How To Manage Family Expectations and Avoid Breaking Rules This Christmas
The festive period heightens the sort of inner conflicts that have characterised 2020. On one hand, it is socially responsible to keep our distance. On the other, it feels wrong to leave someone alone at Christmas.
Should You Visit Your Family This Christmas?
Faced with rising infections and a new, more infectious strain of the coronavirus, the UK government has come under pressure not to relax COVID-19 restrictions over the Christmas period.
The Good, The Bad and The Lonely: How Coronavirus Changed Family Life
COVID-19 has brought about big changes across the world, with much attention focused on the way governments are responding to the health and economic challenges of the pandemic.
Christmas Will Be Different This Year But It's Important To Celebrate Together, Even Online
There is no doubt that Christmas will be different this year. Lockdowns and distancing guidelines have already curtailed other celebrations, such as Eid and Diwali.
Why During Covid, Older Adults Should Avoid The Grocery Store
Older adults should avoid making trips to the grocery store during the pandemic and instead use curbside pick-up or food delivery, new data shows.
Supporting Your Peaceful Home: Consciously Cultivating Connection
Mindful parenting is not about a technique to create an outcome but about building a loving relationship for life. Children want to please us when they’re treated with love, compassion, respect—and when their own stress levels aren’t too high.
More Young Adults Are Living With Their Parents – But Is That Necessarily Bad?
When the Pew Research Center recently reported that the proportion of 18-to-29-year-old Americans who live with their parents has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps you saw some of the breathlessheadlines hyping how it’s higher than at any time since the Great Depression.
Seeing Our Parents and Our Relatives In A New Light
Our parents and our relatives are among our most important teachers; they help shape our view of the world, how we understand ourselves, and our relationships with ourselves and with others.
How To Stay Calm And Manage Those Family Tensions During A Lockdown
The coronavirus restrictions are slowly being eased but the pressures on families at home still probably lead to many tears of frustration.
Why Do Kids Call Their Parents 'Mom' And 'Dad'?
Once, a long time ago, one of us, Bethany, fell behind at the grocery store and was trying to catch up
"Gifts" From Your Family of Origin: Beliefs, Attitudes, and More
Your life journey began with your parents or primary caregivers, and your childhood experience of gifts, hurts, and disappointments: these became the very foundation of your ideas about love and pain.
Why The US Birth Rate Keeps Relentlessly Declining
Aside from a few years in the mid-2000s, the number of births in the United States have been falling for the last three decades and have now reached their lowest number in 32 years.
Tradwives: The Women Looking For A Simpler Past But Grounded In The Neoliberal Present
Alena Petitt, a well-known author and lifestyle blogger, has become the British face of the “Tradwife” movement, closely associated with the hashtag #TradWife.
Accepting Family Foibles (And Protecting Yourself!): Teaching Others How To Treat You
|I know from my own life, and as a former therapist, that family foibles and failures can be excruciatingly painful. For many of us, it takes great strength to heal from childhood wounds.
How To Survive Annoying Relatives This Holiday Season
During the holiday season, we are faced with social commitments that sometimes means spending time with people who grate on our nerves.
How Christmas Can Be Isolating For Young Carers
Most children look forward to the Christmas holidays as a time for fun and families. But for some young carers – children who provide care for someone in their family who is ill or disabled – the Christmas holidays are a mixed blessing.
What Is Karma: Personal, Family, Adopted Children, and Past-Life Karma
Of course, your ancestors can and do leave behavioral and attitudinal legacies that help you actualize your innate potentials. Mingled with ancestral legacies we discover blessings as well as curses. You can take a major step toward maturing when you can see and accept both the good and the bad in other...
Lower Risk Of Depression, Dementia After Getting Hearing Aids
Older adults who get hearing aids for a newly diagnosed hearing loss have a lower risk of being diagnosed with dementia, depression, or anxiety for the first time over the next three years.
Teen Girls Face Pressure To Get Pregnant
Teen girls experience relationship abuse at alarming rates, according to a new study that specifically focuses on reproductive coercion—pressure from a partner to get pregnant.
Creating a Joyful Environment for Our Children and Ourselves
In a world where negativity seeps into every corner of our lives and whatever is gross, weird, or shocking is considered hip and appropriate for children, we must find ways to create a home environment that promotes positive thinking and joyful attitudes. Create a fortress of beauty, hope, and peace where we can...
Doris Day Was A Sunny Actress And A Domestic Violence Survivor
Hollywood legend Doris Day died May 13, 2019 at age 97 at her home in Carmel Valley, California. The beautiful, blonde singer turned actress was viewed by many as America’s wholesome girl next door. In the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s,
How Mobile Devices Have Changed Family Time
There is now widespread concern about the amount of time children spend staring at screens – with many people worried about the negative impacts mobile devices might have on health and well-being.
How Joking Around With Your Brothers And Sisters Shapes Your Sense Of Humor
Two siblings are playing on the living room floor. The girl, aged six, looks at her brother, and smiling, sings: “A, B, C, D, E, F – R!” Her older brother, aged seven, grins and joins in with: “H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, PEE! Get it? Pee! Pee-pee!” Both fall about laughing.
The Surprising Links Between Family Dinner and Good Health
Adults who prepare quality meals for children are offering something more important than a nutrition lesson.
Kill The Competition: Why Siblings Fight But Colleagues Cooperate
There is a certain rhythm to the swing of sibling relations. We resent our brothers and sisters in childhood. We support them in adulthood. We sue them after the reading of the will. The choreographer of this dance, as in so many others, is competition.
The Teenage Brain: Why Some Years Are Crazier Than Others
Neurobiologically the single most important fact about, say, a 20 year old brain is the fact that almost all of it is already matured, fully wired up—myelinated, a jargon-y term for it. The reward dopamine system has been going full blast, and somewhere around like early puberty all of the brain is totally up to speed—except for the frontal cortex.
Family: Different Personalities and Roles, Similar Karmic Lessons
The family unit is a complex mixture of personalities who come together to learn, heal, and love. It is the first place we begin our Earthly journey. Family is instrumental in helping us fulfill our soul's purpose by helping us learn karmic lessons and providing an environment in which we can develop our gifts and talents.
Workaholism Kills Relationships: Creating Togetherness with your Family and Loved Ones
John Bradshaw underscores the importance of family connection. He emphasizes acceptance and "loving your own crooked family with your own crooked heart." Just as Mormons celebrate Mondays as Family at Home Night, we can rethink some of our commitments and create time for what's truly important.
Caregiving -- A Gift That Can Heal Relationships
People have told me many stories of difficult mother-daughter relationships that healed through caregiving. Their stories have given me the gift of healing. Forgiveness, compassion, acceptance, and love grow through empathy for and understanding of the experiences of others...
What We Can Learn From The World's Oldest Population
Japan has long been known for its widespread respect for its seniors and a powerful sense of obligation to care for them. Yet as the demographic structure of society has changed, and the population has progressively aged, the provision of care is increasingly seen as a social (and not exclusively a family) concern.
Aging In Your Own Home... Does It Take A Village?
Statistics show that the average yearly cost of an assisted living facility ($49,635) or a nursing home ($131,853) makes these options financially prohibitive for many. The viable alternative is to safely age in place. The psychosocial benefits of remaining in their own home, continuing to be socially active in their community, and maintaining established relationships are priceless.
A Different Kind of Valentine
February is the month of Valentines, when our thoughts turn to love. Usually we give Valentines gifts and affection to romantic partners. This month I would like to shift our focus to expressions of love to our family, in particular our parents.
How to Heal a Painful Family Relationship
Our relationships with parents, children, siblings, and spouses can be very complex puzzles of love and frustration — we can’t live with them and can’t live without them. We often have long-held patterns and painful feelings related to our sense of worth...
A Hawai'ian Formula To Free Yourself and Install A New Life
Being happy is an attitude to life that is less determined by outside circumstances and more by inner qualities. A person’s character and mind is stable when their inner family is in harmony. As a metaphysician would put it: ‘It’s the same on the inside as the outside.’
My Personal Journey with the Ancestors
When I was seven years old, my father’s father died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His death rippled through the family, particularly affecting my grandmother and his sons. As a child I was shielded from much of this impact, and before this moment I had never...
Why We Need To Stop Playing The Generation Blame Game
Successive generations’ healthy disregard of the previous generation’s tastes, habits and customs is a necessary ingredient of human progress.
Are Our Families A School for Compassion and Unfinished Business?
If we don’t see ourselves as worthwhile contributors to society and we don’t approach our aging with dignity and respect for ourselves, how can we expect them to see us that way? As we age, our families become helpful and supportive, or neglectful and critical...
How Daughters Can Repair A Damaged Relationship With Their Divorced Dad
In a 2002 study involving nearly 2,500 children, researchers found that daughters’ relationships with their fathers were more damaged than sons’.
Dump Your Parent Issues: They Are Messing Up Your Life!
Parent issues are some of the worst and most longstanding issues we can have. When children do not have what they need, they spend the rest of their lives trying to change that. After they become adults, their attempts to find those missing pieces can create...
How To Be Yourself and Be Strong in a Sad or Anxious Family
It is human to despair, and it is human to worry. But when either of these realities, or both at once, becomes the predominant coloration of family life, then you must contend both with your sad and anxious family members and with your own “sympathetic” sadness and anxiety.
Why Birth Order Personalities Develop
Birth Order Personalities develop as coping strategies each one of us used as children to make ourselves feel okay in our particular positions in the family.
Dear Mom: Because Of You, I Am The Woman I Am Today
My mother never worked outside the home, and at that time many women were not encouraged to do so. She had the same limited expectations for her daughter, but she never took into consideration that we were different people and that my spirit screamed for more...
How To Make Mothers' Day Special For Mom
Whether your mother lives in her own home, with you, in a facility, or a long distance from you, there are many things you can do to make Mothers' Day a special day for her. * Plan to spend loving, compassionate, quality time with her. * Engage her in discussions about her past and where she is now in this stage of her life...
Healing Our Family Tree and Unfolding Our Full Capabilities and Talents
We frequently feel cut off from our clan of origin at some given moment during our work on the self. In discovering our true nature, we will also discover at what point the family ignored and neglected us. When undergoing the abuse, we feel like an orphan, yet the fruit and the tree are still joined by bonds of obvious or underlying love.
Older Adults With Living Parents More Likely To Feel Blue
People who have reached age 65 and still have living parents are more likely to suffer depressive symptoms than their peers whose parents have died, a new study suggests.
Do Twins Live Longer Because They’re So Close?
Twins tend to live longer than people who aren’t twins, and identical twins live even longer, according to a new study.
How Your Parent's Lifespan Affects Your Health
The longer your parents live, the more likely you are to live longer and have a healthy heart. These are the results of our latest study of nearly 200,000 volunteers.
Money Plays A Key Role In Family Violence Across Cultures
Most women who face economic abuse do not see it as family violence. But the Victorian Royal Commission on Family Violence connected the two.
Does It Matter That Kindergartners Get So Little Time To Play?
Being a kindergartner today is very different from being a kindergartner 20 years ago. In fact it is more like first grade.
Cleansing Family Emotional Clutter & Genetic Footsteps
The intimate connection we have with family gets embedded within our very being long before we can utter a word. Much of this initial wiring occurs in the right hemisphere of our brain in the first ten to twenty-four months of life. That’s when our brain begins to develop an emotional and social program.
Can Psychology Predict Where Your Relationship Is Headed?
Is he or she the one? You know… the one to introduce to my parents, the one to move in with, the one to start a family with, the one to marry? At some point in every dating relationship, you ask yourself some version of these questions.
Family: Fact and Fiction, Myth and Mystery
From whomever or wherever we come, our present is, in good part, made up of the stories of our past. These stories can be thought of as the twigs and string and odd detritus that holds our families together, and in each of these stories, at least one of these “unpredictable personalities” wants to take wing and fly.
Forgive Your Parents and Release Yourself from Prison
Love works when we envision anyone bathed in it and project it to them. It works even for those whom we rightfully expect should love us, we assume love us, and of whom we can list 5,328 reasons showing how they haven’t. Love is what forgiveness is about. These words apply, most of all, to our parents. Are you rebelling already, saying, “No way! Not in a million light-years!”?
What To Do When You Love Your Family But Dread Family Get-Togethers
Many people dread family get-togethers even if they really do love each other. We see this happening often – maybe you’ve even had this experience yourself and wonder why it’s so difficult. You really do love these people after all.
Family Violence Victims Need Support, Not Mandatory Reporting
At first glance, Victoria Police’s suggestion this week that health professionals report domestic violence to authorities, as they do for child abuse, sounds like a great idea. The suggestion was made in its submission to the state’s Royal Commission into Family Violence.
My Mother’s Passing: The Last Visit and Last Request
Three days before her 95th birthday, my mother transitioned out of her body while she was sleeping. Right at the time of her death, I had a dream about my mother, after not dreaming about her in years. In the dream, my mother was walking across a street...
Biological Family Lessons: Evolving the Family of Humanity
by John Payne. The family blueprint that you inherited was chosen by you because it provided you with opportunities to develop in the areas you had previously selected. Perhaps you wanted to develop the art of forgiveness, understanding, compassion, determination, courage, or any number of...
Home Massage for Families: Learning How To Touch & Be Touched
Our first experience with touch is our mother's loving caress in our home. Within our family we learn how, when and where to touch. Yet natural touch among family members is an often neglected means of communication...
Father & Daughter: The Most Important Relationship
A father’s relationship with his daughter is the most important relationship that she will have in her life. It is, in my opinion, the basis and template for all the relationships that she will have with all the men in her life. Teachers, coaches, boyfriends, bosses, fathers-in-law, sons, and grandsons...
Abuse & Incest: A Healing Journey
I was sexually abused - for 8 years. By my brother. There it is, out in in the open for everyone to know. No lies, no stories, just the truth and me. I am tired of secrets and hush hushes behind the door. It happens, and no one wants to talk to about it. Can you imagine the furor that would have been caused if I had come forward and said, as the daughter of a protestant minister, that I was being sexually abused by my own brother.