Every evening before bedtime, a Japanese parenting practice suggests asking your child one simple question. Not a quiz. Not a test. Just a question — the kind that opens a door and then steps back to see who walks through it. It sounds almost too small to matter. But in all my years of sitting on living room floors with families, watching children find their voices, and coaching parents through some of their most uncertain moments, I've learned that questions are the most und

The most important work often looks like nothing at all. He had been at it for about five minutes. Flipping the bowl. Spinning it on the kitchen floor. Throwing it — not in frustration, not in protest, just in pure, focused fascination — and then retrieving it and starting again. His parents sat at the table with me, reviewing the joint plan from our previous visit. We talked about progress, routines, what they'd noticed since we last met. Meanwhile, Ronan orbited the bowl. T

A Stoic's Unexpected Gift to Exhausted Parents A morning that holds everything at once. The light doesn't ask what you can handle. Sunday morning. I woke up to a text from my daughter Stella, sent at 12:18 in the morning while I slept. She was freaking out. Her boyfriend had gotten too drunk (he's pledging a fraternity at their university, which says it all), raised his voice at her when she tried to suggest he drink water, and she had misplaced her David Yurman bracelet. At

The moments after a rupture — when we come back — are the ones that shape us most. Stella was home for spring break last week. One morning I found her in the kitchen, and before she even said a word, I could see it — the smile that is usually right there on her face had been replaced by something heavier. Her eyes filled up. She leaned into me without saying anything, and I just wrapped my arms around her and squeezed. Her arms stayed down at her sides. She whimpered softly,

The worksheet Brooklyn brought me one Thursday morning. She was just making something pretty. Every Thursday morning, I walk into a preschool classroom and a little girl looks up from whatever she's doing and says the same thing: "Wait! I have something for you." Then she goes to her cubby. This particular Thursday, she came back with a worksheet. At the top, in cheerful block letters: When I Am 100 Years Old... She had filled in the self-portrait box with stickers. A bunny t

The future belongs to children who are free to face it — not weighed down by the wrong scorecard. Last week, as I was clearing out the Old Gray Mare before she got towed, I took the bumper magnets off my car. VT. VCU. JMU. The Mill. GCM. Each one cut to the shape of its own letters — no uniform ovals, just the distinct outlines of my people and the places that shaped them. Stella is still being shaped by JMU — she's only a freshman. And Sam is still being shaped by Marshall H

The steering wheel of Chip's 2010 Ford F-150 — hands that once touched it, and hands that never wanted to let it go. I ran my hands over it one last time on Friday morning. The steering wheel is wood-grain and brown leather, worn smooth in the places where his hands rested most. For nearly six years, I have placed my own hands in those same spots — driving to work, to my group class at a CrossFit gym, to Ohio, to Vermont — and felt something I can only describe as tethered. C

The bowl I repaired after Chip died. The crack is filled with gold. That's the point. On the morning of February 18th, before I knew anything about what I would find at the end of my drive, I left Virginia at 5am headed to Cleveland Clinic. My dad had been hospitalized. The details were still unclear. And somewhere in those early, dark miles on the I-70 en route to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, my brain did something I didn't consciously choose: it reached for grief. I turned on

Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is depend on ourselves I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. When Blanche DuBois speaks this line in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire , it's one of the most heartbreaking moments in American theater. She's being led away to a psychiatric hospital, utterly broken, clinging to the validation of a stranger because she has nothing left inside herself to hold onto. Blanche is tragic not because she needed help—we all

My curated end table—where iron and glass, solidity and transparency, grief and flight live together in two square feet There's a small table in my office that I can see from my desk where I write. It sits by the window, catching morning light, and every object on it was chosen with intention after Chip died. The base is made of iron—strong, sturdy, unyielding—fashioned into branches with a single bird perched among them. The top is glass, transparent enough to see straight t

I was scrolling through Facebook last week when two images stopped me cold. The first: Vice President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush in their bedroom at Walker's Point in Kennebunkport, Maine, summer of 1987. They're still in bed at 6 a.m., surrounded by a joyful pile of six grandchildren tumbling in for morning cuddles. The chaos is palpable—kids climbing, laughing, creating the kind of beautiful mess that only grandparents' beds seem to invite. The photo was taken by the

Sometimes the child we fear becoming a parent to is exactly the teacher we need There are moments in parenting that split your life into "before" and "after." Mine came in a doctor's office in 1995, staring at an amniocentesis result that read: Female . I was 21 weeks pregnant with my first child. I'd insisted on finding out the sex because I needed to prepare myself psychologically. I wanted a boy. No—I needed  a boy. I grew up the only girl among four brothers. I was a tomb

Keeping room in your heart for the unimaginable—for who your children are becoming, not just who you assumed they'd be. A few weeks ago, my oldest daughter Calli sent me something from Paris that stopped me in my tracks. It was an Instagram post from @itsall.fluff—a split-screen image showing a woman at her wedding in one frame and young girls screaming at a concert in the other. The concert photo was from the 1980s, my coming-of-age decade. The text read: "The moment you rea

Saying goodbye at the airport never gets easier I cried from the security checkpoint all the way back to my car. Then I had to pull myself together to pay the parking fee. My daughter Eva had just disappeared through airport security, heading back to Vietnam where she teaches English. We had stood together in the check-in line, dragging out those last precious minutes. When it was time for her to go through security—the point where I couldn't follow anymore—we both cried. "I

Have you ever watched your child throw a tantrum in the grocery store and thought, "There HAS to be a better way"? NPR journalist Michaeleen Doucleff felt exactly that way. As a science reporter with a PhD, she dove into the parenting research—and found it frustratingly limited. But when she visited a Maya village in the Yucatan Peninsula on assignment, something shifted. She witnessed parents raising extraordinarily kind, generous, and helpful children without yelling, naggi

No one tells you that the hardest parenting moments might come after your children are grown. It was Christmas Eve. Twenty-three people in my parents' house in Ohio. Different generations, different perspectives, different backgrounds—even within a family. The chaos was joyful until it wasn't. My adult son and oldest adult daughter started arguing. Not the mild disagreement kind. The kind where my son called my daughter names—one of the destructive relationship habits we'd st

A reflection on witnessing, wondering, and learning to love across the gap As a speech-language pathologist, I've spent 30+ years helping children find their voice. But Annie Ernaux, the Nobel Prize-winning author, wrote something that stopped me cold: "I will never hear the language my mother spoke." She wrote it in A Woman's Story , her tender and unflinching account of her mother's life and death. It's a meditation on the unbridgeable distance that can exist between people

You know that feeling when you're drowning in the daily chaos of parenting - the negotiations over vegetables, the battles over bedtime, the endless "but WHY?" questions - and you just want someone to tell you you're doing it right? Here's what I've learned after 30+ years working with families: sometimes the answer isn't about doing it "right." Sometimes it's about stepping back far enough to remember what you're actually doing. The Astronaut's View of Parenting When astrona

Does your family function well when you focus on what's wrong with your child's behavior, or does your family thrive when you investigate what's going right? That question—adapted from journalism researcher Cathrine Gyldensted's work on constructive journalism—has been rattling around in my brain all week as I dive deeper into my University of Pennsylvania Foundations of Positive Psychology course. Gyldensted asks a similar question about journalism: Does society function wel

Joy and me celebrating at the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA) 2025 conference I went to Washington D.C. last week for my professional conference. The plan was simple: earn my continuing education credits, attend some presentations, maybe network a little. Check the boxes. Stay current. Go home. I did all of that. But I also came home with something I didn't expect. Her name is Joy. I'd stopped at a display celebrating the centennial anniversary of my profe