How to Get Your Kid Shot

People keep guns in their homes because they fear break-ins and assaults. In fact, if you keep a gun in your home you increase the odds of someone in your family getting shot by up to 1000%. No, I’m not talking about gun accidents. I’m talking about family members shooting themselves on purpose.
According to an [...]

Create a New Kid by Friday

There’s a hot new book on parenting that’s already #187 on Amazon’s best-seller list. It’s called, “Have a New Kid by Friday: How to Change Your Child’s Attitude, Behavior & Character in 5 Days”, by Dr. Kevin Leman, a psychologist, marriage and family expert, and common guest on “Good Morning America.”
The Chicago Tribune’s Anne Stein [...]

Feminism versus Evolution: Gender Roles

The New York Times wrote a lengthy article bemoaning gender roles in childcare and housework, essentially stating that division of labor in the house had changed little since the 1990’s despite concerted efforts to re-educate society.
Kathleen Parker of The National Review takes it for granted that men and women are simply different. In her article, [...]

Are We Raising a Nation of Wimps?

Hara Marano has written a book entitled “A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting,” and it’s fascinating. In its review, the Wall Street Journal explores both sides of the issue.
On the one hand, the Journal agrees with Marano that “over-involved parents are sapping the will of America’s youth, keeping them from learning [...]

A Stressful Pregnancy Breeds Stressed-Out Kids

This cover story from Time Magazine suggests that we parents have focused our energy in the wrong place. We’re all killing ourselves to provide our children with perfect, trauma-free childhoods. In fact, we can have more positive impact on a child’s life course by focusing on her first 9 months in the WOMB [...]

The Problem With Only Children

I thought this brief article (from Canada’s top newsmagazine, “Maclean’s”) was an excellent summary of the sometimes unhealthy triangle I have observed between parents and their only child. It also addresses the question of whether overparenting stems from true love, or a parent’s hidden agenda:
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/lifestyle/article.jsp?content=20080430_106899_106899
–
David Code is an Episcopal minister, family coach, writer, and [...]

What Do Others Think of You?

Our herd instincts have hard-wired us to worry about what others think of us, but defining ourselves in our family of origin sets us free.
We humans are hard-wired to worry about what other people think of us, because the herd is essential to our survival. In the herds of families or corporations, we know [...]

To Raise Great Kids, Focus on Your Marriage

Building a dependable friendship with your spouse takes the pressure off your kids because they don’t have to become your surrogate friend in an unhealthy codependence. It also sets a great example for them to emulate when they marry and start families. Dependable friendship comes from sharing your thoughts, feelings and dreams with [...]

Your Kid The Harvard Grad Millionaire

In the name of love, we intervene too often in our child’s welfare. We don’t realize we’re messing with Nature’s natural weaning process, and our children pay a huge price for that. Couples may not be aware how the distance between them affects their perception of their child’s alleged “problem.” But the [...]

How We (Lovingly) Shoot Our Kids in the Foot

I will never forget the words of a doctor from Columbia Medical School who specializes in children’s cancer. She said, “I seldom worry about a child’s prognosis when I see her parents fighting with each other. Cancer is a crisis, and all that stress has to go somewhere. It’s the kid whose [...]

Why It’s Easier To Be With Our Kids Than Our Spouse

The mother-infant bond is an animal instinct that is essential to an infant’s survival, and also brings us primal joy as parents. But if we don’t emotionally wean our children, it jeopardizes their future relationships (not to mention our marriage).
The truth is, we often feel more love from our kids than from [...]

Want More Sex With Spouse? Spend More Time With Your Parents.

You may be surprised to learn that having sex releases a hormone in the brain called oxytocin, which is strongly associated with the instincts of both pair-bonding and the mother-infant bond. Given this primal neurochemical link, the goal is to achieve a balance of intimacy and separateness in both relationships. With Mom you [...]

Reduce Divorce and Depression

There’s a reason your long-lost relatives are long-lost. When family members grow apart, it’s a survival mechanism because they overreact to each other. That’s why distancing from family members is a silent killer-you feel relief initially, but the reactivity that drove you apart just festers inside and corrodes your subsequent relationships with others. [...]

Rising Above the Pack in Life

Our herd instinct is the tremendous drive we feel to fit in, to win approval, and to not make waves. The discomfort we feel when others dislike us, criticize us or gossip about us is evidence of our innate pack mentality.
However, thanks to the unique, thinking part of our brain, we humans aspire [...]

Living on Gut Instinct

It’s remarkable how subjective our view of reality is, even when we’re sure we know the “truth”. Humans may wear nice suits and speak sophisticated words, but when it comes to how we view relationships, we might as well be naked in the jungle again, screaming and swinging from tree to tree. What [...]

Why We Argue and How to Reduce It

What do you and your partner argue about? My wife and I tend to blow up over little things. Next, we get upset that were are so upset over such a little thing. Then we blame each other for causing such a big drama in the first place.
And here’s the greatest [...]

The Joy of Blaming Your Spouse Part 2

Imagine a couple where the wife is very dominating, outspoken and critical, while the husband is more passive, distant, and bumbling. She is the blamer of other, and he is the self-blamer. Over the years, this pattern may intensify. She may run the household with an iron fist, while he becomes more [...]

The Joy of Blaming Your Spouse

(This continues from “Why Your Spouse is Wrong”) The second type of couple has one blamer and one self-blamer. Only a minority of folks are self-blamers. They have an uncanny ability to blame themselves for everything that happens to them or around them.
Self-blamers tend to marry the Other-blamers. That seems counter-intuitive, right? Upon closer observation, [...]

Why Your Spouse Is Wrong

Generally speaking, there are two types of couples: 1) The “both blame each other” couple, where there’s open conflict; and 2) The “blamer and self-blamer” couple, where one spouse always blames the other, who submits. Of course, most of us lie somewhere on a continuum: some of us blame our spouse a lot, and some [...]

Why We Hurt Those We Love

As a minister, when I hear divorcees describe their ex-partners, they’ll say, “We grew apart,” or “We had different interests.” In my experience, regardless of what the spouse may be saying, what he or she is really thinking is, “I outgrew my spouse.” I’ve seen very few people file for divorce because they felt their [...]