Welcome,

For more than a year, I have been writing a blog for a website for parents and enjoyed that experience very much. The more I wrote for them, the more I realized that I had a whole lot to say, and I felt that I wanted to do that through my own medium.  In the Families Matter blog, I would like to take this further and bring the focus back to things that we can do as parents and families to learn from our kids, ourselves and society.

As parents, I believe it is our task to grow throughout our lives and recognize that our children can be our greatest teachers. We owe it to ourselves and our kids to be aware and look at what they are trying to teach us. With our apparent addictions to materialism, focus on sensationalism, and need to keep up with our finances (to name a few), I’m sure you’ll agree that there are so many things in our culture that can sidetrack us from what is truly important in our lives. We can all feel overwhelmed by any number of life issues, yet if we are going to make a difference in the lives of our children, we have to be willing to understand ourselves.

It is my belief that the way we grow is through understanding the emotions we feel, not avoiding them, because every emotion has a positive purpose. Unfortunately, society tells us that emotions are things that we are supposed to hide or use to manipulate ourselves and/or others. We often look at our lives and emotions as being good or bad, right or wrong, strong or weak. Our goals are to appear to be winners instead of losers, so we want to hide or avoid the emotions that look bad, wrong, or weak and often are not honest with ourselves as much as we may not be honest with others.

Another issue that I see in our culture is that we enable victims. When we don’t like something that happened to us, we often take a victim role; when we want to feel better about ourselves, we then look to play rescuer to “prospective victims.” What we need to recognize is that we all have played the victim, persecutor, and rescuer in our lives and even have instigated some of these issues. Your kids have often learned to play these roles from you and from society. I will weave these lessons and examples into the blog entries as time goes on.

I hope to use examples from my own life as well as items in the news and society in my blog, and I promise to preserve the integrity of those I my weave within. I think that many of the parenting issues presented by people in the media provide great lessons to us all, not to point the finger at them, but to look at the three fingers pointing back at ourselves to see what we can learn.

I look forward to hearing from you all.

Dr. E…