BOOK REVIEW.
"It was the impurity in her heart that made her successful. She was an ordinary woman who’d made extraordinary mistakes. She understood every nuance of need and loss." ~ Summer Island Given my love for women’s fiction, I’m enthusiastic when I discover a new writer’s collection. Happily, best-selling author Kristin Hannah captured my interest immediately with ...

It's a fact. Kids lose academic ground during the summer months. Come September, even the best students are several weeks behind where they were in June. Struggling students can lose up to two months. This is especially true in math and ...

One week not long ago, I found myself busier than normal and unable to do my daily workouts. I didn’t worry because I knew I would get back to my routine the following week. ...

Disclaimer: The characters from these vignettes are fictitious. They were derived from a composite of people and events for the purpose of representing real-life situations and psychological dilemmas. Couples commonly talk about feeling unsupported ...

A recent TV ad says it all. It follows a mom through her day with a little boy who appears to have some kind of developmental delay. The voice-over tells us ...

BOOK REVIEW.
This is truly a book I wish I’d had years ago. The aptly-titled Things I Wish I’d Known: Cancer Caregivers Speak Out, by Deborah J. Cornwall, is a welcome resource for those struggling to help the people they love who have cancer. My grandmother, mother, father, and wife all had cancer. My mother was a caregiver for both ...

“I’ve had it.” The parent on the phone is incensed. “The teacher just won’t listen to me. My child needs more individual attention. She isn’t a bad kid. She just needs more help. She’s on an education plan ...

One of the most heartbreaking aspects of my son Dan’s descent into severe obsessive-compulsive disorder was his progressive isolation from his friends. Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence for those with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and often becomes a ...

Naming a time for awareness brings an issue into focus. It gives us a reason to do something extra (such as post this article) to help more people understand it. It makes people who are dealing with it feel less alone, ...

BOOK REVIEW.
One of the quintessential “bad” mommy characters that many are familiar with is Joan Crawford, a.k.a. “Mommy Dearest.” Who can forget that terrifying scene from the movie with the wire hangers? Personally, I do not keep a single wire hanger in my home because of the film -- I worry that the ghost of Joan ...

One of the most common manifestations of obsessive-compulsive disorder is the need for reassurance. “Are you sure it’s okay if I do this or that?” “Are you sure nobody got ...

It’s a problem that is probably as old as time. Adult children don’t always choose the mate their parents want for them. Shakespeare immortalized it in Romeo and Juliet. A central theme in the Broadway musical, Fiddler ...