Our parenting needs to give our children the structure and safety they need to sprout and send out roots, without imposing limits on what they can accomplish. These things are rarely taught by words, but by action and experience. Many times we pass on our limiting beliefs to our children without realizing it. They come to accept mental box that we have put around our own lives and possibilities as true for them as well.
Read Morethe parenting files
Worried About School This Year? Don’t Panic. You Already Have Everything You Need.
This approach is something every parent can do. I’ll never forget the day my mom stopped helping me with my homework. It’s a lesson that has stayed with me my whole life. My mother was one of the most natural teachers I’ve ever met. Never the kind of person to […]
Read MoreMy Children Have Always Been Third Culture Kids, and That’s a Good Thing
When you live overseas with children a conversation you might often have is about raising third culture kids, or TCKs. TCK is a term coined to describe people who grow up outside of the culture of their passport country, but also outside of the culture of the places they grow […]
Read MoreThe End of an Era
It was February 2001 when I became pregnant for the first time. That baby is now 17 years old, and probably leaving home in less than a year. Since that day in February when I first conceived I have been either breastfeeding, or pregnant, without any pauses, for 18 years. […]
Read MoreTo my sixth child
Dear Pax, You are perfect! You are everything a little boy should be. You are strong and agile. You climb and jump and ride your little push bike all over the place. You use swords and guns and make little explosion sounds with with your mouth while dramatically dropping into […]
Read MoreWhy your friend with many kids may say no to coffee, even if she wants to go.
Leaving the house alone is always an event for me. Aaron can get up in the morning, get himself dressed, look at his computer for a while and then casually decide to get up and walk out and drive away like it’s no big deal. He’ll be chased down by […]
Read MoreIt’s on me
He took me out for ice cream for my birthday, trying on phrases in the same way he’s trying on manhood for the first time this year. “It’s on me,” he says in the card. He’ll pay, with money he earned. “What can I get?” I ask him in the […]
Read MoreOf Beggars and Boys, and Becoming Men
Sunday night on our way home from the market the clutch went on our car. We pulled over at the first place that seemed like it might have some of the things we needed for a repair. We hadn’t eaten dinner yet, and it was getting late, and the car […]
Read MoreGrowing up
He’s only half awake, angry, because he wet the bed, and he doesn’t usually but he’s been sick, and he’s so eager to be a big kid this week. I take him to the bathroom to shower off and he has to go potty first, sick tummies lead to many […]
Read MoreDear Son, I want you to fail this year
Dear Boy, Twelve years ago today you made me a mother. It didn’t go at all as I had planned, and dreamed about, your birth, but there you were anyway, with a ridge in your forehead and a cone on the back of your head, and so, very, very fragile […]
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