Talk-Tell

December 2, 2009

Gregory Uba works with a non-profit agency in LA, Connections for Children, serving parents across a wide range of needs from parenting classes to referrals and financial assistance for child care services.  While my particular brand of parenting support trends toward the mindful, spiritual and even esoteric, the approach I favor still boils down to […]

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Gimme Sheltering Sky

December 1, 2009

Being December 1st, today is World AIDS Day—a good day to dedicate some consciousness to those who have died in the past 28 years, to those who today struggle with HIV and AIDS, particularly those without access to health care (in the US this is estimated to be well over three hundred thousand people). Part […]

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The blessing of a power outage

November 30, 2009

On the last full day of hanging with family for the Thanksgiving holiday, I awoke to an unexpected boon, blown in through the wind in the pines—a tree had fallen and with it, the power to the town. With the heat off in the cottage we were renting, staying warm was just enough pretext to […]

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After the Gold Rush… Black Friday?

November 29, 2009

We spent Thanksgiving up in 49er country and it was more than lovely, gathering together as families do from time to time, mingling love, dysfunction, football, excellent food, laughter and poker. The setting— a town that once boomed with gold strikes, saloons and brothels, a stone’s throw from the Empire Mine and its motherlode, now […]

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Is weeping the new Botox?

November 28, 2009

Well, we’re in the official holiday season, and for many of us that means angst and despair peppered in with our joyous feelings of Norman Rockwell family life. As a therapist I have learned the value of feelings—and particularly as a male, it has been a steep and winding road from intellectualized repression to the […]

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Give me liberty or give me lunch

November 27, 2009

When volunteering recently at my kids’ school I had occasion to take a highly informal poll of middle and high school students and thought I’d share my off-the-cuff Studs Terkel findings.  The question:  “If you could have your parents change one thing to make your life better, what would it be?” While not an exhaustive […]

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Thanks

November 26, 2009

“If the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”  (Meister Eckhart, 13th-Century Dominican Mystic) So, thanks for reading. I have written many things:  eighteen as yet unproduced screenplays and one as yet unpublished self-help book—a seven year labor of love that will or won’t find its way in […]

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The secret pain of the entitled child

November 25, 2009

On this week of giving thanks, I thought we might turn our attention to a certain sort of child who tends to try our patience:  the entitled child. Recently my wife was helping serve hot lunch at school when a high school girl asked if she could just “take a water.”  The bottled waters came […]

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The empty chair, the unreturned call—bullies and the parents who don’t parent them

November 24, 2009

An all too common situation that parents confront is when a child is bullied.  This can happen as young as preschool age, and I have been aware of myriad situations where it is mishandled.  On the one hand we can look at how to support a child who is bullied, yet a thornier problem is […]

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Orchid Children

November 23, 2009

A recent Atlantic article by David Dobbs on the “Science of Success,” offers a wealth of insights on parenting kids with highly sensitive genes—or at least genes that put them at risk for depression, ADHD and the like.  While rough and tumble kids might be likened to dandelions, which can grow in any old crack […]

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