Raising children

The writer Zadie Smith puts it better than I ever could, describing having a child as a “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.” Smith, echoing the thoughts of everyone else who has seriously considered these issues, points out the risk of close attachments: “Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy,

Denn wenn unsere Kinder ein allzu perfektes Bild von uns Eltern vorgelebt bekommen, so argumentiert die Elternberaterin, desto mehr können sie dazu neigen, sich selbst unter Druck zu setzen. Jetzt und später in ihrem Leben. "Je mehr Eltern sich dagegen verletzlich zeigen", sagt sie, "je häufiger sie sagen: ‚Ich kann nicht mehr‘ oder

Sometimes when you listen closely to your body, the message you hear is a call not for food, but for fasting. You may observe this in animals, which abstain from food when sick, and in young children, who sometimes go days eating hardly anything at all (much to the consternation of their parents!).

The modern style of parenting is not just exhausting for adults; it is also based on assumptions about what children need to thrive that are not supported by evidence from our evolutionary past. For most of human history, people had lots of kids, and children hung out in intergenerational social groups in which they were not heavily supervised. You

Jung called this process Individuation, which is really a great word for it. We move from a social and cultural identity to a truly individual sense of self. While in the first half of life we internalize aspects of our environment, in the second half we explore and express the truths which arise from within, individuating ourselves from group iden