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

Somewhere in the third trimester, people start saying it. Let me know if you need anything. Your mother-in-law says it. Your coworkers say it. Your neighbor says it over the fence. And most of us answer the same way. Thanks! We're good. We plan for the baby's needs. Ours are harder to say out loud. There's a registry for the baby. There is no registry for the person who will be awake at 3 a.m. wondering if she's allowed to wake someone up. Meal trains. Night help. Someone to

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

When something isn't going well with our kids, it's pretty natural to start with the kid. How do I get her to stop melting down? How do I get him to listen? What should I say when she talks to me like that? How do I get them to stop fighting? What consequence should I use? I've asked those questions, too. But what if sometimes we're starting in the wrong place? What if, before asking How do I change what my child is doing?, we got curious about what their behavior is doing in