Search Results for: kessler/2009/11/nerf-guns-–-what-are-we-afraid-of/2009/11/nerf-guns-–-what-are-we-afraid-of/2009/11/your-role-in-your-childs-development/2009/06/communicating-with-children

Are You Repeating Your Parents’ Traits?

…r personal goals and more authentic expressions of who we are. Because, as children, we internalize our early environment, when we grow up, most of us are not fully differentiated selves. The degree to which we’ve failed to identify, understand, and separate from certain overlays on our personality can lead us to relive rather than live our lives. One important question that we can explore is, “to what degree are we following a prescription laid o…

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VIDEO: Dr. James Garbarino Discusses Promoting Resilience in Boys

…r-socialization. You can go to most any pre-school center still and if two children look upset and begin to cry, what you often see is, they’ll take the girl onto their lap and sort of embrace and soothe her and the boy they’ll stand up and say, “Alright, now tell me what’s going on!” Given whatever temperamental differences, we probably should do exactly the opposite. Take the boy on your lap, stand the little girl up and look her in the eye and…

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Bullying and Beyond: How to Stop Violent Behavior

Every day, an average of 160,000 children in the United States stay home from school for fear of being bullied. Last year, bullying made national headlines when physical and emotional violence towards LGBT teenagers led to a series of painful suicides. The immediate response to this was impressive. Dan Savage created the “It Get Better Project” and inspired thousands of people, from Adam Lambert to President Obama, to send in videos about their o…

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Teaching Right From Wrong

…ions. This circumstance highlights for me the significance of teaching our children beyond right and wrong. While there are clearly things that are right and wrong, good and bad, black and white, most things are not so clear. There is great importance to teaching our children the ideas of context, perspective and shades of grey. What is right in one circumstance or from one perspective may not be the best answer. We all know about social lies and…

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What to Do When Your Child is Stressed

…d benefit from being aware. Take size for example. It may sound silly, but children are much smaller than adults, and for that reason, an event we may deem insignificant can feel traumatizing to a child. For example, imagine all the times we’ve sat playing patiently with our child until all of a sudden we realize what time it is, and that we have to leave to make an appointment. To the child, in that inexplicable instant, our gentle expression has…

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Give Yourself a Retreat: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

…s, or those personal goals of spending more time with your partner or your children? The answer is lots of reasons, and here are just a few of them: Nature helps The poet William Blake once wrote, “Great things are done when men and mountains meet. This is not done by jostling in the street.” Whether we consider ourselves tree huggers or city slickers, most of us inevitably surrender to scenes of absolute, natural beauty. Connecting to nature thro…

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What Love is Not: A Proven Method to Make Love Last

…le life being led by two people. Sharing activities, stories, friends, and children are all meaningful elements of a relationship. But denying the fact that every human and experience is unique is denying ourselves and our loved ones a partnership based on equality, reality, and genuine affection for one another. When we merge our identity with our partners we lose attraction to them. They become no more interesting to us than our right arm. Yet,…

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Making Love Last by Learning to Love

…ed the discrepancy between a fantasy of love and the experience of love as children, at times when our parents, who claimed to love us, acted in ways that were not always loving and, even destructive. The more we see love as an ethereal concept, the more we lose sight of the specific behaviors that make love an active expression of our feelings for others. When we see love as a product of action, however, we can look into ourselves and our relatio…

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Seven Real Vows to Make Your Marriage Last

…one person is adult and the other childish, they typically evolve into the roles of an angry, disapproving parent and a helpless, incompetent child. When one is more extroverted and the other withdrawn, they become a couple where one is silent and the other is the spokesperson for the duo. It is important to take a hard look at ourselves and at any ways that we may be acting unequal in our relationship. We should try to recognize if we are being c…

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Sleepovers: Are They Appropriate for Every Child?

One of the most pivotal coming-of-age experiences in children’s lives is their first sleepover, perhaps the first night they spend away from their parents and embark on a journey to independence and creating their own life outside the realm of their family home. With the first sleepover comes many worries for the child: what to bring, whether or not to leave the beloved stuffed animal at home, being away from their parent for the whole night, and…

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