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It is difficult to say whether there is a preferable age for facing the death of a parent, but having it happen during childhood and adolescence can have devastating effects on physical and mental wellbeing, which can extend even into adulthood.

In an ideal world, everything would be simple: you, as the father or mother, tell your child, the apple of your eye, to do something and, being perfectly obedient and submissive, they do as they’re told. However, we don’t know if such a world would really be ideal. Nevertheless, for many parents, this resembles a paradise to which they would love to escape...

At the age of 27, for the first time in my life, I worried that time was passing too fast. For the next few years, the speed with which most of my friends were getting married was the next source of concern.

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.

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...

One night, thousands of miles apart, two young women of the same age made a decision—a seemingly trivial one, but one that would seal the fate of one of them.

If you’re reading this article in July of 2024, there’s a good chance I already have climbed or am currently climbing Wave Rock. Called Katter Kich in the Nyungar dialect, Wave Rock is an enormous granite cliff face in the shape of—you guessed it—a wave that protrudes from the surface of the earth in the middle of Western Australia’s Wheatbelt. It forms the...

Historically, living together has been a response to economic and security needs rather than a virtue. However, history cannot fully explain the isolation experienced by the current generation.

Happiness must come naturally – and this is true for success: you must let it happen simply by not obsessing over it.

No matter how much we avoid it, the day will come when our parents will not be able to get by without us, just as we would not have been able to grow up without them.

Sleep is perhaps the most important, complicated, and misunderstood physiological mechanism that keeps us alive.

No matter how hard we try to hide it, there are days when we are struck by the overwhelming feeling that our lives, however beautiful and enviable, are missing something essential.

Should my child’s photos be displayed on Facebook—even if I were to amp up my privacy settings? Before Elliott, my son, was born, I was adamant that all online footprints of him would be non-existent, or at most, kept to a minimum. I knew anything I posted on the internet featuring Elliott would stay there forever, and I didn’t want him living with...

Sometimes I think I was born with a magnifying glass in my hand, one through which I critically scrutinize everything I do and say and which relentlessly magnifies every imperfection.

How can we protect ourselves against expecting too much of our friendships? Can we do something to prepare for the disappointment? And what does one do to deal with it?