Three weeks ago, I logged into my first class in Seattle University's Clinical Mental Health Counseling program. Back in 2011, I started studying for the GRE with a similar intention. Then life happened, and that path got set aside before I ever sent an application. So opening my laptop that first night felt bigger than the start of a semester. It felt like picking up a thread I'd put down fifteen years ago. I expected to be busy, and I am. What I didn't expect was how quickl

People are sometimes surprised by this. They book a call expecting a list. What to say at bedtime. What to do about the hitting. The three steps for getting out the door. It's a fair thing to expect. Most parenting help comes in that shape. And when you're tired, and it's the fourth rough night in a row, a script sounds like mercy. Here's my hesitation with tips: they work right up until the moment you need them. In a calm moment, you can remember the script. In the moment th

Almost every parent I sit with has said some version of this to me at some point: "I said the exact thing my mom used to say, and I hate that I said it." It's usually a small thing. A tone. A phrase. A way of going quiet instead of talking something through. And it comes out of nowhere, mid-sentence, mid-moment, and lands with this strange double feeling: it worked, in the sense that the kid stopped whatever they were doing, and it also felt like betraying something you promi

There's a voice a lot of parents carry that says some version of: you don't know enough, you're not doing enough, if you were really good at this it wouldn't be this hard. I hear it almost every week, in different words. A parent will tell me about a hard morning, a meltdown, a missed moment, a short temper, and somewhere in the retelling, the voice slips in. Not loud. Usually just a quiet aside, almost apologetic: I should know how to handle this by now. Here's what I don't

There's a question I ask almost every parent in our very first session together, before we've talked about bedtime, or siblings fighting, or the thing that made them finally reach out. Most people can't answer it right away. Not because it's complicated. It's actually a short question, six words, maybe seven. But it tends to land somewhere people haven't been asked to look in a long time, and I watch it happen almost every time: a pause, a little laugh that isn't really a lau

Think of the last small moment that knocked you off center. Not a crisis, something tiny. A shoe that wouldn't go on. A question asked for the fifth time. A tone you didn't love. And something in you got sharp, or cold, or tight, in a way that felt just a little bigger than the moment deserved. Here's what most of us do next: we go straight to the fix. We rush to smooth it over, get the shoe on, get everyone out the door, and quietly file the moment away as "not my best," so