My major professor in my doctoral program once told me that by the time children are three years old, their lives are set. I was not convinced by his deterministic view of child development.  However, as I’ve gotten older and grown to understand children better, I think he was probably right. Read More»

(This is an abbreviated version of a recent speech I delivered to a group of young women.) 
 
There is controversy in mental health over the necessity of both a mother and father in a family.  Can kids grow up just fine without one or the other? This has me thinking. Maybe fathers provide something unique that it is much harder for mothers to do with their daughters. This is how a dad sees his daughter. Read More»

Her son was only eighteen months old. He was a feisty child with quite a temper, but otherwise perfectly normal. Even his temper was well within the normal range of emotions for a child his age. Mom was new at the job and deathly afraid of making a mistake. I walked her to the door of my office and she looked up at me with the most desperate eyes.

“I just want to be a perfect parent,” she said. “I know I’ll make mistakes, but I don’t want to make any big ones.” Read More»

In more than fifteen years of writing this column I’ve never suggested resolutions for the coming year, but I suppose I’ll give it a try.  If you don’t have any ideas about what you would like to accomplish for your family in the coming year, here are some ideas for you.

1. Shut the television off. Television isn’t evil, but like any tool, it can be misused. The average family has the television turned on eight hours each day. That doesn’t leave much time for talking to each other. Resolve to pick just one day each month to be a TV-free day. Do something together as a family that day. Read More»

The older I get and the more I understand about human behavior, the more certain I am that we are social creatures. The most serious psychological conditions in human children involve neglect and abuse – situations where the child either has minimal or no social interaction or where that interaction is painful. Read More»

Kayani sat in front of me with a paper and crayons. He was six years old and several months earlier, his parents had been butchered by militants from a tribal faction simply because of their heritage - they had the wrong parents, as had a number of his neighbors and playmates. Since that time he had been living with relatives. He lived in a very small one room house with no indoor plumbing or electricity. After my evaluation, I couldn’t find anything wrong with him. At least for now, he was fine. Read More»

The electoral season has pushed issues like the ground-zero mosque, homosexuality, the race of our president, liberalism, and conservativism to the front lines of daily news. For those on the right end of the political spectrum, the president’s race has nothing to do with their dislike of his policies and they resent being told they are racists when they exercise their right to dissent. Read More»

I’ve been a college professor for many years. Every year at least one or two of my students are caught cheating.  They plagiarize term papers, look for answers on other students’ exams, or turn in someone else’s homework as their own. Read More»

“…so I told her to **** off…”  That was a piece of a conversation I couldn’t help overhearing in a store recently.  The speaker, a teenage girl, was apparently unhappy with something another girl had done and she littered her five-minute conversation with profanities and vulgarities, completely insensitive to anyone standing nearby, including a mother with two young children.  Read More»

The title for this article is not original to me. It was the title of a poem written by a friend and if he still had it I would probably share it with you now, but he wrote it when he was a boy and it is apparently lost forever. The message of his poem, however, is one that shouldn’t be lost.

He wrote the poem at a point in life when he wondered if anyone noticed him. When he told a joke, no one seemed to be listening. If he was interrupted in telling a story, nobody asked him to finish it. “Am I here?” he wondered. Read More»