A very long time ago it seems, I gave a talk called Cultivating Caring Children. I loved that material. More recently I had the opportunity to keynote on empathy. Oh my goodness, I was taken by surprise by the rant that was in me. I decided at that time to create a course with empathy as the…
We are being called upon these days – for good reason – to confront racism wherever we should find it. It is being uncovered in some of the very institutions we depend upon to preserve order and justice in our society. The sense of anger and betrayal runs deep. There is also a growing realization that…
Editor’s Note: Thanks to, and appreciation for, Dr. Neufeld, who has written our 101st editorial – a measure of maturation for the Neufeld Institute as an organization – on the topic of maturation. Everywhere I look in our society, I am struck by a seeming epidemic of polarization, tribalization, impulsive behaviour, dogmatism, black-and-white thinking,…
We are proud to share with you Dr. Deborah MacNamara’s address to the United Nations in New York for the Global Day of Parents, which she presented in June 2016. The digital age has reshaped the landscape in which we are raising our children. While our new tools and technologies allow us to do things…
“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts” In the context of reflecting upon my 65th birthday this past December, I came across this quote from Charles Dickens’s last novel, Our Mutual Friend. My ponderings on these words continued into the arena usually reserved for…
In the aftermath of the Vancouver riot following the Stanley Cup finals there has been an unleashing of emotion from anger to despair – but at the heart of it there is profound confusion as to how to make sense of the senseless. As we gather ourselves and repair our broken city, we are left…
When my eldest child was born the whole world shrunk down to the size of her face, the feel of her skin, the sound of her cries. The days grew long, I was bleary eyed with exhaustion, and all my energy went into the here and now, into meeting all the moment-to-moment needs of a…