Blogs and Articles

When my daughter was 17 years old, she had a freak surfing accident in which one of her fingers was partially amputated by the leg rope of a surfboard.  She was on the West Coast at the time, and it was the 2nd day of the academic program she was attending out there.

She was remarkably strong.  She insisted that she didn’t need us to fly out there from our home in New York and begged us not to remove her from the program and bring her home.  She was...

In other articles I have often discussed how important it is for parents to examine their values and to transmit those values to their children by setting limits for them. Many parents begin with good intentions in this regard, only to find that children of today are very clever at negotiating, manipulating and wheedling their way out of those very limits. In the end, the children wind up behaving in the way they'd like, and the parents wind up bewildered and helpless, at a loss to explain how they ended up "giving in" once again.

One of the most common...

Jenna's mom paid a significant amount of money for Jenna to attend day camp. Jenna was enthusiastic, but also anxious. The night before camp began, she started complaining of a stomach ache. She is so nervous each morning that she begins hysterically crying and throws up.

Max's dad thought a sports camp would be just the thing. He often said that Max was born with a baseball bat in his hand. Yet now that camp has begun, Max becomes hysterical about a half hour before the bus comes. So far, Dad has been able to coerce him on to the bus, but wonders if he's doing the right...

When four year olds begin finding "bathroom talk" funny, parents usually dismiss the "you're a poo poo head" with a shrug of the shoulders. "It's just a phase," parents will say. And indeed, this type of "humor" does seem to pass by the time a child is around five or six years of age. Yet when those same children begin experimenting with four letter words, very few parents will dismiss it with "it's just a phase." Indeed, children's initial experimentation with four letter words often shocks and inflames parents. Some parents respond with moral imperatives: "We do...

The New Year is here. It's the final year of the decade and the doorway to the new millennium. It's a wonderful time to make resolutions, especially resolutions that have to do with your most valuable gift -- your family. Here are some suggestions that will infuse your family with health and send it into the millennium with joy:

* Spend time together. We live in a very busy world. Sometimes it's easy to bypass the things that are important to us and that we should be spending the most time on - like our family. After all, when we're done getting ourselves...

"My 20 month old daughter started to cry and when I went in, there was my 5 year old son standing there. She had a red welt on her forehead and I was convinced he'd hit her, but he denied it. I began interrogating him, and wound up accusing him of hitting her. I found out later that she'd hit her head going under a table. I felt so guilty!"

"I walked into my infant son's room where he was lying in his playpen. My 3 year old son had taken every item of clothing out of the dresser drawers and piled it on top of my four month old. I was horrified!"

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