I’m delighted to add new resources to my website: the self-compassion videos and tip sheet from the Mothercare studies. The Mothercare resources are for mothers of babies and they were developed by Dr James Kirby and Dr Stanley Steindl. They have been used in two studies, one a micro-RCT. In the RCT we found benefits […]
Today was an historic day – the first COVID19 vaccine in Australia, with phase one of the national roll out to begin tomorrow. And do you know what we did in our family to mark the occasion? We baked a cake. Two cakes, in fact, one representing COVID19 and the other the vaccine. Back in […]
2020 has been quite the year. And, like many of us, I felt the need to see it out the door and begin 2021 well. It was the right year to begin a new New Year’s tradition with the kids, and here is what I came up with: We each created three drawings: Everything about […]
What a year 2020 has been for all of us. As we all stumble out of 2020 and look blinkingly and hopefully to the future, I’d like to take a moment to wish you and your family all the best. I hope you find a moment’s pause in all the holiday excitement for a little […]
We are living in challenging times, extraordinary times. Challenging times to parent. As, like everyone, I reel with the shock of the pandemic and its implications I’ll share with you a few of my thoughts: The great blessing of COVID 19, as horrific as it is, is the fact that all the evidence to date […]
“But that’s not fair!” It is a favourite phrase of children everywhere. But how should a parent respond? By righting the injustice? Or by explaining that life isn’t always fair? Well, firstly it is important to understand why your child is saying “but that’s not fair!” As in the function of the behaviour. […]
To me, one of the most wondrous aspects of parental love is the sheer unconditionality of it. We fall madly in love with our children before we even know, in any real sense, who our children are. Parental love is wide open, spacious and infinitely curious to discover. It can be tempting, oh so tempting, […]
Good parenting is an artful mix of loving, responsive, sensitive caregiving on one hand, and discipline, raising expectations and teaching new skills on the other. Both are needed. Many of our stuff ups as parents can be understood as getting the mix wrong. Maybe we realise that we expected far too much of our child […]
As a psychologist, there is a lot of pop psychology advice that I really hate. One of the simplistic pieces of pop psychology advice that I loathe is the idea that you can easily add new activities to a busy life by simply getting up earlier. Want to meditate? Exercise more? Write a novel? Simple! […]
Mindfulness is the ability to stay psychologically present in the here and now of your life. It is a skill and, like any other skill, you can improve with practice. Just as the psychological sciences are starting to really flesh out the benefits of mindfulness, mindfulness has broken into popular culture and the mindfulness craze […]