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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As a clinical psychologist, I often have to caution clients to examine the sparks that they feel for a new romantic prospect.

You want to be excited about someone new and feel a deep connection to them. But many of us carry old wounds from our childhood, previous relationships, or formative experiences.

If your past was chaotic, inconsistent, and confusing, then you may be drawn to those same relationship dynamics again and again. Here are five signs that the chemistry you feel might actually be a red flag.

In your past, if someone made you feel loved but also anxious, your nervous system learned that loving and fearing the same person was okay.

Mixed signals, hot and cold affection, and inconsistency can then feel intimate rather than anxiety-inducing. Excitement and anxiety are closely related emotions, so you feel on edge, but mistake this feeling for excitement and chemistry.

What to do: Slow down and notice how your body feels around this person. Does your nervous system settle when you are around them or are you always on edge? If it’s the latter, that may be a signal that the feeling you have isn’t chemistry, and that this person makes you feel unsafe.

The emotional rollercoaster when someone pulls away and the relief when they come close again can feel like a spark, especially if you had relationship dynamics like that in the past.

When you are stressed, your body releases hormones such as cortisol, which activates reward and addiction pathways in your brain.

As a result, you may unconsciously chase that stress, conflict, unpredictability, and intensity because it gives your body a hit of the feel-good chemicals that it craves.

What to do: Your body needs to learn how to slow down and feel safe again. This can look like stretching, breathwork, meditation, nature walks, and decreasing your workload.

Being drawn to someone doesn’t always mean the chemistry is good. You may be unconsciously trying to gain mastery over an old wound by reenacting the pain.

You believe that you can make it right this time. You might also recreate painful dynamics that mirror your past because you can predict what happens, and this gives you a false sense of control.

What to do: Self-reflection is important here. Does this person remind you of something from your past? Therapy can provide you with a safe space to unpack your history. 

If it feels exciting when your partner is jealous, this isn’t chemistry — it is your insecurity rearing its head.

You might even do something on purpose to trigger their jealousy in order to feel closer to them or make them prove to you that you are wanted. In your mind, this might sound like, “If they choose me, then I’m finally good enough,” or, “If they chase me, it means they love me enough.”

What to do: Work on yourself so your validation comes from within, not from other people. Remember who you are outside of the context of this relationship, and that you are already more than enough. 

Steady connection should feel grounding and safe. But if your nervous system is used to chaos, calm can feel boring and even uncomfortable. 

You may catch yourself thinking there’s no spark, and then chase the next thrill by creating tension, initiating conflict, or even leaving the relationship. If you feel safe and you aren’t used to that, in your mind, this might sound like, “If I feel safe, I’ll let my guard down but then I’ll get hurt.”

The lack of spark doesn’t mean there isn’t chemistry. It might just mean there isn’t anxiety.

What to do: Teach your body that it’s okay to feel calm. When you feel like you want to create conflict or chase a thrill, stop and notice that. Then practice doing the opposite of what your urges are, and waiting for them to pass.

Noticing patterns in your relationships is a great first step. Of course, you should always consult with your physician or therapist before making significant changes. Understanding how to slow down and process your past can help you relearn what safety and consistency feel like.

Dr. Amy Tran is a clinical psychologist. Her PhD in child and adolescent psychology informs her work on attachment, relationships, and emotional safety. She is a digital artist and author of ”This Book is a Safe Space.″ Follow her on Instagram.

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On my first day of work at the neighborhood ice cream shop, my boss lined up cups on the counter, handed me a scooper, and set a timer.

“A perfect scoop takes under 24 seconds,” he said. 

Ice cream splattered as I tried to keep up. It humbled me, but I kept showing up. The pay is $16.50 an hour plus tips, and I — a 31-year-old with years of experience in news and tech — expected to be working alongside teenagers. 

Instead, when I started working at Lady Moo Moo in Bed-Stuy, I found myself surrounded by people who, like me, had already built careers and are now navigating an unpredictable job market. Some had been laid off just as I had. Others, like my colleague who is a sex educator and public health advocate, lost funding in their fields. A few are juggling multiple part-time roles to stay afloat. 

We’re all piecing together income however we can, showing up where steady work exists. We have responsibilities and ambition. We’re trying and adapting. There is zero shame in it. 

My life used to look very different. At 23, I was the U.S. news lead for ByteDance’s first U.S. content product, TopBuzz. By 25, I oversaw content strategy at SmartNews, a Japanese news aggregation startup that once felt like the future of media.

I still remember the 10th anniversary celebration. The company flew the U.S. team and several colleagues from Japan to San Francisco and put us up in beautiful hotel suites. The CEO opened a five-figure bottle of whiskey in front of everyone. The future felt bright. A few months later, most of the U.S. team, including me, was laid off. Talk about whiplash.

In 2024, Meta offered me a job that was listed in New York, which has always felt like home. After I accepted, the role shifted to San Francisco. I was hopeful about this next step in my career when I moved west. But no one on my team worked in my building, I had five different managers, and I was laid off again after only a year.

I moved back to New York with part of my severance, assuming my experience, especially with Meta, would help me find work quickly. Instead, I stepped into the most brutal job search I’ve ever experienced. When I logged onto LinkedIn, my feed was full of people going through the same thing.

After a long interview process at Yahoo, I didn’t get the full-time role I’d applied for. But a month later, the hiring manager offered me a part-time weekend contract. I accepted immediately. It meant waking up at 5 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays and going without benefits, but I loved the work and wanted to stay in the industry.

I figured a job at the ice cream shop in my neighborhood, which is open every year from April through November, might help fill the gap. 

I never expected to get a scooping job in my 30s. I took it to make some extra money until I regained my footing. But I ended up finding so much more in it. 

At Lady Moo Moo, the line wraps around the block even on rainy days. On Halloween, a little girl dressed up as the shop’s golden gumball. The basement is filled with gifts, drawings, thank you notes and even a paper mache cow a customer made.

People come in after long workdays, school pickups, and difficult conversations, or simply because they want a moment of sweetness. I saw couples on dates, friends catching up, and neighbors stopping by because the shop is part of their daily rhythm. 

Every shift, I met people who never imagined they would be picking up part-time work: artists, teachers, nonprofit workers, tech employees, museum curators, and neighbors doing their best to make life work in a difficult economy. No one was ashamed. Everyone showed up for themselves and for each other.

During our final week of the season, the owner took the entire staff out to dinner. I’ve worked full-time jobs with far larger budgets that never expressed appreciation like that. Walking home afterward, my arms sore from 24-second scooping drills, I didn’t feel “behind” in my career. I felt grounded and grateful. I felt like I belonged somewhere again.

Do I want another full-time role? Of course. I miss health insurance. I miss buying fresh groceries. I miss sleeping past dawn. But this experience gave me something I didn’t realize I needed — and when the shop opens its second, year-round location in early 2026, I’ll keep scooping while I continue my job search as long as my schedule allows it.

In a moment when the job market felt chaotic and stability seemed elusive, I found steadiness in a community that held me up. It reminded me that life is about more than titles and résumés.

It’s about the places you go and the people you meet who show you that you’re not alone — the ones who scoop beside you and turn a side gig at a small neighborhood shop into something that feels like home.

Kaila Curry is a journalist, senior content manager, audience engagement and social media strategist and, most recently, an ice cream scooper. She has held editorial and content leadership roles at ByteDance, Meta, and SmartNews, and is currently seeking a full-time role.

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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.

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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.

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