Category: Blossoming the Child

In my last post I mentioned that children need to experience discomfort in order to learn how to find comfort. Leah, who maintains this blog, suggested that I elaborate on that statement, as it could be misinterpreted, and it is an important topic. It must be, as parents regularly ask me for guidance on just…

When a parent is with a young child, yet his/her mind is off somewhere else, the child can sense that the parent doesn’t want to be there.  At the same time, the child instinctively knows that she needs her parent’s’ full presence. To get it, she might try to engage the parent in play, ask…

My friend Craig’s six-year-old nephew didn’t like carrots and refused to eat them. One day he walked into the kitchen and asked Craig what he was snacking on. “Oh, this is special adult food,” he replied. “You’re too young for it—you’ll have to wait until you grow up to enjoy carrots.” A while later, Craig…

Here’s an e-mail I recently received: We have a child due and we’ve been thinking a lot about education…there are things about the system that we both disagree with yet think it’s important for children to learn how to socialize and work things out with the citizen majority…. What we are more curious about is…

This is a question I often hear: “We are getting a divorce. We have joint custody of our children, but we live in different towns. What can we do to minimize the impact on them?” The next time I’m asked, this might be my answer: “Rather than structuring your lives so that your children come…

Here is a quote from pages 269-70 of Nisa, The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (NY: Random House, 1983) by Marjorie Shostak. The small size of villages means that girls approaching puberty have few, if any, peers to compare themselves to. Thus they do not develop to maturity in a context of intense…