Seven tips for concerned grandparents
If you’re concerned about your child’s parenting style, you’re not alone. Here are a few ways to mitigate conflict in your relationship with your adult children and grandchildren.
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A son’s wisdom and a father’s vulnerability
Something beautiful happened a few months ago as my wife and I were editing a new book on the parable of life with our son Edward – who has Down syndrome. We were working on a chapter that explored the challenge between “choosing for Edward” and “letting him choose,” when he came down the stairs…
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Still learning, ten years on
Going through my inbox the other day, an email caught my attention. It invited me to participate in a research project examining “caregiver burden” in families of children with medical complexity. I completed the survey, but I also wrote to the research team to ask about their choice of language. By using the word “burden,”…
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Healing heartbreak
This past Spring, I read Let Your Heartbreak be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation by Episcopal priest Adam Bucko. I considered my life and saw that my heart had been repeatedly broken. I revised the question to: What is my greatest heartbreak? It didn’t take long for the answer to emerge – my failings…
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Caregiving can be told two ways
I had dinner with some new friends last month; all of us are caregivers of children with disabilities and developmental challenges. At one point, we discussed the question, “If you could change anything about your child, would you?” It sparked some deep reflections about making changes for our children versus making changes about them. Several…
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Right to learn
This September the usual back-to-school focus on new pencils and a different classroom sits on the surface of a boiling cauldron of controversial issues in education. From nursery schools to elite universities, education has become one of the biggest battlegrounds in the contest to control and shape social development in Canada and the U.S. In…
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Selecting literature
In my last column, I suggested that parents and teachers have a responsibility to vet the appropriateness of the materials that their children read, but that care must be taken not to judge a literary work on superficial moralistic grounds. An example of this moralistic impulse is the frequent banning of Mark Twain’s classic, The…
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Children are a gift, not benchmarks of your success
Parents today spend almost twice as much time with their kids than parents in the 1960s did. And this intensive commitment is not simply the result of fathers taking on a greater role in childcare. Believe it or not, mothers also spend more time with their kids now than in the 1960s – even as…
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The last Koyzis
My Dutch Canadian friends and acquaintances tell stories of how, in 1811, Napoleon compelled residents of the Netherlands to adopt surnames. Prior to that year, many people in the Low Countries had gone by patronymics based on their respective fathers’ first names. Assuming that surnames were a passing fashion, many Netherlanders adopted humorous names, with…
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Good decisions in a hospital room require trust and teamwork
How do you make decisions? Are you a pros-and-cons list maker, weighing each side like it’s a courtroom debate? Or maybe you like to test-drive your choices (my preference): Pretend you’ve picked one path for a few days just to see how it sits with you, then flip to the other and compare. Making medical…
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The good of marriage
Two months ago, our daughter Theresa married Paul in a downtown church here in Hamilton. Four days later Nancy and I celebrated our 29th wedding anniversary. Then, a week and a half after that, we attended the wedding of Nancy’s niece in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’ve not written about marriage very often in this space,…
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Summer breeze
Who doesn’t love July – summer in all its youthful exuberance? Happy childhood memories waft into my mind on the warm breeze. I remember days floating on my back in Lake Erie’s waves, gazing into a sky so deeply blue I imagined it might swallow me whole. Or afternoons spent pumping hard on my bicycle,…
