Family

(c) photography33 of fotosearch

Home Is Where You Feel Safe. How Emotionally Safe Is Yours?

How aware are you of potential emotional hazards in your household?  Read More
(c) creatista at fotosearch

Chores: Secrets To Winning the Parent-Kids Chore-Wars

Fights about chores demoralize everyone in a family. At the same time, children’s participation in the tasks that keep life going is vital to their become self-sustaining adults. Read More
c) stuartmiles www.fotosearch.com

Is There Too Much Anger in Your Family? How Can You Respond?

Abuse of family members can be emotional (too much anger), verbal (telling others what to do, criticizing, blame, name-calling, swearing) or physical. How can you stop it? Read More
(c) gajdamak www.fotosearch.com

If Your Mother Was Grieving, Could You Become Her Caretaker?

What would you do if you suddenly found that you had to care for a depressed and grieving parent?

Mom Loved You Best! The Rise and Fall of Sibling Rivalry

How sibling rivalry develops, and what makes it fade.  Read More
 
Hire an Au Pair? Help Yourself; Help Her; and Help the World

Hire an Au Pair? Help Yourself; Help Her; and Help the World

So many moms, and dads as well now, have too much to do with juggling work and home life. Ever thought your family could use a nanny? A nanny may also need you! Read More
 
 

Are You a Good Enough Parent? Partner? Therapist?

How good do you feel about yourself?  And what are the childhood sources of those feelings?  Clare Rabin’s new book sheds light on these questions by exploring the time-tested ideas of Donald Winnicott. Read More

When Is the Best Time to Have Children?

 When is an ideal time to have children? And what are the consequences for your future life of that decision? Read More

What Can a Newborn Infant Teach Us About Joy?

 A one-day-old newborn can teach a major lesson about happiness. Read More

Grandparents and Grandkids: The Perils of Long Distance Love

 Grandchildren are the privilege and delight of increasingly fewer seniors. Those who do have grandkids too often live at too far a distance to reach out and hug them. Read More

Mending a Broken Family; Strengthening a Healthy Family

 Families can be fountains of strength. At the same time, all families are fragile. Internal factors like a parent with mental health issues, and also outside factors like job loss or economic stresses, can overwhelm a couple’s abilities to cope in good humor. One temporarily fractured couple has written profound advice relevant to all parents. Read More
Keeping the extended family together.

A Big Family: Does Number of Sibs Impact Divorce Risk?

 A recent study suggests an interesting relationship between the size of the family a child grows up within and the likelihood that in adulthood that child will end up divorced. Read More

When Your Mother Has a Borderline Personality

 Adult children of moms with borderline personality disorders report the lifelong devastating impact of their mothers’ intense narcissism and unpredictable raging. What could help kids who have these kinds of moms? Read More

Is Natural Better?

 A new book sheds light on the question of whether natural approaches to diet, childbirth, healing and the environment really keep us healthier and happier. Read More

Healthy Relationships Breathe In and Out Like An Accordion

 What are the risks and potential solutions to nourishing both time together and time apart? Here’s seven guidelines to think about. Read More

Deck the Halls for Chanukah

 Sustaining traditions is key to what the Maccabees, the Jewish freedom fighters of 2000 years ago, fought to preserve. Read More

10 Ways to Feel Closer to Loved Ones

 Want to feel more connected with your friends, kids and partner? First, cut out any negatives you do like criticizing or getting irritable. Then check out how many of these positive kinds of contact are frequent aspects of what you do with them.Read More
Is therapy working? Is this the right therapy help for me?

More Info for Adult Children of Borderline Mothers

 These comments from readers of my earlier postings on borderline personality disorder have useful suggestions for understanding and coping with family members who rage. Read More
Older men with younger women can enjoy a loving relationship

Will You Still Need Me? Will You Still Feed Me?

 Here’s a way you can catch a glimpse of the future. Take a look at what you’ve been doing in four arenas of your life to view the kinds of connections that are likely to lie ahead for you in your elder years. Read More

What to Do With Your Mother Once You’re a Grown-Up

 Watching squirrels in my backyard and then goats in a meadow triggered thoughts about how adult children and their moms interact. Some enjoy each other like the playful furry-tailed squirrels. Others ignore each other like goat moms and their grown-up offpsring. Does our society train our children to value independence to the exclusion of sustaining strong family ties? Read More

Three Ways to Use Play to Get Kids to Behave

 Parenting, someone once said, is the art of getting kids to do what you want them to do, and getting them to stop doing things you don’t want them to do. These three ways of playing can fill your basket of parenting tricks with potent fun strategies. Read More

Kids Making Too Much Noise?

 Try reading this story to your children if they sometimes make too much noise. Your discussion afterwards should be interesting. The story was written by a five-year-old boy who was trying to learn to tame his volume. Read More

How a Large Family Stays Close

 Big families are relatively rare these days. It’s even rarer for multiple generations to live in the same city. Even if they do, odds are that the family members rarely get together beyond weddings and major holidays like Christmas or Thanksgiving. My secretary’s family succeeds. How do they do it? Read More

Preparing Teens and College Kids for The World They’ll Enter as Adults

 What do students need from their parents? Freud had a surprisingly solid definition many years ago. With tough economic times likely to lie ahead, it’s worth paying attention to what Freud said. Read More