“Something’s not right with me, but I don’t know what it is.”

“I should be happier. What is wrong with me?”

During more than 20 years as a psychologist, I have discovered a powerful and destructive force from people’s childhoods that weighs upon them as adults. It saps their joy, and causes them to feel disconnected and unfulfilled. This childhood force goes completely unnoticed while it does its silent damage to people’s lives. In fact, it’s so invisible that it has flown under the radar of not only the general public, but also the mental health profession.

I call this force childhood emotional neglect, and have spent the last two years trying to help people become aware of it, talk about it, and heal from it.

“[B]eing regularly creative correlates with being a better you, a happier mother, a lighter self with an easier laugh,” writes creativity coach Miranda Hersey in her excellent e-book The Creative Mother’s Guide: Six Practices for the Early Years. (You can read a sample page here.)

But, not surprisingly, expressing your creativity, whether through penning poetry, painting or opening up an Etsy shop, can be incredibly challenging during the early years of motherhood. Your days fly by, a blur of feedings, fatigue, mood fluctuations, swelling to-do lists and profound love for your little one.

In The Creative Mother’s Guide, Hersey, who has five kids herself, shares a variety of valuable tips and other mothers’ stories on living a creative life when your kids are young.

Despite recent attention — and even jail sentences — being handed out for teen bullying, it remains an all-too-common problem. School administrators and parents are often frustrated in trying to curb this behavior. It’s insidious, underground, and few teens want to talk about it openly — out of fear and stigma.

The fear is very real, because adults can’t watch kids and teens every moment of every day. The possibility of repercussions — such as even worse bullying — for reporting bullying behavior reinforce the fear and cycle of bullying.

That’s why it’s so refreshing and gives us hope to have come across this video the other day by 16-year-old Canadian Megan Landry. Join over 105,000 others (as of this writing) who’ve already watched and give a view below.

You suspect your teen is using drugs. Maybe they’re not acting like themselves. Maybe they’re cutting school or shirking other responsibilities. Maybe their grades are dropping. Or their behavior is worsening. Maybe they’ve started hanging out with a bad crowd.

Maybe they’re being secretive and have even stolen money from your wallet. Maybe their physical appearance has changed with rapid weight loss or red eyes. Maybe you’ve noticed a change in their sleep habits, energy level and mood. Maybe you’ve actually found marijuana or other drugs in their room.

Naturally, the thought and possible confirmation of your child using drugs trigger a rush and range of emotions: anger, frustration, disappointment, sadness, fear.

If you think your child is using drugs, how do you approach them? Where do you start?

“For most teens, the Internet is a fundamental part of life,” according to Dana Udall-Weiner, Ph.D, a psychologist who specializes in media literacy. It’s how they communicate and interact. Teens use social media sites like Facebook for everything from casual talks to breakups, she said.

With social media a major part of teens’ lives, it’s important they have a healthy relationship with the Internet. What does this look like?

According to Udall-Weiner, it resembles any healthy relationship: It has boundaries.

It also shouldn’t have to meet all their needs, including emotional, social, intellectual and spiritual, she said. For instance, sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest should never replace face-to-face interactions, she said. Instead, they should supplement them. That’s because online interactions lack the emotional depth and support of real-time relationships. “…[I]t’s hard to know whether someone is trustworthy, loyal, and invested in your well-being.”

One day, when two of my children were only 4 and 3 years old, they wanted to play “let’s pretend” with their dad and me. My older daughter, as older children often do, declared herself the director.

“You and Dad sit over there”, she commanded. “Now, my brother and I are going to be the father and mother you are the day care center.”

With that, the two of them brought us a couple of dolls, kissed them goodbye and went to the next room.

“What happens next?” I called.

“Oh, you play with the babies and then we go to work for awhile and come back and give you a check.”

“And what are you doing at work?” By now I’m curious about where this is going.

“We talk to people and do stuff and get tired.”

With that, they came back in the room, handed us “checks” made of some coupons I had lying around and took their babies off for bath time and stories.

It was hard for my husband and me not to laugh. They were so serious about it. Ahh. A kids’-eye view of adult life. We go do something mysterious at this thing called work, get tired, and then collect them and real life begins again. That was my first indication that maybe we needed to tell our kids a little bit more about the work that took us away from them all day.

There are many reasons why kids need parents. They need parents to love them, teach them, support them, take them places and buy them stuff.

But do you know what else kids need parents for? Want to guess? Whatever you’re thinking is probably true, but I doubt it’s the answer I’m thinking of.

Kids need parents to restrict their freedom.

What?! That sounds like heresy in a freedom-loving culture.

Shouldn’t we all have freedom to follow our desires? To do what we want? To venture down the road we find most appealing? Isn’t that what our social movements (civil rights, women’s movement, gay liberation) have been about? Remove the restrictions! We want the freedom to indulge in our inclinations!

I have read every parenting sleep book that has been published in the last 20 years. I’ve been told by neighbors, mothers, siblings, friends, and strangers why my children don’t sleep and how to make them miraculously nod off.

But 11 years after the first insomniac was born, I’m still exhausted, as I am convinced he emerged from my womb with no need of sleep, and then his sister two years later with the same curse. I’m not sure how it happened, being that I’ve always needed eight hours of sleep to stay sane.

The last two months there has been a lot of cussing in our house after 8 p.m., when we begin the rituals. In desperation I headed to my shelf of expert advice to see if any nuggets in there would apply, or at least not nauseate me. I came away empty-handed. Great intentions. Perfect principles. Wise stuff. Just not going to work on my rebels, who defy traditional rules and procedures.

So I’m back to threatening. However, threatening, itself, can be complicated, and deserves its own guidelines.

Anger is a naturally occurring emotion. However, often people do not express anger in a healthy, appropriate way. They allow frustrations to build up, then reach a point where they erupt.

Over time, pent-up anger and resentment causes tiny problems to become big ones. Anger can become displaced or is expressed in a way that becomes problematic. Many people feel more upset when they realize that they overreact or explode with anger, especially if it causes hurt for themselves or someone else. Thus, it creates the terrible cycle of struggling with anger.

But there is help for anger that doesn’t require you to dig up your past, explore your thoughts, or send letters to a dead loved one. It’s called biofeedback, and it offers individuals readily-learned techniques that are safe and effective (based upon decades’ worth of research).

“You idiot. Can’t you do anything right? I asked you to do a simple task. And what did you do? You screwed it up big time. What the hell is the matter with you?”

Some people believe that humiliation is a good teacher. You gotta learn. You must not forget. You will be punished if you don’t do it right. Humiliation will make a lesson stick.

These folks are right — humiliation is a good teacher.

But the lesson you learn is not what the teacher is intending. You don’t learn to do things better. You don’t learn to upgrade your skills. You don’t learn to trust your ability to learn.

Could the bystander effect be partially to blame for the lack of anyone intervening in the rape and sexual assault of Rehtaeh Parsons and Audrie Pott while it occurred?

The bystander effect is a psychological phenomenon whereas the more people that are present when a person is in distress, the less likely anyone intervenes to help that person. Both cases involved a young girl being sexually assaulted and raped while at a house party with other teenagers.

Add alcohol to the mix — and the emotionally-based (often poor) judgment associated with the teenage years — and yes, it appears to be the perfect recipe for disaster.

Don’t-Know Mind, or Beginners Mind, is a Buddhist principle. It helps remind us that clinging to certainty, although natural, can cause us suffering. In parenting, it can interfere with our children’s innate ability to learn from experience.

There aren’t many jobs we sign up for in life where the stakes are as high as they are in parenting. We are suddenly required to be on call 24/7 without prior training, schooling, or mentoring. No matter how many books we have read, or how many children we have spent time with, we enter this job mostly ignorant of what it entails. Living outside of parenting and observing it is unfathomably different than living inside of it.

In our culture we like to “know” what we are doing. We read books, we do research, we seek control over our lives in myriad ways.

Good parenting, however, requires “don’t-know mind.” It is a letting go of preconceived ideas and a letting go of the notion that we have control over how things are.