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

What 30 years of research reveals about the kids who become the greatest creative achievers—and why your investigative questions matter more than their test scores Creativity runs deep in my family—four generations deep, to be exact. My grandparents on both sides were business owners and creators. My dad is an entrepreneur. My mom is a talented quilter who can also sew and knit. My children's dad's family tells a similar story: entrepreneurs and creative types going back gene

The neuroscience of prospection, the physiology of pessimism, and why peek-a-boo might prevent your next cold ________________________________________________________________________ Working parents lose an average of 11 days per year to illness—their own and their children's combined. That's 11 days of scrambling for backup care, burning through PTO, missing important meetings, and losing income. But what if I told you that how you think about parenting challenges could lit

Your child bursts through the door, eyes absolutely shining with excitement. "Mom! Dad! I got the lead in the school play!" Or: "I made the basketball team!" Or: "Look at this picture I drew!" You have exactly three seconds to respond. And according to Dr. Martin Seligman—founder of positive psychology and my instructor at UPenn—how you respond in that moment will either amplify their joy and strengthen your relationship, or quietly diminish both. Here's what stopped me cold

________________________________________________________________________ If you're a parent, you've no doubt noticed: there's a LOT of parenting advice out there. Sleep training methods. Discipline strategies. Screen time rules. Emotional regulation techniques. Everyone has an opinion, and much of it conflicts. So how do you know what actually works? Here's what I'm learning in my Foundations of Positive Psychology course at the University of Pennsylvania: Most of the 200+ ha

How Investigative Parenting makes room for both boundaries and joy — Investigative Parenting in action: Sometimes the best moments come from embracing the ridiculous together — There's a moment that perfectly captures what I mean by parenting with silliness: It's a rainy Tuesday morning. You're already running five minutes late. Your child spots a puddle and their eyes light up with pure joy and mischief. Most parenting advice would tell you this is a clear teaching moment—st

Defining a framework that empowers parents through strength-based detective work ________________________________________________________________________ If you've encountered the term "investigative parenting" before, you're not alone. From Christian parenting blogs to special needs advocacy to French parenting anthropology, the detective metaphor has appeared in various forms across the parenting landscape. And for good reason—the idea that parents should observe, question,