Strategies for managing children’s digital behaviour
Parents have a crucial role in managing their children's digital behaviour, as well as preventing and detecting addiction. Their success depends on their own relationship with digital devices.
”Think of the children!” Are video games harming us?
As the world went into various lockdowns over the course of last year, people turned to a variety of entertainment forms to cope with...
Saving creativity
An experimenter is like a hunter who, instead of waiting quietly for game, tries to make it rise, by beating up the locality where he assumes it is. – Francis Bacon, 17th-century English philosopher
Life in the vicinity of death
One night while checking on his patients in a palliative care centre, the therapist risked asking a confusing question to a person whose universe had shrunk to the size of his sickbed: “What brought you joy today?” The answer was immediate: “Being alive.”
“Are you as old as you feel?” The factors of successful ageing
The factors behind successful ageing have been the subject of research for decades, but the subjective side of ageing still needs to be explored. Because successful ageing is more than an attempt to defy age and its frailties, it is a process in which, in addition to losses, benefits need to be taken into account—not just those delivered by good genetics or a...
For better or for worse | How to love for a lifetime
"Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters written in prose." (Beverley Nichols)
Visible and invisible chains
"Man is born free but everywhere is in chains." (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
Does divorce make us happier than continuing in an unhappy marriage?
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.
“My children are geniuses” (and other exaggerations of the modern parent)
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.
New Year’s resolutions: a tradition doomed to failure?
Besides carefree days, Christmas carols and traditional sweet breads, any respectable December also includes an evaluation of the achievements of the previous year and making plans for the future.
Our parents’ need for meaning
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.
Invisible people
"Since you are precious and honoured in my sight, and because I love you, I will give people in exchange for you, nations in exchange for your life." (Isaiah 43:4)
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.
“In the ferocious world beneath the heavens”
Looking back, I realize how the ferocious world beneath the heavens is tamed, at crucial moments, through communication on that biblical Ladder of Jacob.
The lost art
I am standing outside a cavernous hall, holding a clear plastic bag that contains several pens and pencils. My head is pounding; I’m wide-eyed with fear; my heart is about to burst out of my chest; and I have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The reason? I’ve forgotten to study for an exam that’s about to begin!