Category: Family & Education

Activities to Look Forward to, Year-Round

One way to make life a lot more delightful is to ensure you’ve always got something to look forward to. When work gets busy or troubles abound, having something on the horizon to look forward to can be just the thing to pull you through with a smile. The start of a new year is…


All I Want for Christmas Is to Be Like Ebenezer Scrooge … And So Should You!

Other than the accounts of a birth in a manger, the most popular and best-known Christmas story in the English-speaking world is Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” First published on Dec. 19, 1843, this novella about a miser, visitations from three Christmas spirits, and a conversion of the heart was sold out by Christmas Day…


The Dangerous Evolution of Dolls: From Nurturing to Narcissism

I happened down the toy aisle last week and was confronted with a host of hideous, creepy dolls. Fearsome mini fashionistas with pouting lips, bare stomachs, and gigantic eyes stared down at me as I scooted forward, fighting off that feeling you get when you’re in a haunted house. The line of O.M.G. (Outrageous Millennial…


Dear Next Generation: Game of Thrones and Psychology

Eight years ago, my youngest daughter, who’s now 30 years old, asked me to write a book for her. It was in the middle of winter and dusk had just turned to darkness as I landed at the Dayton, Ohio, international airport. Hours before, I was at our home in New Hampshire. Two weeks prior…


Parenting With Patience

Parenting calls on us to bring forth every talent, skill, and virtue we can muster. It shows us, often in technicolor, the many ways in which we fall short and the many aspects of ourselves we can improve. Perhaps the most coveted of all parenting virtues is patience. Whether our children are in the newborn,…


Parenting Matters: Lessons About Giving From Christmases Past

Everyone remembers being a kid and running down the stairs on Christmas morning to find a brilliantly lit Christmas tree with toys under it. Sorry, I should have written “most everyone,” because back then, many of us didn’t have electricity or lots of presents under a tree—except for one Christmas. We had gone to Midnight…


Researcher Cites ‘Perfect Storm’ for Placebo Effect In Transgender Youth Treatments

“A perfect storm” of factors may have distorted research that is popularizing “gender-affirming” treatments, an Australian researcher says. In a new scholarly article that cites more than 100 references, Dr. Alison Clayton asserts that expectations of positive results could have influenced studies about hormones and surgeries for gender-questioning youths. This placebo effect—rather than the treatments…


How to Be a Great Neighbor

We can’t choose our neighbors, but we can choose to be friendly, considerate, respectful, and generally the kind of person we want to live next door or down the block from us. Smile and Wave Being friendly and acknowledging those living near you can be infectious—if you do it, chances are they will, too. It’s…


Getting to Know You

In an epigraph to his 1926 novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway quotes Gertrude Stein: “You are all a lost generation.” Stein was referring to those born between the 1880s and 1900, particularly the men who had served in World War I and the men and women of the “Roaring Twenties.” In some ways,…


Finding Children’s Books That Offer Family-Centric Values

If you’ve recently browsed your local library or big-name bookstore for children’s books, you might have noticed that the classics are hard to find and that many titles, whether subtly or overtly, seem to be themed around the political issues of the day. Family-centric and traditional stories are buried on out-of-the-way shelves, if at all…