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Of Remembering, Mourning, and Striving to Become a Better Parent…

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“What you can do as a parent is “strive to be like them.” The easiest way to do so is to consciously look back to your own childhood. Remember what it was like to be small, culturally disrespected and invisible, and everything that accompanied that, both the good and the bad. In this way you will find in your heart the understanding and empathy that can manifest the respect your child deserves. When you “think like a kid” you minimize the natural and cultural differences between generations to build the strongest, most sound foundation of a healthy relationship as a parent and child.” Want to Be a Better Parent? Think Like a Kid/Be a Better Parent by Thinking Like Kid by Linda Dobson

The first time I felt someone truly understood how difficult my childhood had truly been was when reading a book on alcohol and substance addiction when earning my MA in Psychology.

The most powerful and profound aspect of the text was the author’s clear and precise description of how

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Of Responsibility, Daughters and The Decision of Motherhood…

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Emilie Mendala-Mathew writes in her recent article, “Mother-Daughter Relationships Associated With Mental Well-Being,” that, “The quality of relationship between a mother and daughter has been linked to the daughter’s mental health.”

Says Rosalind Barnett at the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley, College, Wellesley, MA, “Daughters who report healthy relationships with their mothers also report high self-esteem, positive outlooks on life, and fulfillment in different areas of their lives.”

Likewise, Barnett adds, “Positive aspects of the mother-daughter relationship can result from daughters feeling cared about, mothers expressing interest in daughters’ life, mothers supporting daughters’ family choices and personal decisions, mothers being dependable, and effective communication.”

Well how original?

This is not to discredit Barnett’s work or assertions. They

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Of Mothers, Nurturing and A Child’s Brain…

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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 Daughters, Actions and Self-Awareness…

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“[D]aughters can model a great deal from a mother who is self-aware herself,” says Juanita Johnson in, Know Thyself First (Part 6 of Our Mothers, Ourselves: Mother-Daughter Relationships)

A storyteller and psychotherapist, who, along with her 27-year-old-daughter gives talks and workshops on the mother-daughter relationship, Johnson adds, “…I observe quite frequently that [a] mother knows so very little about her own self…[and instead] plac[es] way too much emphasis on how her daughter turns out rather than examining, ‘What [what she, the mother] do I know[s] about [her] self and how [she] feel[s] about [her]self…”

After reading this I immediately realized why I have felt such

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Of Love, Nurturing and Outliers…

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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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Of Health, Well-Being and A Mother’s Love…

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A new study, Mother’s Love Can Prevent Illness in Middle Age, at Brandeis University now suggests that, “…a mother’s love expressed each day keeps the doctor way, most particularly in mid-life.”

When examining children from poverty-stricken situations, researchers learned, and not too surprisingly, that these children grow up to become adults who suffer from numerous chronic illnesses. And yet there are those children who, despite coming from poor backgrounds, experience good physical health and mental well-being.

Why?

Bucking what I would call

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Of Actions, Integrity and Trusting Our Choices…

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In stating, “…mothers and daughters cannot serve as best friends to the other…,” Linda Perlman Gordon and Susan Morris Shaffer add in an excerpt from Too Close for Comfort: Questioning the Intimacy of Today’s New Mother-Daughter Relationship , that the …basic question… a mother must answer is: “…Do you trust your daughter to be an independent and self-sufficient woman? Can you support her in making choices and doing things differently from how you would do them?”

The answer a mother offers lies within her ability or inability to trust

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