Category - Parenting

“She’s nice.” “Niiiiicccce!” says my son, ogling the Rolls Royce parallel-parked outside a downtown Boston McDonald’s. (Yup, really….) Nice. (Sarcasm oozing, eyes rolling, when we witness someone else’s blunder.) That was a kind thing to do! Often we consider “nice” and “kind” to be interchangeable descriptors. But let’s try a quick experiment. Try replacing “kind” for “nice” in each of the first three statements above. “Kind” only works for the first, but not for the second or third. We would not describe an expensive car (or any other pricey, stylish object) as kind, or, at least in current vernacular, use…

Change isn’t easy. Especially when it is isn’t our choice, and even when it is. But the ability to adapt to change is a necessity it order to survive or simply to thrive. From an evolutionary standpoint, adaptation is the biological mechanism by which organisms adjust to new environments or to changes in their current environment.  There are two ways that living beings adapt–biologically and behaviorally. In this post, I’m going to focus on behavioral adaptation. We are in the middle of a world-wide out-of-control experiment with a novel virus. Behavior is at the epicenter of the crisis. Current advice…

The dad executes a ballet leap worthy of a severe hamstring injury and joyfully hook-shots boxes of pencils and packs of lined paper into a shopping cart. His son and daughter trudge behind, lower lips protruding enough that birds could comfortably perch upon them. Remember that commercial for back-to-school shopping? Remember feeling that relief (It’s ok to admit it, you are among friends here) when the calendar flipped to August? Remember normal back-to-school shopping? It’s hard to believe that was only a year ago. And now this anticipated ritual is changed in ways we could never have imagined. Not only…