About the author

Aleksei Martiushin · Father of a five-year-old and creator of Raising Stoics

I'm Aleksei Martiushin. I'm the father of a five-year-old, and Raising Stoics began as the course I built for my own son.

Why I made it

We kept running into the same four things: anger that came out as shouting and throwing, fears, giving up the moment something got hard, and wanting everything right now. I wanted something short enough to fit into family life — twenty minutes, twice a week, for twelve weeks — built on a few ideas a five-year-old can actually hold: what's in my control, a pause button, the weather inside, "not yet".

It worked well enough at home that I turned it into a course other families can use, with a handbook for parents and a short daily app for children.

Where the ideas come from

Two places. The first is the Stoic philosophers — Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius — whose core question, what is in my power and what isn't, turns out to make sense to young children. The second is developmental psychology: research on self-control, emotion coaching, step-by-step brave practice for fears, and how children learn to name and manage feelings.

What I'm not

I'm not a psychologist or a pediatrician. The guides are for ordinary parenting challenges. When something goes beyond that — worry that stops daily life, anger that is getting worse, sleep problems that don't ease — the pages say so and suggest talking to your pediatrician.

How the guides and research pages are made

Every guide is built on published research and well-tested approaches, written in plain language for parents of four- to seven-year-olds.

Study briefs name the papers, link to them, say how strong the evidence is, and say what the studies don't show — including when a famous finding is weaker than its reputation.

Data stories use open data. The source and license are under every chart, and the numbers can be downloaded.

Every page shows when it was published and last updated. If you spot a mistake, write to hello [at] raisingstoics [dot] com and I'll correct it.

Thank you

To my son, who is the reason this course exists. Everything here started with wanting to help him with the big feelings every five-year-old has.

To the researchers whose open work this course stands on, and to the organizations that publish their data freely — the CDC, UNICEF, the OECD and many others. Their generosity makes honest writing for parents possible.

And to every parent who tries a lesson and writes back to say what worked and what didn't. You make it better.