nurturing

The Star of Spring in Japan by David A. LaSpina 8619211980_2ba7cc0504_b.jpg

Of Text Messages, Letters and Maslow’s Highest Level of Needs …

Around eleven-thirty last evening I received a text from our youngest daughter stating that she and her schoolmates had arrived safely in Japan.

“We’re here and everything is good,” she had written. “I love you,” along with her code for letting me know she sent the text.

I wrote back,

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Of American Children, The Matsikenga, and Self-Absorption …

Elizabeth Kolbert asks in her New Yorker article, Spoiled Rotten, “Why do kids rule the roost?”

More specifically she poses the question, “Why are American kids so spoiled?”

On spending several months living with and observing the Matsigenka tribe of the Peruvian Amazon, Carolina Izquierdo, a medical anthropologist at UCLA, grew impressed with the helpfulness and responsibility of Yanira, a six-year-old girl and member of a family within the Matsigenka tribe of 12,000.

Dr. Izquierdo witnesses Yanira’s self-less behavior, what some might call daily altruism, when she and Yanira accompanied a third family of the Matsigenka on an expedition down the Urubamba River for gathering leaves from the kapashi palm tree used to build roofs for the Matsigenka’s houses.

During the trip, Yanira, not a member of the family she and Dr. Izquierdo had accompanied, assisted others in performing daily chores and tasks without having to be asked.
Yanira made herself useful and all the while, Kolbert writes, “ … asked for nothing …”

This ability to give assistance without request, and in so doing,

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Of Daughters, Healing and Living with Intent…

The most difficult aspect of raising our middle daughter has been the clarity of self that her presence in my life has delivered.

From the moment I realized my water had broken–I had been lying in bed–to her entrance into the world 45 minutes later–I pushed only 3 times–to when the nurse handed her to me and I placed her to my breast she had mirrored aspects of myself long hidden and yet to make their existence known.

When arriving home 12 hours later and preparing to feed her, our middle daughter, who exudes

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Of Mothers, Nurturing and A Child’s Brain…

It makes sense to me…

“We can now say with confidence that the psychosocial environment has a material impact on the way the human brain develops,” said Dr. Joan Luby, psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO, and head researcher of the study that is a larger part of a larger project tracking the development of early onset depression in children.

Vanguard theories of psychology has fairly unanimously asserted and demonstrated that the psychosocial environment of an individual affects that person’s emotions.

The majority of us who have spent any significant amount of time in psychotherapy as a client have

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Of Love, Nurturing and Outliers…

In a culture where citizens and institutions emphasize work and accumulation of wealth, and where ascertaining the basic necessities of life cost a small fortune, all of us can easily descend into believing, and rather unconsciously, that lacking a trust fund in which to dip our fingers and secure these necessities, along with the various accoutrements society demands we provide our children–iphones, their own personal computer, ipads, ipods, televisions, designer shoes, etc–we lack what it takes to parent well.

And yet parents who possess tons of

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