Maybe you've heard about helicopter parenting until you're sick of it - parents who prepare the road ahead for their kid instead of preparing their kid for the road ahead. Julie Lythcott-Haims wrote a fine book about the phenomenon: How to Raise an Adult: Break Free...
If your child should receive a request for a nude pic, how do you think they would react? You'd be surprised how many young people would laugh and consider it a harmless, fun thing to do, perhaps a way to be included with the cool crowd, never thinking about the...
During the COVID-19 shut-down I heard reports that many LGBTQ college students who have been forced to study at home are experiencing unusual stress levels caused by their parents' failure to accept their gender identity. They believe that their child has chosen a...
"There's nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly." - Buckminster Fuller This quote made me think of my West Point class. Before I arrived there, I had made straight A's for 12 straight years, graduating as valedictorian. But during my...
It’s often said that experience is the best teacher and that the value of mistakes is that you can learn from them. There’s a lot of wisdom in this. It's why we don't want to protect our kids from every mistake and failure while they're growing up. If an activity...
If you found out your teen daughter was experiencing pressure from the cool kids to "hook up" with boys, would you encourage her to go along in order to be well-liked? I admit, it's a silly question. Of course you wouldn't. The many risks are life-altering, with no...
A young father was telling me about his two children, a seven-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy. "My daughter is an angel, but my little boy is a terror. He defies me every chance he gets. At lunch I asked him to come to the dinner table and he refused. That...
With every choice, there is a consequence. And the situation of that consequence sets up another choice. One choice after another, we create our life paths and become who we are. It's a process that continues throughout one's life. It's how a child gradually becomes...
"I was a terrible student," he said, "always staring out windows or looking at the clock, waiting for class to be over." From a very early age, the only thing that interested him was excitement, danger, and risk-taking. He considered schoolwork pointless, and...
Helping an adolescent child grow up to be a happy, successful, and independent adult has never been easy. Try doing it without a spouse. Or both parents having to work a full-time job. Or the disturbing influences of rapidly innovating technology with its shiny...