Writings
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I blog weekly on parenting issues through a Jungian lens. Please check back regularly to see the latest posts.
Why Does Motherhood Make Women So Judgy?
Christine was uncharacteristically upset when she arrived for our appointment. She had just gotten off the phone with Marni, someone she had felt was a good friend. “Marni asked me whether I was worried about Josie being too busy and not getting enough sleep now that...
Listening to Our Parenting Intuition
Perhaps no human endeavor engenders as much well-meaning advice as parenting. Parenting books, websites abound. Friends, relatives (mothers in law?), strangers, and of course the media are happy to offer advice on all aspects of raising children – much of it wildly...
Does Anyone Ever Regret Having Kids?
The answer is “yes,” as discussed with great honesty in this article. Most of the time, no matter how ambivalent we may be about becoming parents, once the little one arrives, we adjust and then find it difficult to imagine what our lives would be like without...
Is Beauty and the Beast too Sexist for Kids?
Disney’s recent release of a live action version of “Beauty and the Beast” has sparked new criticisms of this ancient tale, with some writers decrying it as misogynistic. As a result, some parents are opting out of taking their kids to the...
Mothering’s Hidden Masterpiece
In the car on the way to her music lesson, my fourteen-year-old daughter is surly, withdrawn, and irritable. When she is like this, I am careful not to fill the space with anxious chatter, and so these car rides are often silent. On a recent such drive, I searched out...
The Last Baby
I wanted a third baby. My youngest was just graduating from baby to toddler. My oldest was fast approaching school age. They were beautiful, funny, adorable, consuming, exasperating, and exhausting. For great chunks of every day, I wondered how I would survive until...
Our Children’s Psychological Inheritance
In her wise book The Conscious Parent, Dr. Shefali Tsabary describes how we displace our own psychic conflicts onto our kids. She depicts such a dynamic between mom Anya, whose parents held her to impossible standards, and Anya’s daughter Jessica, who in...
When Our Child is Suffering
There were a few days last fall when both of my children were away on overnight school trips. The first childless evening, I found myself disturbingly… happy. Happy, calm, relaxed. What was wrong with me? Wasn’t I supposed to feel lonely? Unsettled by the...
About Time… How Being with Kids Shifts Our Perspective
Being with babies and small children invites us to leave, at least occasionally, the familiar constraints of clock time, and enter into the timeless fluidity of the moment. One minute, we can be entirely focused on a mundane task, doing something we did a dozen times...
The Dark Mother
I love Neil Gaiman’s wonderful short novel “Coraline.” It seems to me that this terrifically frightening book shows how the dark side of the mother archetype is always present in potential. Carl Jung coined the term archetype to describe universal patterns of human...