There’s an old wisdom that says when a child is born, he arrives from the spirit-world knowing everything. But he soon forgets. The parents’ role was to help the child remember these original teachings. Every child needed to know these codes to lead a good life, respecting all his relatives and being of service to […]
Relationship
Rules govern every family, even when they’re unspoken
Our family rules guide our conduct, how we are with one another. They’re a vital influence on family health. The rules we live by are often unspoken, unwritten or assumed, which causes a lot of needless grief and strife and confusion. We may feel that our child is unruly. Or our partner! Yet when it […]
Time for yourself
The arrival of a baby changes all relationships, including our relationship with time. Our days, and hearts, reorganize to tend to this new, tender life. One day we feel a tinge of panic, and realize we are losing our autonomy. We have hardly any time for ourselves. Listen to that tinge and take it seriously. […]
Imagination and the art of parenting
Our imagination is vital to our ability to parent joyfully. Imagination dies when our lives become routine. It withers when we too often choose comfort over change. It goes undergound when we become trapped in family roles. It goes stale when we set our up lives to avoid surprises, spontaneity and the unforeseen. It freezes […]
The richest inheritance you can give
It’s not wealth, property or an expensive education. The richest inheritance we can offer our child is our joy. It flows from us when we learn to love ourselves and others. It’s our laughter. Our delight. Our curiosity. Our awe. Our gratitude. Our acceptance. Our passion. Our playfulness. Our vitality. It’s the gift of our […]
Every family needs a gardener
Every family is an ecosystem to itself, a vegetable bed set in a larger landscape of great mosaic beauty. This fertile soil in which our children grow is a complex, wondrous, wobbling weave of ancestry, biology, spirit, life stages, genders, roles, grief and losses, professions, passions, dreams, possibilities. It is so vast even in its […]
Crown a King or Queen to ease sibling rivalry
If you have two children or more, you’ll be familiar with siblings fighting over candy, toys, holding your hand, or most anything. It’s a tug of war that can last till morning come. Or more likely, until you simply can’t take it any longer and you either yell enough, or step in to sort out […]
Finding a groove for family chores
Family chores are sometimes a drag, but they don’t have to be. We often handle our daily dose of necessary tasks in a haphazard and often inefficient way. Yet somehow we get it most of it done–washing clothes, dishes, sweeping, paying bills, shopping, walking the dog, repairing, cooking, recycling. Chances are though that someone is […]
Discipline asks that you’re clear on what you value
Discipline is teaching, and teaching works best when there’s a relationship of trust with your child. We build trustful relationships over time. It requires consistency and clarity and good role modelling. If like many parents you’re unsure how to discipline your child, start by getting clear on what your core values are. Your values are […]
The parental paradox of discipline
We all want to know how to discipline our child. Sometimes this is another way of controlling our child. But discipline at heart means to teach. Our child is our disciple, a follower. To really know something, teach it. Our child is our teacher. How we teach determines what we learn. In other words, when […]
The death of a snake
We were playing, a few fathers and our boys, in the newly cut hay meadow when a child found a dead snake. The adder’s body had been split in half by the angle mower. We soon found more animals strewn across the field–voles, shrew, mice, slow worms, smooth snakes. Death inevitably comes into our children’s […]
Your child is raising you too
To parent is a verb, something we do to or with our child. There’s no single verb that I know of that describes what our child does to us. And yet, they raise us too, for a very simple reason–we love them and they love us. This reciprocal relationship shapes everyone involved, not just our […]
What grows up must grow down
The autumn rains, the growing reach of the night, the early morning mists all say it’s time to harvest now. The seeds I planted in early spring have become cabbages the size of UFOs and onions with leaves like spears. And as I start gently to pull them from the soil, their roots cling firmly […]