Family

I once heard on the radio a recommendation to help us understand the elderly: to attach some weights to our backs, hands and feet, put some blurred glasses on our noses, cotton wool in our ears, and then go to the market...

"The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice" (Peggy O'Mara).

In a world of rising toxic masculinity, here are some basic foundations we can provide to ensure our sons grow up to be men who make us proud.

I just got back from the funeral of a fifty-four-year-old mother who left behind a grieving teenager. His father told how the boy wanted to ask his mother for forgiveness, on her deathbed, for all the stubbornness typical of a seventeen-year-old. He was already forgiven.

As the world went into various lockdowns over the course of last year, people turned to a variety of entertainment forms to cope with...

While the debate over the “ideal age” for fatherhood may go on endlessly, one fact is clear: the average age at which men in modern society become fathers has steadily increased in recent decades. Behind the polished statistics lie moving personal stories about what it means to embrace fatherhood at an age when youth is little more than a distant memory.

Describing the breakup of her marriage after the birth of her children, journalist Nora Ephron writes that a child is a grenade for the couple’s relationship. After the explosion, when the dust settles, “your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.” [1].

There was a time when the word parenting would cause me to either roll my eyes or shrug. It was a time when seven hours of sleep a night, instead of at least eight, had the destabilizing potential of a hurricane, a time when the clear voices of children in the park would compel me to grab a book and read under my...

A common source of jokes and stories with subtext, the relationship between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law appears to be characterised by particular sensitivities.

The saying Spare the rod and spoil the child is deeply rooted in some cultures as saving discipline. Where does this idea come from and is it true that using the rod is next to godliness?

All COVID-19 statistics lead to the same conclusion: the young ones, our children, are at the lowest risk of getting ill or dying from the virus. That’s comforting. But the pandemic does pose a certain danger to them.

Every generation of parents loves their children and searches for the best ways to support them and prepare them for a successful start in life. Modern parents, however, often take this effort to extremes, complicating their children’s lives (and their own, just as much) in an attempt to clear a perfectly smooth path for their still-uncertain steps.

"Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.” (Dr John Trainer) Sometimes I pass my grandparents' house, which...

Behind the prelude to a divorce are four major destructive behaviours which can prevent the couple from keeping their enthusiastic promise of staying together ...for better or for worse, till death us do part.

In the whole array of virtues that a stepparent must possess in order to succeed in raising a well-rounded child whose world has been shattered by the separation of his or her parents, courage is only mentioned in passing. Yet courage is the foundation of a construction that promises to be challenging from the outset, say those who have plunged into the role...