I still remember my parents’ conversation. I was playing on the living room floor. My ears pricked up when I heard my father saying to my mother, “Well, we want her to have a good Grade One teacher to give her a good start, and Miss Cox is the better of the two teachers.” Yay!…
I have talked about guilt and shame. Now it is time for blame, the third sibling. Sometimes it is clear who is at fault. However, often it is not clear, especially with children and adolescents. One of the ways of relieving guilt (did something wrong) or shame (something is wrong with me) is to shift…
In an earlier editorial I talked about guilt as an unpleasant emotion that is best kept in sight. Well, what about shame? Is that not what you also feel when you feel guilty? For purposes of gaining insight into these difficult feelings, it is important to distinguish between shame and guilt. As I said in…
Halloween, among all our traditions, has a visceral feel of tapping into something very deep in our psyche. I am going to talk about fear. There comes a day when a young child suddenly realizes that bad things can happen to those he or she is attached to. Something might have already happened such as…
And as a parent you likely will have discovered by now that people feel no shyness about commenting critically about your child’s behaviour and the way you are dealing with your child. It is hard to read the parenting literature or the newspaper’s reports on the latest release in research or the latest parenting advice…