For many parents, catching your child in a lie can feel like a personal betrayal. Many of us were taught that lying equals disrespect, and that disrespect deserves punishment.

The problem with punishment is that breeds fear, which can then breed more lying. Think back to the last time you lied. What emotion drove it? Fear, embarrassment, guilt? If you knew your honesty would be met with empathy instead of anger, would you still have felt the need to hide the truth?

I’ve spent my career educating parents, teachers, and caregivers about early childhood development. Here’s the advice I give them when they catch their kids lying.

Lying in kids is developmentally normal. In fact, it’s a sign that their brains are developing the ability to plan, problem-solve, and imagine different outcomes. These are the same skills that drive learning and creativity. Researchers even call it “executive function in action.”

Put another way, lying is a developmental milestone, not a moral failure. Children may lie for several reasons: to avoid punishment, to manage social stress, having poor impulse control, or to protect their independence.

When you understand the “why,” you can respond to the need behind the behavior, rather than the behavior itself.

When your child lies, your instinct might be to correct, scold, or punish. Instead, focus on making honesty feel safe.

Make these your go-to phrases:

1. “I’m not mad at you. I feel upset about what happened because I want you to be safe. Let’s talk about what could happen differently.”
2. “I love you even when you make mistakes. It’s safe to tell me the truth.”
3. “Are you scared to tell me because you’re afraid I’ll be mad? [Pause.] It’s okay for me to have a hard feeling. I can calm my body to help you.”
4. “I want you to feel safe telling me the truth. I will listen and we can always figure out problems together.”

Each statement sends a clear message that they are safe, even when they mess up.

Take this example: Eva, 12, has an iPhone she’s allowed to use for one hour after school. Her mom, Jane, finds out that Eva snuck the phone back into her room and lied about it.

When Jane calmly asks why, Eva admits she needed to coordinate outfits with her friend Abby and didn’t want to let her down.

Jane could have focused on the rule-breaking. Instead, she said: “Thanks for being honest. I get it. I remember wanting to match outfits with my friends, too. The one-hour rule still stands, but next time, just tell me. I’d rather give you five more minutes than have you feel you need to hide it.”

By responding with connection instead of control, Jane preserved trust and taught Eva that honesty leads to understanding, not punishment.

Even in a home built on trust, kids will still lie sometimes. That just means they’re still learning.

To strengthen honesty at home:

• Normalize mistakes. Kids tell the truth when they don’t fear shame.
• Validate their feelings. “I get why you felt nervous to tell me” goes a long way.
• Reiterate expectations calmly. Boundaries can coexist with empathy.
• Stay flexible. When kids see you adapt, they learn that honesty pays off.

The more your child feels safe with you, the more likely they will want to be honest and come to you — even when it’s hard.

So instead of asking, “How do I stop my child from lying?” ask, “What is this lie protecting them from?” Respond with empathy. Keep the door to honesty open. That’s how you build trust that lasts.

Alyssa Blask Campbell has a master’s degree in early childhood education; is the New York Times bestselling coauthor of ”Big Kids, Bigger Feelings″ and ”Tiny Humans, Big, Emotions″; and the CEO of Seed and Sew. A mom of two, she has also been featured as an emotional development expert in numerous national publications.

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We often underestimate how much our morning rituals can set the tone for the rest of the day. When you prioritize activities that spark a natural dopamine release, you aren’t just waking up — you’re essentially giving your brain a head start on feeling motivated and balanced.

“Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, which is a chemical released by brain cells, and it’s mostly involved in motivation, learning and reinforcement,” says Mia Soviero, a neuroscience researcher who conducted research at NYU Langone Health and Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute.

“It isn’t just about feeling good. It’s mostly about learning and motivating you. So, it helps our brain understand what actions are worth repeating and what habits we should have in our lives that we should strengthen,” says Soviero, who also founded the nonprofit Research Girl, Inc to help aspiring science researchers receive more opportunities in their field of interest.

A common misconception is that dopamine levels are always supposed to be boosted, Soviero says: Neurotransmitter levels are meant to fluctuate.

“We don’t want to always have really high dopamine levels, but we do want to have a healthy dopamine system,” she says. “You just want to build these good patterns in dopamine, where dopamine is able to be released the way it’s supposed to.”

Here’s how Soviero structures her mornings to keep her dopamine system healthy, she says.

Step 1: Exposure to sunlight

Soviero’s ideal morning routine for the best mood starts the night before: Getting adequate sleep sets the tone for the next day, she explains.

Then, “I make sure that when I wake up, I get exposure to some light in the morning,” she says. “Opening your curtains in the morning and getting sunlight on your face for a few minutes have actually been scientifically proven to reduce depressive symptoms, especially if you have seasonal depression.”

Sunlight exposure directly affects the area of your brain that controls your body’s internal clock, or your circadian rhythm, according to Harvard Health Publishing.

Not getting enough exposure to sunlight each day “can cause your brain to produce too much of the sleep hormone melatonin and to release less serotonin, the feel-good brain chemical that affects mood. The result of this chemical imbalance? You feel low and lethargic,” the health blog states.

Step 2: Sudoku

Soviero makes time in her mornings to do “small, meaningful activities” like completing a daily Sudoku puzzle.

“It’s a great way to kick off the day with a little dopamine from doing a puzzle. It’s that feel-good chemical from achieving [it],” she says. “Novelty and new things that you aren’t expecting that are good can increase dopamine levels in the brain and contribute to dopamine health. So that’s why puzzles are great.”

Solving crossword puzzles and physical puzzles can have the same effects on your brain, Soviero says: The brain has a reward system that boosts dopamine when “something unexpectedly good happens, and then decreases when something worse than expected happens.”

“This means that evolutionarily, we would strive for goals in the hopes that we’d get this feel good chemical as a reward,” she says. “So when you do something, [like] learning a new skill, and you’re surprisingly good at it, you get this influx of dopamine.”

Step 3: Text a friend

Each morning, Soviero practices a simple and significant form of social connection: texting a friend. “I’ll send a text to my friends [like], ‘Hey, good morning. How are you doing today?’” she says.

“Humans are biologically wired for connections,” Soviero adds. “When you get to make that human connection, it’s scientifically proven to boost your mood because that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.”

Spending too much time without interacting with close loved ones like friends and family can harm your health, she says. Being socially isolated and feeling lonely can increase a person’s risk of developing heart disease, dementia, depression and other chronic conditions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Connecting with others is “really healthy, not only for your brain but also for your body,” Soviero says.

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This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Millennial Money series, which examines how people earn, spend and save their money.

Nabeel Khan knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur early in life.

In high school, Khan hired “12 of the smartest kids I could find,” he says, and co-founded an AP tutoring company. They charged between $20 and $50 per hour and made “about $5,000″ within the first month, he says. He says he loved the challenge of working in customer service and balancing costs and earnings.

The now-27-year-old went on to study materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan, thinking he might dive into the world of sports equipment after college. But over time, he says he realized he could have a bigger impact as an entrepreneur in the tech world.

When he graduated in 2020, Khan accepted an offer as an operations manager at an Amazon warehouse, which became an entryway into tech.

While his initial offer as an operations manager was for $50,000 per year, within five years, Khan says he was working as a senior AI product manager at the company earning $432,000 per year, including base pay and company stock.

Khan left Amazon in July 2025 to pursue entrepreneurship and co-founded SkillAxis, which creates AI product managers for non-tech companies. His quick rise at Amazon and the savings he amassed enabled his departure, he says.

Here’s how he built his career at the tech giant and made the transition to entrepreneurship, and a look at his life in Brooklyn, New York, where he currently lives with his girlfriend.

At Amazon, Khan immediately began looking into how he could grow in the company, specifically in roles that would contribute to his dream of becoming an entrepreneur.

He discovered the roles of project manager and product manger, both of which would be promotions and teach him skills like managing people and designing products.

To learn more about how to get hired for those roles, Khan looked for mentors who held them both within Amazon and outside of it. He says each mentor gave him advice about which skills he would need to get hired, as well as specific project ideas for how he could prove he had what it took to move forward.

Khan created an educational road map for himself and says he would spend evenings and weekends working on gaining new skills he hoped would help him get promoted. For example, he spent six months taking a software bootcamp class from the Georgia Institute of Technology to learn how to code, he says, and got certified in Amazon Web Services.

He also looked for opportunities to practice and gain new skills while in his current job. In his role as an operations manager, for example, he helped update the safety system in the warehouse, which helped build his portfolio to become a project manager.

“I was always finding ways to be creative about the role that I was currently in, going above and beyond to find ways that I could apply that next role,” Khan says.

By mid-2021, Khan was promoted to project manager, earning $66,000 a year. By mid-2023, he moved into a product manager role, earning $146,000, and by 2025, he was a senior product manager earning $432,000.

While at Amazon, Khan says he saved upwards of 80% of his income, accruing around $666,000 by the time he left between his various savings, investment and retirement accounts. In part, it’s why he felt comfortable leaving, he says. He knew if anything went awry, he’d have a financial cushion to fall back on.

During that time, he primarily held positions that were either remote or required a lot of travel, enabling him to save money on housing. Instead of having a home base where he paid rent, he split time between his parents’ home in Georgia and his girlfriend’s home in New York in between work trips.

When he finally made the leap to becoming an entrepreneur, Khan first lived off of his savings.

Between July and November 2025, SkillAxis brought in about $51,000 in sales. He now pays himself about $5,000 per month from the company to cover his living expenses.

Aside from having built up a financial cushion, Khan left Amazon in July because as he plans for his future, he says this is his window to make a big career swing.

Khan lives with his girlfriend in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Here’s how he spent his money in October.

• Rent: $2,125
• Food: $1,238 for groceries and dining out
• Transportation: $899 for the subway and rideshares
• Health insurance: $289
• Business expenses: $198 for a Filmic Pro subscription and travel
• Subscriptions: $143 for his two gym memberships, his Wall Street Journal subscription, Spotify, iCloud and Google Drive
• Discretionary: $93 for laundry and entertainment

Khan and his girlfriend split their rent 50/50, and his girlfriend has a stipend from law school, which covers their Wi-Fi and various utilities. Khan is still on his family’s phone plan, which covers his phone bill. He’s already paid off his student loans — around $50,000 worth — and currently has no credit card debt.

Despite Khan’s history of saving, he’s not currently contributing to his savings as he builds his business. He says he’ll resume saving money in the future after his company grows. As of early November 2025, his net worth is about $703,000, including his checking accounts, savings, investments, retirement accounts, cryptocurrency and a couple of watches, worth around $6,000 each.

As a kid, Khan says he remembers seeing his dad watch a commercial for an Omega watch and comment about how nice it would be to own one. Once Khan made enough at Amazon, “I ended up getting one for him,” he says.

Going forward, “my financial goal is to have an overall net worth of $1 million by the time I’m 30,” Khan says.

He wants to enter his 30s with more financial stability. To get there, he’ll double down on making sure his company is successful by identifying gaps in software tools and letting the market guide them to build the solutions their clients need, he says.

For anyone who wants to try and copy his career growth, “just be creative about what you can do in your current environment,” he says. If you find ways to go above and beyond your job description, “you’ll end up benefiting yourself and your reputation wherever you are.”

Khan currently spends about 80 hours per week working, and the rest working out and seeing the people he cares about most. “A successful life to me is one that balances work as well as time with family and friends,” he says.

But big picture, he is happy with the balance he’s struck in life. Between building his company and spending time with his family and friends, “I think I’m living my dream life right now,” he says.

What’s your budget breakdown? Share your story with us for a chance to be featured in a future installment.

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Most winter mornings, Jaime Randle piles bread, stacks of cups and cleaning supplies into the back of her SUV and commutes about two hours from her Connecticut home her stall at the Union Square Holiday Market in New York. “It’s like opening a mini store every week,” she says.

Randle, 39, is the founder and chef at Coco Bred, a food stand offering portable coco bread pockets stuffed with Jamaican jerk chicken, oxtail and curry goat. Being a vendor at the popular tourist destination is expensive and “exhausting,” but rewarding, she says. Starting Nov. 13, Coco Bred brought in over $31,000 in sales in the first 17 days at the market, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It — clearing her almost $23,000 market entrance fee in under a month.  

Renting a booth at markets across the U.S. can cost up to tens of thousands of dollars for vendors who sell trinkets, tea towels or Jamaican jerk chicken sandwiches. Despite the costly investment and up to 12-hour-long days spent running the pop-ups, some small-business owners say they bring in more revenue and profit in seven weeks at holiday markets than the rest of the year.

At large New York markets in Union Square and Bryant Park, that payoff is largely driven by high foot traffic — in some cases, up to hundreds of thousands of locals and holiday tourists per day — creating weeks of nonstop sales for many vendors, says Evan Shelton, vice president at Urban Space, a privately run operator of both markets.

“Every year, I see more and more people,” visiting the markets says Shelton, who has worked at Urban Space for five years. Business from that traffic drives many vendors to come back year after year, Shelton says. “I’m seeing a 90% return rate, which tells me that this is worth their time and effort.”

Not every market is worth it for every vendor, some sellers and business advisors say. Foot traffic doesn’t guarantee profit for smaller operations, which may have to spend money they don’t have on labor, inventory and holiday decorations to run a successful booth.

If an entrepreneur is still “figuring out what works and what doesn’t, it’s probably not a good time for you to invest all that money into just getting people used to you,” says Keila Hill Trawick, a business advisor of over 20 years and founder of Little Fish Accounting in Washington, D.C. “I think where holiday markets tend to help long term is when you are already a part of the local economy.” 

Even at smaller markets across the country, in cities far less tourist-heavy than New York, many small-business owners look forward to the intense work, the financial reward and the connections from working a holiday market.

‘I’m investing a lot of time and energy’ 

Running a booth at a holiday market can be very expensive, even beyond any potential market’s entry fee. Randle, for example, had to buy equipment, pay the contractors who built out the mini kitchen she installed in her booth, and compensate 11 employees, she says. She put her $23,000 entrance fee, which includes her electricity lines, on a credit card, Randle adds.

“I’m investing a lot of time and energy, and I’m also investing in, what I hope, is my daughter’s future,” says Randle, whose 10-year-old often helps out at Coco Bred. “I mean, it’s such a flex for me and for her to say that her first job was at her mom’s company. I’m so proud of that.”

Coco Bred, which also sells in a stall at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, brought in over $41,000 in sales between January and September, according to documents. The entertainment venue receives a 30% cut, Randle says. She projects her market sales will exceed that number by the time the holiday market ends on Dec. 24, and the venue doesn’t get a percentage. Coco Bred is profitable, too, Randle adds.

Not every vendor is so lucky, and much of their success can depend on matching their business with the right market. In 2024, Amy McCoy spent $13,000 renting a booth at the outdoor Snowport Market in Boston for her side hustle Tiny Farmhouse, which sells stationary gifts like tea towels, she says. She sold $13,000 worth of products in just over two weeks, documents show — but ended the market at a financial loss due to other expenditures, she says.

For McCoy, a full-time freelance video producer, there was a learning curve: She overordered inventory and didn’t budget for labor, she says. She hired extra help two weeks in after experiencing the toll of working long hours in cold temperatures.

“After a snowstorm, I came in and there was snow and ice all over the interior of my booth,” she says. “I spent about three hours cleaning snow and ice off of all of the display surfaces and flooring on the last Saturday before Christmas, and I wasn’t able to open until 2 p.m. More than a few tears were shed.”

Instead of returning to Snowport in 2025, McCoy spent $6,375 to rent a booth at SoWa Winter Festival, held inside a restored power station a 10-minute drive from the larger market, where customers pay $10 to enter. It took her one weekend to bring in over $6,000, documents show. She projects sales from her booth will make up 30% of her sales this year, she adds.

With the warmer temperatures and shorter hours at the indoor market, she can work mostly by herself — and without space heaters, McCoy says. While her side hustle usually breaks even most months of the year, she’s currently operating with a 20% profit margin, she says.

‘We’re all there through it together, rain or shine’

Smaller markets tend to cost less for vendors and bring less foot traffic to their booths. That can still be a winning proposition, says Cynthia Green, who sells handmade pressed flower art and jewelry at the Cambria Christmas Market in Cambria, California every year.

Green pays just under $2,000 to rent a booth for 28 days at the market that draws about 80,000 visitors each year, according to a market representative. In 2024, Green’s business Pressing Petals brought in just under $21,000 in sales from the market, documents show. The revenue represented about one-third of the business’ yearly sales, Green says.

Paying a fee to participate in any market is just “something you plan on,” as a business owner, says Green, who sells her products year-round at a market in Paso Robles, California, and at various art festivals.

Holiday markets don’t come with guaranteed customers, Hill-Trawick notes. Freezing temperatures or pricey products can keep them away. In November, the city of Chicago put a capacity restriction on the storied Christkindlmarket. Reportedly, some sellers say the decreased foot traffic has negatively impacted their sales. (The city has since raised the capacity limit).

What you sell can also make or break your performance at holiday markets, says Hill-Trawick. Customers tend to seek easily carriable items like food, figurines and earrings — and they gravitate toward “one of a kind” items like vintage or sentimental finds, she says. “It needs to be an experience to be worth it.”

Greene, now in her fourth year at the Cambria Christmas Market, says there’s an additional benefit to finding the right market for her particular business: Each winter, she gets to interact with the same community of small-business owners who also operate there annually.

“It’s like Christmas day when we get the notice that lets us know when we can go set up,” Green says. “We know everybody and it’s a little family. We’re all there through it together, rain or shine.”

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In 2017, Thomas Kelly graduated from medical school and finally became a doctor — a career he had dreamt about as a kid and spent years working towards. But once he started practicing, Kelly realized that the job was different from what he’d imagined.

“My time as a doctor [was] very constrained. I only get 10 minutes for the patient,” he told CNBC Make It. “I was finding I had, you know, 100 patients to see in a day, and [was] always in a rush and always coordinating 700 tests and a million tasks.”

“In a perfect world … I would spend as much time with [patients] as they need … I would understand their family, I would remember them deeply, and then I would check in on them regularly,” he said. However, the reality is that, like many other clinicians, he faced “incredible burnout” working in the field.

Inspired to tackle this problem, Kelly created an AI tool that helps transcribe medical visits, generates clinical notes and more, with the goal of lessening the load on doctors and clinicians.

Now, the 33-year-old is the co-founder and CEO of Heidi, an AI medical scribe. The company announced its $65 million Series B round in October, valuing the company at $465 million.

Growing up in Melbourne, Australia, Kelly was inspired by his primary care doctor to pursue medicine.

“I just loved my primary care doctor … He was like, the pinnacle of using your intelligence and knowledge for good,” said Kelly. “He always had an amazing plan. He was very warm, great bedside manner, but also, just incredibly sharp and intelligent always.”

That experience stayed with him. During university, he explored other interests such as math and computer science before ultimately deciding to go into medicine. In 2013, he enrolled into the University of Melbourne where he began medical school.

While studying medicine, Kelly also started a side hustle where he posted educational videos on YouTube and tutored students interested in getting into medicine.

To his surprise, the videos began to attract many students, more than he could handle at the time, and what started as a hobby steadily grew into a small business. To better manage his time during his tutoring business, Kelly began experimenting with building out artificial intelligence tools.

“The first AI product I ever tried to build was an interview tutor that people could practice with,” said Kelly. This tool, called “Oscar” allowed students to practice conversations with a medical interviewer, and by 2020, about 20,000 students were using it, he added.

“That was the seed that grew into Heidi,” he said.

As Oscar improved, Kelly began to notice its broader potential. “There was no [single] lightbulb moment,” Kelly said, however, he realized that if an AI tool could understand a conversation between a student and a medical examiner, it could do the same for a patient and a doctor.

“You could then create clinical notes. You could do differential diagnosis, potentially. You could complete tasks,” he said. “That is the root [of] medicine. It’s a very advanced, very technical, deep, complicated conversation, but it’s still a conversation.”

By 2021, Kelly was faced with a big decision: go all-in on his medical career and begin vascular surgery training or take a career break and try to build out his AI tool to help serve not just medical students but also clinicians and doctors.

“I took the leap,” said Kelly. ”[I thought] I’ll regret it forever if I don’t take this chance. How many surgical trainees are good enough in math and have had business experience and can build this product? I think not many.”

“Maybe it was hubris, but I thought if anyone can start this company, it would be me, and let’s try and see what happens,” he said.

So in 2021, Kelly officially left his medical career behind and went all-in on building Heidi. Today, the tool assists in helping doctors offload some administrative tasks such as creating documentation, clinical notes and more.

Heidi has grown into a strong business and has attracted nearly $100 million in funding.

“At some point I just [did the] introspection … if you’re sitting in an aged care home and your family’s around you, what are the things you’re going to regret? And for me, it was, I definitely would have regretted not having tried,” said Kelly.

Want to give your kids the ultimate advantage? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course, How to Raise Financially Smart Kids. Learn how to build healthy financial habits today to set your children up for greater success in the future. Use coupon code EARLYBIRD for 30% off. Offer valid from Dec. 8 to Dec. 22, 2025. Terms apply.