Writings
New Book Out Now
I blog weekly on parenting issues through a Jungian lens. Please check back regularly to see the latest posts.
Cultivating Creativity While Mothering
Sasha entered treatment with me when her back pain became unmanageable – and nothing else she had tried was working. Sasha was trained as an opera singer, but had stopped performing when pregnant with her daughter. Though she had intended to go back to music in a...
When Motherhood Defeats Us
It is a human need to experience ourselves as competent. When we are mothering children, whether we feel competent can play a significant role in determining how satisfying we find this role. While some women come by a sense of competence easily after becoming a...
Teaching Kids to Value the Inner Life
Last time, I wrote about how becoming curious about our inner life – and helping our kids to do the same – can be helpful in managing difficult emotions. Relating creatively to our inner life brings other benefits as well. When we cultivate openness and acceptance...
Helping Teens Manage Big Emotions
Research indicates that emotional regulation is one of the most important skills we can teach our children. Teens who lack an effective way of managing distressing emotions may choose maladaptive ways of coping, such as avoidance or numbing through addictions....
What if I Feel Envious of My Kid?
Janice had been seeing me for a few years, but I had never seen her quite this uncomfortable before. She was telling me about her daughter’s high school graduation party. Janice was a devoted mother who had worked hard to support her daughter through some academically...
Can Motherhood Make You Badass?
My mother was never very good at saying “no.” When as I teenager I would ask her for something she needed to deny me, it would tie her in knots. She would get angry at me for having even asked. When my daughter became a toddler, we began to have battles over TV. She...
Am I Raising a Narcissist?
Recently, some research on parental overvaluation created a stir by suggesting that treating our kids as “special” can lead them to develop narcissistic traits. You can take parental overvaluation quiz here. I imagine most of us know of a parent who...
Can Mothering Help Us Love Our Worst Qualities
The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung coined the term “shadow” to refer to all those part of ourselves we would rather not know about. As children, we learn early on that certain qualities are not acceptable and need to be hidden from view. Aggression, selfishness,...
Managing Adolescent Volatility
If we are parenting an adolescent, we realize that the teen years come upon us as a second storm after the relative reprieve of the school years. Teenagers can be as changeable as toddlers, but their outbursts are more frightening, and carry more potential for real...
Parenting When Depleted
Kathryn’s eyes filled with tears as she related to me how worn and spent she felt caring for her twin boys, now two. Kathryn’s own mother had been emotionally absent, pursuing one affair after another while leaving Kathryn and her siblings with a succession of...
Childhood’s Impermanence
I was doing some spring cleaning in the yard last week, when I found a small plastic T. Rex. He was somewhat muddied, but otherwise showed no signs of significant wear from his decade long exile from the toy box, and even retained his fearsome posture. Finding him...
Is There a Right Way to Parent?
My Facebook feed abounds with articles and book reviews about parenting. Apparently, we are overvaluing, overscheduling, and overprotecting our children. The underlying message in all of these stories is this: We are doing it wrong. And if we are doing it...