How Financial Support May Affect Emotional Maturity
Money matters when it’s time to leave home
Money Matters, Especially When It’s Time to Leave Home
Knowing what money means to you is good for you — and also for your young adult.
Adolescent Suicidality: Grieving for Childhood
Being a teenager involves unavoidable developmental losses – for both the adolescent and their parents. It is often unconscious grief around individuation and separation, argues Brad E. Sachs, that is the source of suicidality in young people. Here, the psychologist, author and family therapist explains how exploring the loss of childhood can bring revelation, relief and resolution for both generations.
On The Importance of Treatment Failure
We do all we can to avoid feelings of failure. And yet, failures in psychotherapy can actually serve the needs of the client.
Holding Your Fire: Try Not to Shoot Down a Trial Balloon
One of the most formidable challenges for parents of adolescents and young adults is finding ways to supply fuel for the engine behind their decision-making when the decisions that they are beginning to engineer are not exactly ideal ones—at least from your perspective.
It’s All Relative… Sometimes
When our child is first handed to us, through birth or adoption, through step-parenthood or foster care, an extraordinary commitment is handed to us, as well—we are agreeing to care for someone who is, right now, a total stranger to us, and we are promising to do so for our entire lives. From that point on, not a single day will pass during which we are free of some sense of parental responsibility, no matter how old we or our children are. As a comic once noted, “All parents watch their middle-aged children for signs of improvement.”
Meet Your Family’s Future at a Family Meeting
Many families, during the childhood and early adolescent years, schedule some version of a “family meeting,” a time that is designated for the parents and children to gather together to discuss important matters.
The Myth of the Mindful Parent
Parenthood was never intended to be a peaceful, passive endeavor. Child development is-and will always be-a dynamic, embattled, and, at times, bewildering, process. A certain baseline amount of friction and ruthlessness is to be expected when both generations fight to do their jobs-when children fiercely rattle the family cage as they struggle towards freedom and […]
Calling Into Question
We are all familiar with the adage, “Ask a silly question, you’ll get a silly answer.” The questions that parents ask children are worth considering because the depth of the questions that we present to them correspond closely with the depth of self-awareness and understanding that will be engendered by those questions.