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...

For at least one party, sibling estrangement can be more painful than loss through death, writes Fern Schumer Chapman, who was excluded from her brother's life for four decades.

Happy couples are not spared from marital conflict, but the crucial thing is that they have simple but effective tools to strengthen their relationship in a way that does not allow the conflict to destroy the emotional connection between them.

Raising a child is not easy at all. Raising someone else’s child is even harder. But raising six children who are not your own, giving up your life, sounds crazy to most of us.

To err is human. “The only sure way to avoid making mistakes is to have no ideas”, Albert Einstein said.

Lucy is an 8-year-old girl who has a range of interests broader than that of an ordinary adult. She is enrolled in an international school, where classes are taught in French by native speakers. Her classmates are children of expats from different cultures, which amuses her nanny, who, when picking her up from school, says that she "took her from the children's UN."

Education is essential for the survival of any social group, since a community ensures its existence and development only by passing on to the next generation the knowledge it has accumulated, the power it derives from it and its ideological aspirations.

There is a saying that describes one’s life partner as being most appreciated during two life stages: before marriage and after the funeral. Unfortunately, proverbs and sayings hint at a reality which is also faithfully rendered by statistics showing that love wears off pretty soon in many marriages. But maybe this is part of the problem—the fact that we overburden love, treating it...

Love is the most beautiful and perhaps the most incomprehensible thing in the world. We find it in movies, in books, in the strength of a "yes" declared before the civil authorities, and in the embrace that binds spouses at the end of a hard day's work.

You wouldn’t think so, but whether or not children do chores is one predictor of their future happiness and success. 

If, biologically, a person becomes a parent when their child is born—or, civilly, when they adopt a child—from a practical and even moral point of view, a person only becomes a parent when they master a series of crucial skills.

Our children are forced to adapt to a world we did not want for them. As many mothers who attend coaching sessions say, the theme of war is one of the most difficult for them to address in discussions with their children, as they feel responsible for finding the balance between the child’s emotional security and their exposure to the reality around them.

If the death of our parents is a blow which makes “the very fabric of life…buckle and cave in,” the ageing of our parents resembles a classroom where we learn to give more than we are used to receiving.

Many families who feared that the new coronavirus would affect their health ended up dreading its effect on something seemingly even more difficult to protect: the well-being of their relationship.

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.