Social

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.

We sometimes find ourselves surprised by how other people think about moral issues—how they distinguish right from wrong and choose to do what they think is right.

A smooth sea never gave a skilled sailor, said Franklin D. Roosevelt, suggesting that without hardship, challenges and even failures, we cannot become our best selves.

“If you say to me, 'Socrates... you shall be let off, but upon one condition, that you are not to enquire and speculate in this way any more, and that if you are caught doing so again you shall die'; if this was the condition on which you let me go, I should reply: 'Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but...

“Can’t good people teach bad people to be good?” Madeleine asked her mother, with the innocence of a seven-year-old.

What do you do when things go wrong and everything around you seems to crumble? Do you keep your eyes forward and try to find a solution? Or do you fall into endless complaining?

“Hi, I’m Rebecca, and I’m a shopaholic!” This line, along with the character, though from a comedy released in 2009, is cut from the fabric of everyday reality. Shopping has become an indispensable appendage of modern life. However, when it ceases to be just an accessory to a much more complex existence and moves to the centre of an individual’s focus, the leap...

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."

There are two main reasons why we find it difficult to apologise, particularly to our kids.

Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. – Rainer Maria Rilke

Growing up, a fixture of my childhood was the iconic Aussie summer. I spent many of my early years either indoors with the air conditioning turned up full-blast, or swimming in our local watering hole. The scorching sun was a constant, with days of humid weather on the east coast or dry, oven-like temperatures in the west.

The year 2022 was perhaps richer than previous years in events that affected the whole world.

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.

I don’t remember much about the moment. I remember its warmth, and the way it glowed with purpose and spirit. But the stage is blurry. The song which pulsed out from it is uncertain. I know it came from a good friend of mine, one whose spot-lit glory provoked in me no jealousy, no feeling of being left out.

Even after the World Health Organization replaced the term social distancing with physical distancing, people are still feeling the effects of social distancing.