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Is it Middle School Bullying or Normal School Conflict? How to Tell
Does anyone else out there have the feeling we’re trapped in a collective nightmare where all our seventh-grade bullies have come back to haunt us? Every TV station, every news eeport, is filled with examples of classic bullying behavior: name-calling, racial slurs, religious denigration, ethnic smears, physical assaults, us-versus-themism, and targeted, hateful online campaigns. It… Read more
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Helping Your Kids Manage the News
I had five children under the age of five on September 11, 2001. I remember frantically plucking the older ones from school, suspiciously eyeing a sprawling pharmaceutical campus I passed on the way home wondering if it might be an attractive target to some crazed attacker. John rushed home from work, as much to be… Read more
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How Science Can Help Your Child to be Happier
I know what it is to try to coax a smile from a daughter who’s forgotten how to laugh. I’ve lingered at my son’s bedroom door, hesitant to leave, worried that the stress might be too much for him. I’ve sensed the space between the child I know and the carefully constructed image they’ve spun… Read more
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How to Talk to your Teen about Choosing a College Major
A few years ago at the University of Wisconsin-Maddison, one of the school’s deans greeted a group of incoming freshmen with this question: “How many of you know exactly what you want to major in here at Maddison?” Hundreds of arms shot confidently into the air. “OK,” he said. “How many of you have absolutely no… Read more
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Passing Down Your Family Stories is Key to Raising Resilient Kids
My father’s sister, Nancy, passed away recently. She’d been born in 1932, the third of ten children, one of whom would die in infancy and another as a toddler. When she was seventeen, her father passed, leaving her desperate mother and six of the kids in a little house on Oxford Street in Philadelphia with… Read more
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Village Building: Bricks and Mortar
A few months ago, I read the results of an October 2022 Study Conducted by Everyday Health Group that was incredibly disheartening. The study, which questioned women aged 18-54 who were pregnant or had at least one child under the age of eight (Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z moms), found that nearly seventy percent of these young moms are… Read more