Category Archive:
Teaching and learning principles

Gardening: Teaching Children to Love The Earth

gardening teaching children to love the earth

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.Cicero (106 BC –43 BC) The look of wonder in a young child’s eyes reigns eternal, as the magic of a bean sprouting in a paper cup reveals itself. The bean emerging green from the earth begins a youngster’s understanding of a law […]


Balancing Parenthood

listening and following the adult

Every now and then go away, Have a little relaxation, For when you come back to your work Your judgment will be surer; Since to remain constantly at work Will cause you to lose power of judgment. Go some distance away Because the work appears smaller And more of it Can be taken in at […]


The Power Of Family Stories

the power of family stories

Every family, every college, every corporation, every institution needs tribal storytellers. The penalty for failing to listen is to lose one’s history, one’s historical context, one’s binding values. Max De Pree, Leadership Is An Art  On Christmas Eve, the cousins chose to watch The Sound of Music. This surprised me, as the cousins’ ages range […]


Competition

competition

The thirtyish-year-old father stood next to me on the playing field. We were watching his four-year-old son’s soccer team. “I can’t wait until Josh is old enough to play catch with me,” he said. “Josh is old enough to play catch with you now. Matter of fact, if you don’t build that relationship now, when […]


TV Or Not TV, Is That The Question?

tv or not tv is that the question

All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone. Blaise Pascal (1623 -1662) “I can tell you exactly the year that my students changed,” my college professor told our class in the 1970’s. “I’d ask a question and nobody made any attempt to answer it. They thought they were […]


See It In Your Child Video: Meeting The Goal Of Protection

Meeting The Goal Of Protection

In previous sessions we talked about the child’s need to belong, and how a child’s behavior is directed towards getting this emotional connection of belonging. We’ve talked about how a child’s behavior is driven by four unconscious goals: contact, power, protection and withdrawal. Let’s look now at how we can help our children in meeting […]


Economics For Life

beginning a conversation

People are changed not by coercion or intimidation but by example. John C. Maxwell “After you graduate from college and get a job, you’ll have more money,” my grandmother told me, “but you won’t be any happier. You’ll just have a new set of problems.” The years validate the accuracy of my grandmother’s advice. I’m […]


1969…1969…1969

1969...1969...1969

It was a bathroom mirror moment–one of those instants where you stand between two mirrors and see yourself patterned to infinity. Mindy, our neighborhood babysitter, sorted pennies by date, with my daughters, then three and five years old.   I walked in from the dentist office, minus two wisdom teeth. I’ll admit I wasn’t at the […]


Help with Stuttering

children seek to create a flow of activity

“Kate has started to stutter. What should I do? How can I help her?” Doug, father to three-year-old Kate, asked. As we develop spoken language, stuttering is a symptom of expressive skills lagging behind receptive language skills. If we think about receptive language being our reservoir of words and understanding, and expressive language as the […]


When All Else Fails, Sing!

when all else fails sing

The dot on my hand darkened to black, deep black. Wearing a plastic mood dot was part of my stress management class. If all went well, the dot shone blue. If not, it turned shades of bluish-black, to midnight. In my preschool class, over the course of a couple of weeks, I noticed that certain […]