“You’re acting like your mother!”   How do you feel when you say that to yourself? For some of us, despite early and frequent admonitions it would never happen, that might not be such a bad thing. However, regardless of how positive or negative we have evaluated our experience of being parented; there will be places where we want to do things a little differently. And yet- there we stand- same corny joke, same lecture on making better eating choices, same blurted response as you watch your children fight like little Mixed Martial Arts raccoons re-enacting every violent scene from BBC Planet Earth. Whether we are aware of it or not, how we were cared for dramatically influences how we will care for our children and manage relationships in our lives. Early relationships shape our emotional forms and often do so below the surface. Many of these influences remain dormant, or less visible, until we are in a caregiving role. Children have a wonderful capacity for stripping our emo

Kids freak out. These can be some of the most stressful moments for parents. If you keep reading I'm going to talk about why kids freak out and the most important things we can do to support them when they do. I appreciate that this is a little longer than a typical blog post- but you are on a page with “nerdy” in the title… so it’s kind-of your fault really… Part 1: "I HATE YOU!" It’s 9:00 a.m. and I'm staring out of my office window mesmerized by the power of the water as it whirls and churns as it collides with the pillars of the bridge spanning the Columbia River. The water on the surface looks relatively calm- masking a chaotic torrent of press and stored energy below. The silence in my office is displaced by the ringing of my phone. At the other end of the phone is the mother of an 8-year-old boy. As she recounts the words spoken by her son the night before, they are broken by deep gulps as if the air around her suddenly became too heavy to breath fluidly