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He may have been the young man I remember walking down the hall toward me from reception. On a Saturday night his single row of shoulder length hair would have been backcombed and doused with enough got to be glue that it would stand up an impressive 9 inches off his head. In that moment,... Read More

As I write this, yesterday was Thanksgiving and 2025 is coming to a close so I’m pretty wrapped up in wrapping up a mixed bag of a year. I think a lot about the effects of our current digital world on our children. Before laptops and cell phones, there were radios and televisions. Watching the... Read More

Some of you live with young adults facing a workplace unlike anything you have experienced. I remember when an oil company where I worked embarked upon the process of converting from punch card data entry to dumb terminal user data entry. I was their selected trainer (much to my surprise). I trained about 200 people... Read More

I want to discuss boundaries today from two different perspectives: boundaries or the lack thereof often observed in children with chronic trauma histories and boundaries for you as caretaker. This won’t be easy. It won’t be easy for me and it won’t be easy for you. Promise. Boundaries serve us and protect us. They organize... Read More

How do we prepare a young human to enter the adult world ready to participate? Let’s take a few minutes to look a little closer at our parental roles with an eye to which ones work toward this goal and which work against it. Those that are critical for children under 7 must yield to... Read More

I’m continually amazed by how much time I spend considering the human condition. As a child, I remember thinking that my family was one of a kind and that Leave it to Beaver was showing me what all other families were like. My aspirations tended toward helping teens realize their power to live lives vastly... Read More

It’s humbling to consider what’s happening in the brain of an infant. Even before birth, a fetus is shaped by its mother’s rhythms—walking, sleeping, talking—as well as her emotions and the substances she ingests, from caffeine to sedatives. These experiences can cause obvious outcomes like neonatal withdrawal, but also subtler, long-term neurological changes. Parents who... Read More

Tears 101 I’ve mentioned before the value of daily meditation. Well, this morning found me looking for a guided meditation that promised a less self-destructive dopamine hit than I’d been enjoying all week. I’ve been getting waaay too much this week by eating waaay too many sweets while wallowing in grief. I was desperate for... Read More

Whose Fault Is It? My 11-year-old granddaughter urgently asked me to take her to get two cocoas before she left for an event Saturday. Up here in Flagstaff, there were about 6 inches of snow on the ground. It was cold! When I declined to leave the warmth of my house and the project I... Read More

WHERE DO I COME FROM? Call me Cathy. Cathy with a C, please. I have a vague memory that I was named after my dad’s former girlfriend. I was my mother’s 5th pregnancy, first live birth. I am my dad’s second born; a half sister was 6 years older. I had 3 younger sisters. We... Read More