The (Power) Struggle is Real

As I sit with parents before meeting their children for the first time, I often hear the same things over and over: “It’s a constant power struggle. I can’t trust them to do anything on their own, and I’m exhausted from always having to step in.” This repetitive topic doesn’t come up because the parent…

The Key to Successfully Blending Families

Parenting, itself, is a challenge. But when parents are trying to raise children who are blended from different families, it is an even bigger one. When blending a family, a biological parent may feel disillusion that they found a new partner to share their life with and yet still feel like a single parent! A…

Gratitude-Giving

With everyone’s favorite turkey-eating and cornucopia-decorating holiday just around the corner, I thought it the best time to share a thought about thankfulness versus gratitude. Although the two ideas are often synonymous, there’s an important distinction between the two. Thankfulness is traditionally defined as an expression of appreciation for things received. Being thankful often involves…

Resetting Your Path

We all get off course sometimes.  We face hardship and challenges that derail our plans and cause us to question what we’re doing and where we’re headed.  We make poor choices that take us down dark alleys that seem to have no way out.  Sometimes we’re left spinning out of control, and sometimes we’re stopped…

Retirement: Journeying Toward a Sense of Purpose

“Sense of purpose” is a topic I have researched and thought about for many years. Time and again my personal journey has led me back to the concept that people who have a sense of purpose as they approach retirement seem to live a more satisfying life as they age. I define “sense of purpose”…

Parenting in the Digital Age

Fun social media “facts”: 500 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every second. It would take 158 years to watch every single snapchat story uploaded in just one day. Out of 7 billion people in the world, 3.7 billion own a cell phone, while only 3.5 billion own a toothbrush. Jean Twenge, a generational…