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One of the most striking changes in contemporary parenting is the way it is starting to resemble a well-designed video game, which can make players become addicted. But what happens to parents who feel they are losing the game?

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” said Nietzsche in one of his essays back in 1889. Easier said than done when you’re facing unemployment, illness, rejection, or a blank exam paper. We tend to see these as things we need to get rid of. This can’t possibly be the life we wanted.

If you can’t get motivated, you aren’t alone. The people at Therapy Central recognise that many of us struggle with feelings of “nothing gets me going”, “I don’t care about anything” or “I just don’t care about getting out of bed”.  In these situations, keeping motivated can be a chore.

Children have big feelings. Even worse, children have big feelings over what seem to be rather inconsequential things.

What do a foul-mouthed, drug-abusing Canadian, a stately Frenchman from Bourg-en-Bresse and an American businesswoman whose prison nickname was “M Diddy”, all have in common?

In a world of many predetermined things, friends are the family we choose for ourselves. Often, their presence is what keeps us going. In Vital Friends, Tom Rath says that many of those who end up on the streets, divorced, or addicted to overeating, struggle with inner demons precisely because they are alone. They feel excluded, abandoned, unloved.

From a certain point of view, our life can be divided into moments when we have let circumstances determine our future, and moments when we have gone where we wanted to go, despite the circumstances.

Changing habits is like tightrope walking: an exercise in which the balance is always fragile, but it is the small changes that pave the way to truly remarkable results.

“You can have any colour you want, as long as it’s black,” Henry Ford famously said, and the modern mass production revolution began. Today, however, you can customise almost anything. You can blend your foundation to match your exact skin colour. You can design your own shoes; you can personalise your car, your suit and even your M&Ms.

Sunday afternoons were a sacrosanct time when I was growing up in Argentina. Everything seemed to quiet and slow down between 2:00 and 5:00 pm, during siesta. Even shops would shut. All you could hear was the sound of the cicadas as the whole neighbourhood took a nap. Young and old, rich and poor were unified by this wonderful tradition. At least, I...

The book written by John Ortberg, All the Places to Go... How Will You Know? invites us to reflect on the discerning of God’s will for our lives.

Some say that of all the opinions we can have in life, the most important is the opinion about ourselves.

What I need now is stability. And that can only come through sacrifice. That's what I've heard and that's what I’m doing. My family? It can wait—dear ones, too. The little joys of life? Who has time for that? I'm still waiting.

The promise to live with our loved one “until death do us part" has gradually lost its meaning. Today, it is considered unrealistic to get married with the idea that the relationship will last forever.

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.