Even in these harried and hurried days, a child still unfolds slowly. And so it can take years for a child to know how to become a respectful friend and confidant of fire. There’s the crux of knowing good wood when you find it. The sharp sound of it snapping. The smell of it. The […]
home
What she does, not who she is
The walls of our home have to be spacious enough to house all of our child’s personality and gifts, while solid enough to mold her behavior. The distinction is not obvious. When we parent the behavior, we’re teaching our child how to be a regenerative human being, someone who comes of age ready to serve […]
Welcoming loneliness
A relationsip is not a bulwark against loneliness. We may soon find, despite our most cherished hopes to the contrary, that rather than dispell our sense of being adrift, a generous home also houses our solitude. On days when we are down on our knees, desperate to be rid of our longings, we may lay […]
Home as a place that doesn’t exist
The global village tends no fire around which the children can gather. Its sophisticated arrogance is politely to sneer at domesticity as a lovely ideal, but ultimately a naive and inevitably temporary undertaking. It announces to anyone seeking to grow roots, that home is to be found everywhere, making sure that it is nowhere to […]
The spell of potential
There are a few spells around, beliefs that are so common we hardly notice their insidious impact on how we lead our lives. Like when we tell a child “You can be anything you want to be”, without us actually having any way to know what that child’s potential truly is. Potential has no definite […]
Your secret lover
Your partner doesn’t know your secret lover called Plan B. Plan B is softer, more loving, doesn’t smell of onions. It has nicer parents, better health, and always agrees with the values you want to share with your child. Plan B doesn’t age. It is the other life you dream of when this one seems […]
Place is your child’s close relative
A friend of mine grew up in the inner city, a world of asphalt, concrete, steel and the growl of combustion engines. Outside his apartment a solitary lime tree sprung from the pavement. Every day he’d climb that tree. He says he perched there for what seemed like most of his childhood, watching the world […]
Attachment beyond mom and dad
Attachment theory places a child’s sense of belonging at the breast of the mother, or in the lap of the father. But we’re all born with a need for attachment to a home that is far vaster than the nuclear family. Imagine instead an attachment theory that knows the pain of being uprooted and adrift, […]
The origin of song
As a young, ambitious man, I sought the origin of song in the brain of an Australian zebra finch. I was training to become a neurologist. My practice was to pick apart the foundations of beauty, wonder, awe to locate the source of music and the grammar of song. Or that was the idea. All […]
Turn your family into a rebellious island of sanity
Start the revolution by making your family home a rebellious island of sanity and insane possibility. Create a home that’s your getaway, a place so good, so relaxing, so full of life that you have no desire to fly off to another distant promised land on a holy-day at an all-inclusive coddling factory. Tend the […]
Withhold or flow
Family energy stops flowing when you withhold your inner life. You might want to hide your endless worry from your overworked wife. You’re secretly fuming that your husband has left his underwear on the floor again. Or you hesitate to show your joy on a day that your partner is in pain. When you withhold, […]
R.I.P. love
Drama doesn’t fan passions, it kills love. When every joint decision becomes a battle, you all lose. Bills, vacations, renovations, investments, bedtimes, discipline, meals. It gets too exhausting to put on the armor every time you have to reach an agreement. Sooner or later, one of you surrenders, and the other claims victory. And the […]
Shoes, treasures and the true meaning of discipline
Your child isn’t listening to you. You can’t make her do as you tell her. And that can be wildly frustrating. There’s a choice here–do you enforce or do you yield? Enforcing is more of the same–power over, authoritarian parenting, hierarchies, right and wrong. But yielding, isn’t that giving up? Not if you take a […]
The cost of privacy is the loss of intimacy
Privacy always comes at a cost. Privacy is keeping everything to ourselves. Drawing the curtains and hiding our struggles and bewilderment to the world. Most of us keep parts of ourselves private even to ourselves–plunging them deep into our subconscious. Maybe we keep our feelings and thoughts private from our child. We might keep other […]
Making room for anger
Our home needs to house our entire child, every part of her, even her anger. Her screams, tantrums, rages need a large room of their own. We create space for this out of our own familiarity with distress. We teach her where to find peace again, by knowing how to find our own peace. One […]
Choosing to step into a larger world
Sometimes our world shrinks in an instant. A relative says something disparaging about how we parent. Our partner turns to another screen while we’re sharing our heart. Our child shatters a glass of blueberry juice on our new woolen carpet. Our bellies tighten, our chests constrict, our minds whirr with the incessant voices of trickster […]