Do you know your child’s love language?
In 1997, Dr Gary Chapman released the book "The 5 Love Languages of Children" as a follow-up to his bestseller, "The Five Love Languages."
Metropolis
Urban alienation is one of the great themes approached critically by many artists.
Is disciplining children the responsibility of grandparents too?
“When grandparents enter the door, discipline flies out the window,” poet Ogden Nash once said, encapsulating one of the most common sources of intergenerational conflict—the role grandparents play in the upbringing of their grandchildren.
Tears, war, and tulips: a day among the Ukrainian refugees at the Siret Customs Point
The wind is blowing and it is snowing at the Siret Customs Point. Refugee groups stream by, women with children clinging to them, and the words of a little girl from another war, concluded almost eight decades ago, keep running through my mind: “And this was imprinted in my mind, that when my father is not home, it is war.”
Where has love gone?
Born in 1999, Alex is on the cusp of the millennial generation. We're 12 years apart, but we have a lot in common. One is an unhappy time at school. Back in my day, it was called being an "emo": a kid who was too sensitive, too sad, too lonely, too shy, too everything.
Grateful—even for lemons
Things happen anyway, whether good or bad. Why put extra effort into trying to respond positively when certain things happen? Why be grateful?
Some still believe in education
Is it worth fighting for a better world? Is it worth believing that, in a world relentlessly subject to the laws of entropy, hope, good thinking, beauty will still have the chance to develop and enrich our life horizon through education? Can tomorrow's world be better than today's, when everything we hear seems to be so catastrophic, and everything we do seems to...
People get ready
The song, “People Get Ready” was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr’s march on Washington and his “I have a dream” speech. In writing it the following year (1964), Curtis Mayfield not only captured the spirit of the march but created a song that caught the mood of the times and injected hope: “There’s a train a-comin’… . You don’t need no ticket,...
What kind of children do our words shape?
"The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice" (Peggy O'Mara).
How to speak to be heard
“The problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.” (George Bernard Shaw)
How well do you know your heroes?
In 2016, I noticed advertising for a new quiz show called Hard Quiz coming to ABC TV in Australia.
Sugar and venom: pitfalls of the freedom to buy and sell sex
More than 19 years ago, the Netherlands experimented with legalising prostitution, an approach that many countries looked at with interest and curiosity. After all, after the failure of the "noble experiment" of American prohibition, people wanted to see the result of the opposite approach with regards to sex.
Hope, a legacy of another world
Hope can be palpable and elusive at the same time, both reasonable and independent of logic. Yet this independence from logic is not synonymous with indifference to reason, but a victory over it. Hope has its own logic, one that changes lives for the better.
The change we are left with
What if change is given to us to use only as long as we continue to work for it?
Life really is beautiful
Graeme Frauenfelder, 56, didn’t realise until he was an adult that he was the victim of a mental health problem that affects 1.8 per cent of Australian males and 1.7 per cent of females. He’d assumed that his feelings were typical of any kid. But Graeme’s problem has a name. It’s bipolar disorder, which used to be called manic depression. Bipolar disorder is...


























