 parent-child relationships, I’ve found that true success is more about raising kids who are confident, emotionally secure, and deeply connected to themselves and the world around them.

The parents who really understood this embraced sometimes unconventional strategies that prioritized curiosity, a love for learning, and emotional intelligence over societal expectations.

Here are nine things they did differently early on:

Instead of worrying so much about how their kids reacted to challenging situations, these parents understood that their behavior would influence their child’s level of resilience. They modeled mental and emotional strength by being mindful of how they managed their stress in front of their kids.

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Instead, they encouraged reflection with “you should be so proud of yourself” or “you worked very hard on this — how does it feel?”

While well-meaning, “good job” can create reliance on external approval. These parents focused on fostering intrinsic motivation, helping their child take pride in their own achievements.

Through quality time, active listening, and shared experiences, they made their kids feel valued, safe, and understood. This also fostered the child’s confidence to take risks and thrive.

They avoided punishment, knowing it builds resentment and disconnection, not skills. Instead, they let natural consequences teach lessons.

For instance, if a child forgot to do their homework, they faced explaining it to their teacher — a chance to learn responsibility and problem-solving. This approach built accountability and resilience.

Instead of offering rewards for good grades, they focused on cultivating a love for learning. Whether their child excelled or struggled, they kept the focus on growth and made it clear that grades didn’t define their worth.

They encouraged their kids to ask “why” and “how,” rather than simply accepting the “right” answer. This fostered curiosity and gave their child the confidence to challenge the status quo — key traits of future leaders.

Whether solving a math problem or explaining a favorite game, these moments gave kids a sense of importance. By stepping back and letting their child take the lead, these parents showed respect for their child’s abilities and nurtured their self-esteem.

Reading wasn’t a chore — it was woven into daily life. Whether picture books before bedtime or novels on lazy afternoons, reading became a natural and enjoyable part of their world, fostering creativity and a lifelong love for learning.

They treated emotions as valuable, not something to fix or avoid. When their child was upset after losing a game, for example, they might have said, “I can see how much this matters to you. It’s hard to lose something you care about.” This simple validation helped their child process emotions and build resilience.

Reem Raouda is a parenting coach, mother, and creator of BOUND, a parent-child connection journal designed to nurture emotional intelligence and self-worth. She is also the founder of Connected Discipline Method. Through her coaching and courses — including Power Struggles No More — she has helped hundreds of families foster connection and harmony. Follow her on Instagram.

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Conflict is inevitable in any relationship, but how we handle it can make all the difference.

As a psychotherapist who has worked with over 100 couples, I’ve seen how small changes in communication can fundamentally transform the way they work through disagreements together.

But in the happiest and most successful relationships, couples use an effective tool that I like to call the “5-Second Pause Rule.”

Have you ever noticed how quickly a minor disagreement with your partner can spiral out of control?

I’ve seen so many fights start with an offhand comment or a forgotten chore. Before both people know it, they’re arguing about issues much bigger than what they started with. Suddenly, old arguments are being rehashed, or new ones are appearing out of thin air.

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This is where the 5-Second Pause comes in. The idea is simple: When you feel a conversation starting to heat up, pause for five seconds before responding. In that short time, your brain gets a chance to cool down, shift out of a reactive mode, and engage with your partner in a more thoughtful and loving way. 

And this tactic isn’t based on a hunch — it’s backed by research. In one study of over 6,000 trials, researchers found that taking a brief pause during moments of rising tension significantly reduced the likelihood of conflicts escalating.

When you’re both calm and receptive, sit down with your partner and explain how taking five seconds to pause during heated moments can help the both of you stay connected and avoid saying things you’ll later regret.

It’s important that you both agree to use this tool — it works best when it’s a shared effort.

1. Create a plan together

This is the fun part: Decide how you’ll implement the rule. Should conflict arise in the future, what will your signal be to put it into action? Will you hold up a hand or say a specific code word? The end goal should be to set out the best way for you both to pause without feeling dismissed.

Make sure you’re very clear about when it’s appropriate to use this rule, and when it’s important to keep the conversation flowing. The rule should be used as a preventative measure; it doesn’t grant you immunity from important yet difficult conversations.

2. Practice it in the moment

Consistency is key. The next time you and your other half wind up in a tense conversation, take a step back, breathe, and count to five.

Use this time to ground yourself and to consider what you want to say next. Those few seconds are all it takes to help you respond from a place of understanding, rather than defensiveness. You might be surprised by the impact it has — not just on the argument, but on your relationship as a whole.

Jourdan Travers, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and clinical director at Awake Therapy, a telehealth company that provides online psychotherapy, counseling and coaching. She also helps curate the popular mental health and wellness website, Therapytips.org. Jourdan received her MSW from The University of Maryland and her B.A. in psychology from California State University Northridge.

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Rent the Runway co-founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman has one request for job candidates interviewing for her company: Be authentic.

“I’m looking for someone who can actually have a conversation with me off the page,” says Hyman, 44, who has run the clothing rental company since its founding in 2009. “I am going to ask you questions to get a sense of your personality … and how you think on your feet.”

Hyman isn’t interested in listening to candidates recite their resumes. Instead, she asks them about their industry, their last job’s competitors and what they would do differently if they ran their previous employer, she says.

The tactic helps her determine if the candidates can stay cool and communicate under pressure, says Hyman: ”[In interviews], people are so trained to talk [through] their bullet points, their stories. If someone isn’t flustered by [nontraditional interview questions] and can have really strategic and thoughtful conversations … that’s a green flag for me.”

Hyman also looks for prospective employees who show a history of loyalty and mental resilience, especially in the face of challenges, she says. If a job candidate has “hopped around” between different jobs, that’s a red flag, she notes: “I don’t think you can make an impact anywhere until Year 2.”

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Rent the Runway is far from the only employer to value employees who are adaptable and cool-headed under pressure. Adaptability is an “increasingly in demand” soft skill across multiple industries, according to LinkedIn blog post last year. It’s the No. 1 trait that sets high achievers apart from other people, Harvard Business School professor Joseph Fuller told CNBC Make It last year.

“It’s a skill that can be rare to find,” said Fuller. “People are afraid to try new things and fail. But you can’t grow without moving beyond your comfort zone.”

Other hiring managers have different tactics to determine how people think on their feet. Kara Brothers, the president of skincare company Starface World, likes to gauge job candidates’ emotional intelligence and self-awareness by asking introspective questions, like “In your last workplace, what held you back?” she told CNBC Make It last year.

Brothers’ goal is to gauge the candidate’s flexibility and willingness to learn, she said.

“We all have an ego, but does your ego impede your ability to work effectively?” said Brothers. “I’m trying to figure out if you’re aware of when you’re at your best or where you might hold yourself back in professional relationships.

Want to land your dream job? Take CNBC’s online course How to Ace Your Job Interview to learn what hiring managers really look for, body language techniques, what to say and not to say, and the best way to talk about pay.

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We’ve all dealt with emotionally immature people: They get defensive at the slightest criticism, they constantly deflect blame, and then they try to guilt you into feeling sorry for them.

Emotional immaturity is a growing problem, and whether it’s in your personal or professional life, communicating with them can be a real struggle.

As experts on the psychology of communication, we know that if you’re not careful, you can also easily run the risk of seeming emotionally immature to others. Why? A lot of us automatically use certain emotionally immature phrases without even thinking about it.

Here’s a list of the most common ones to avoid:

People who are emotionally immature often won’t take responsibility for their own actions when something goes wrong. So what do they do? They extricate themselves from situations by immediately stating that they are not to blame. 

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An emotionally immature person will do everything in their power to not take responsibility for their actions, and a common tactic is to make it seem like you, or literally anyone else, is in the wrong — not them.

You can almost imagine a little kid saying this one. This phrase is a way for them to avoid any true accountability or genuine communication with the person they are engaging with.

This is a combo of gaslighting — trying to make others believe a false reality — and shifting the blame again. The message they’re sending: You’re the problem, not me. Another toxic phrase in this vein is “you’re being too sensitive.”

People use that simple “whatever,” often with a shrug, to say, “I’m done discussing this.” It’s an emotionally immature method to shut down the paths of communication and figuratively walk away from any further discussion.

Here we go again with the gaslighting. People who are emotionally immature rewrite reality, both for themselves and, possibly more importantly, for others. When someone says something like this, they’re typically trying to evade responsibility and make you think something else happened.

In this case, emotionally immature people walk away from any complicated issue by throwing it onto someone else and dismissing any and all responsibility. It’s the perfect example of transference.

Another example of invalidating other people, and one that is used in both personal and professional relationships. By saying phrases like this, an emotionally immature person is dismissing the other person’s concerns and opinions, and belittling their reaction.

Yes, it’s usually best to focus on the future. But emotionally immature people will often accuse people who bring up their mistakes of harping on the past. They don’t want to learn from their mistakes and they don’t want an honest discussion about whatever is happening. They want to move on without addressing the issue.

Here’s an example of how emotionally immature people passive-aggressively avoid taking responsibility for what they say. It might sound like they’re trying to smooth things over, but it’s actually more of a way of critiquing someone, then distancing themselves from their statement. 

Emotionally immature people often use broad generalizations. Instead of engaging in constructive honest conversation or using specific examples, they will issue an accusatory blanket statement and use that to avoid any further discussion. 

If there’s one phrase that really sounds like a kid said it, it’s this one. How many of us used “but all the kids are doing it” argument trying — usually in vain — to get our parents to allow us to do something? But emotionally immature adults use it, too.

They’ll pull out the time-honored “everyone’s doing it” argument as a justification for something they want to do or already have done. Of course, they’re blameless if they’ve done something wrong, they were just going along with the crowd, after all.

Kathy and Ross Petras are the brother-and-sister co-authors of the New York Times bestseller You’re Saying It Wrong, along with other popular language books, and co-hosts of the award-winning NPR syndicated radio show and podcast ”You’re Saying It Wrong.” They’ve also been featured in media outlets including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and Harvard Business Review. Follow them on Bluesky.

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The last two years have been just about as good as stock investors could have hoped for.

Heading into 2025, the S&P 500 — a measure of the broad U.S. stock market — has submitted gains of about 26% and 25% in the previous two years, following an 18% downdraft in 2022. So what are the odds of a third big year?

“Historically, the likelihood is about 1 in 5,” says Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA.

Stovall would be the first to tell you that market history is no guarantee of future results. But the best market prognosticators study historical patterns for a reason. “I’m a big believer in history,” Stovall says. “It doesn’t necessarily repeat, but it does tend to at least rhyme.”

All in all, Stovall expects the market to deliver solid, if unspectacular, gains this year, reflecting a strong market that will likely have some ups and downs, especially as investors digest the economic ramifications of a new administration in Washington.

“I call myself a bull with a lowercase b,” Stovall says.

Here’s what he and other market experts say to expect in 2025.

While it’s important to know how the market has behaved over historical cycles, analyzing the current conditions for stocks and the economy matter, too. And crucially, many of the factors that have led to the strong bull run in stocks of late remain intact, says Ryan Detrick, chief market strategist at the Carson Group.

“What got us here? It is a strong consumer. It is strong incomes. It is strong wages. It’s an economy that is still growing nicely,” he says.

Detrick and his colleagues expect inflation to continue to cool, which should allow the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates — a boon to a few areas in the market that have struggled in recent years.

“If inflation continues to improve a little bit and the economy stays strong, there’s no need to have interest rates where they are right now,” he says. “We think more cuts are likely, and that may unlock some animal spirits that might help small businesses and the housing market.”

All in all: “We think this bull is alive and well,” Detrick says.

While a strong economy is a positive backdrop for stocks, their underlying fundamentals are what tend to drive prices. The big one of those — earnings outlooks for companies in the S&P 500 — looks like a green flag, too.

“Earnings expectations for 2025 are strong — some might say too strong — but even if revised down slightly, companies still look to be in better shape than in 2024,” Liz Thomas, head of investment strategy at SoFi, wrote in a recent note. Overall, Wall Street estimates large U.S. companies will boost their earnings by 14.4% in 2025, following a 9.9% gain in 2024, according to data from SoFi and LSEG.

Both Thomas and Detrick see gains in the broad stock market this year, though more muted than the past two years’ results. But even if you’re bullish that stocks can continue, it’s important to remember that things typically don’t go smoothly up and to the right.

Last year was an unusually placid one for stocks, with the biggest pullback of the year coming in at just 8.5% — well below the market’s average intra-year drawdown of 13%.

“We’re telling clients to plan for a double-digit correction at some point during the year,” says Detrick. “Most years have a double-digit peak-to-trough correction.”

That doesn’t mean you should make any wholesale changes to your portfolio, market experts say. It just means to stick to your plan if and when the going gets tough.

Stovall says the first year of presidential cycles feature an average stock market decline of 17%. “So somebody might say, ‘Well, wait a minute, shouldn’t I then just bail out of the market altogether?’” he says. “And my answer is, well, not really.”

That’s because the average time that it takes for the market to recover its loss after a decline of 10% to 20% is four months, Stovall points out. “So you’re better off just being aware of the potential volatility and not reacting to it.”

One move worth making now is ensuring you’re adequately diversified. By spreading your bets across a variety of asset classes, you ensure that your portfolio’s performance isn’t tied to the fortunes of one particular investment.

If outperformance from a small group of stocks has them occupying an outsize portion of your portfolio, for instance, now may be a good time to get back to your target allocations, says Detrick.

“You may have had a great couple years with some of these tech stocks, but let’s remember you don’t always want to chase the shiny object,” he says. “It’s important to rebalance, and you might consider taking some of those profits and investing in some of the under-loved areas of the market that are cheap right now.”

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