Continued from Part I… Here are five ways moms can encourage daughters to have a good relationship with their dads: Recognize that your ex is your children’s parent and deserves respect for that reason alone. If your children hear you make negative comments about your ex, it can have a detrimental impact on them. Modeling […]

As a child, I was never quite sure about the nature of my father’s feelings toward me. When I was very young, I knew that I was Daddy’s Little Girl because we used to make special trips to the seashore where we would collect guppies — putting them into buckets under the moonlight to watch […]

Often it takes a wake up call to realize that you need to spend more time with your partner concentrating on each other instead of spending all of your time with your kids focusing all of your energy on them. If you haven’t read Part 1 of this article, go read it now! In this […]

After becoming a parent, keeping the relationship between you and your partner flourishing can be a difficult thing to accomplish. There are several simple but crucial changes that you can make to put the focus back on the couple enough to keep their relationship going strong. 1. Create a Date Night To have a romantic […]

Parent child conflict increases during adolescence as the healthy teenager pushes for more independence to grow and healthy parents restrain that push in the interests of safety and responsibility. Each of “the five engines that drive independence”—separation, expansion, differentiation, opposition, responsibility—creates a different source of dispute. SEPARATION can cause disagreements over time with peers versus time with […]

…continuing from Part 1 of The Empty Nest: Opportunity or Crisis It can be a crisis: If the kids have been the primary focus of your life. As important as it is to love our children and love the job of parenting, it’s also a stage of life, not the whole of it. Those who have thrown […]

Feelings of loss and anxiety about change when the last child leaves home are normal. But it often has been pathologized in popular culture as a disorder, disease or condition that needs treatment. Usually it’s not and it doesn’t. In fact, the “empty nest syndrome” usually doesn’t exist at all. For most families, the last kid going […]

What good is money if it can’t buy happiness? In the latest survey of U.S. college freshmen, when over two hundred thousand students at 279 colleges and universities were asked about their most important life goals, 77 percent checked off “being very well off financially.” But what does achieving this goal mean for our ultimate well-being? […]

Ending a friendship is a very personal decision. Everyone has his or her own threshold — his or her own breaking point. Perceptions of what may be considered ‘toxic’ can vary, depending on the individual. And, the connection to another person in a friendship could be strong, which may outweigh the negatives present within the […]

We often here the question, “Who are vision boards for?” and the answer is anyone who has a goal or dream they want to achieve.  One thing to keep in mind is vision boards are universal; everyone and anyone can use them. In this post I will share how vision boards can benefit all of us. Recently, […]

For some people, this is a truly radical idea: There is no need to fight with your partner. Ever. Accusations, recriminations, character assassination, threats, name-calling, and cursing, whether delivered at top volume or with a quiet sarcastic sneer, damage a relationship, often irrevocably. Nobody needs to be a monster or to be treated monstrously. Nobody who yells will ever […]

As president of the Walt Disney Company’s children’s book and magazine publishing unit, Russell Hampton knows a thing or two about teenagers. Or he thought as much until he was driving his 14-year-old daughter, Katie, and two friends to a play last year in Los Angeles. “Katie and her friends were sitting in the back seat […]

How well does your family function emotionally? Families operate at different levels of emotional health. One way of measuring the well being of family relations is the Beavers Scale of Family Functioning, named for its creator, psychiatrist W. Robert Beavers. The family is a system of emotional relationships and the Beavers scale identifies five developmental levels […]

There is a long and interesting story published in the New York Times that asks whether we can teach emotional intelligence.  It begins with a lovely story of a kindergarten teacher coaching his young students on what they might say when an angry parent makes them feel scared. It struck a nerve.  A few days ago, I spent several hours […]

Throughout history and in societies all over the world, parents have tried to influence the love lives of their children — with mixed success. Parents and children frequently don’t see eye to eye on what makes a suitable partner, as studies across cultures have confirmed. Whenever a pattern of human behavior is widespread, there is […]

It’s a too-familiar story. James and Cindy have come in for couples counseling because they worry they have grown apart. With three children under the age of 12, they want to see if they can salvage their marriage. They can’t imagine breaking up the family even though they feel they are breaking up. Cindy is […]