Parallel Parenting Quotes

I see things in windows and I say to myself that I want them. I want them because I want to belong. I want to be liked by more people, I want to be held in higher regard than others. I want to feel valued, so I say to myself to watch certain shows. I watch certain shows on the television so I can participate in dialogues and conversations and debates with people who want the same things I want. I want to dress a certain way so certain groups of people are forced to be attracted to me. I want to do my hair a certain way with certain styling products and particular combs and methods so that I can fit in with the In-Crowd. I want to spend hours upon hours at the gym, stuffing my body with what scientists are calling 'superfoods', so that I can be loved and envied by everyone around me. I want to become an icon on someone's mantle. I want to work meaningless jobs so that I can fill my wallet and parentally-advised bank accounts with monetary potential. I want to believe what's on the news so that I can feel normal along with the rest of forever. I want to listen to the Top Ten on Q102, and roll my windows down so others can hear it and see that I am listening to it, and enjoying it. I want to go to church every Sunday, and pray every other day. I want to believe that what I do is for the promise of a peaceful afterlife. I want rewards for my 'good' deeds. I want acknowledgment and praise. And I want people to know that I put out that fire. I want people to know that I support the war effort. I want people to know that I volunteer to save lives. I want to be seen and heard and pointed at with love. I want to read my name in the history books during a future full of clones exactly like me. The mirror, I've noticed, is almost always positioned above the sink. Though the sink offers more depth than a mirror, and mirror is only able to reflect, the sink is held in lower regard. Lower still is the toilet, and thought it offers even more depth than the sink, we piss and shit in it. I want these kind of architectural details to be paralleled in my every day life. I want to care more about my reflection, and less about my cleanliness. I want to be seen as someone who lives externally, and never internally, unless I am able to lock the door behind me. I want these things, because if I didn't, I would be dead in the mirrors of those around me. I would be nothing. I would be an example. Sunken, and easily washed away.

My feelings towards it can only be paralleled by that of a doting parent towards an idiot child.

But she knew it would never happen. She had no intention of visiting him there. Even if she were open to the idea, as Mom and Dad both hoped she would be, the mathematics of it seemed utterly impossible to her. What was she supposed to do, spend Christmas there and Easter here? See her dad every other holiday and one week during the summer, just enough to glimpse his new life in fragments, tiny slivers of a world she had no part in? And all the while missing out on those moments of her mom’s life—her mom, who’d done nothing to deserve to spend Christmas alone? That, it seemed to Hadley, was no way to live. Perhaps if there were more time, or if time were more malleable; if she could be both places at once, live parallel lives; or, simpler yet, if Dad would just come home. Because as far as she was concerned, there was no in-between: She wanted all or nothing, illogically, irrationally, even though something inside of her knew that nothing would be too hard, and all was impossible.

You did not create their disorder; you do not control it; nor are you responsible for it.

Pop says cops and courts no longer protect citizens, so citizens must protect themselves.” “I’m afraid he’s right.” “My husband, I can’t evaluate my opinions of right and wrong because I learned them from my parents and haven’t lived long enough to have formed opinions in disagreement with theirs.” “Deety, your parents did okay.

In fact, the same intervention or response may even have the opposite effect on two different clients with contrasting developmental histories and cultural contexts. For example, if a client’s parent was distant or aloof, the therapist’s judicious self-disclosure may be helpful for the client. In contrast, the same type of self-disclosure is likely to be anxiety-arousing for a client who grew up serving as the confidant or emotional caregiver of a depressed parent. Greater sharing with the therapist may help the first client learn that, contrary to her deeply held beliefs, she does matter and can be of interest to other people. In contrast, for the second client, the same type of self-disclosure may inadvertently impose the unwanted needs of others and set this client back in treatment as, in her mind, she experiences herself back in her old caretaking role again—this time with the therapist. This unwanted reenactment occurs because the therapeutic relationship is now paralleling the same problematic relational theme that this client struggled with while growing up.

What possessed us? We were so happy! Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on this outrageous gamble of having a child? Of course you consider the very putting of that question profane. Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't.

think,” he said, “that a man who is surrounded exclusively by women, without a single male friend, shouldn’t be entirely trusted. A man who ignores anybody who can’t further his career or whom he doesn’t want to sleep with can’t be entirely trusted. I think that a thirty-six-year-old man who blames his parents for everything that’s currently wrong in his life…” He dropped the parallel, paused. “I think he’s dangerous.

A reader might think that this is, obviously, a kind of misplaced parental anxiety and love. And they might be right. But I felt like I was losing my mind. There was no trust, no affection, no listening, just ignorant micromanagement. It felt like I was existing in a parallel universe where everything I'd just done with my life, everything I was doing with my life, hadn't made any difference at all. I was a kid again, useless. Nothing was mine—not my time, not my schedule, not my choices.

But what’s perfectly obvious in the realm of geography is not so obvious in those other arenas. And, as we are about to discover, what’s true geographically is equally true relationally, financially, physically, and academically. There is a parallel principle that affects parenting, dating, marriage, our emotions, our health, and a host of other areas as well. Just as there are physical paths that lead to predictable physical locations, there are other kinds of paths that are equally predictable.

Youth. Particularly hard hit is the younger generation that faces an economic situation for which it has been inadequately prepared. Imbued with the unrealistic expectation of continuing economic prosperity, of having things better than their parents did, they grapple, often unsuccessfully, with underdeveloped self-sufficiency, unemployment, and underemployment in all but a few circumscribed areas. But this sense of entitlement creates a resentment of the compromises necessary to effectively survive. As a result, young adults may tend to feel more disillusioned and alienated.

maybe even just time travelled; we hadn’t really decided yet. Personally, I’d rather go with parallel universe, mostly because it just sounded so much cooler. We had no idea how or when we could get back, which meant that we might be lost in time forever. Fran’s parents were missing in some other timeline or maybe even this one. We hadn’t actually gotten that far though, to be honest. I had no idea if our actions would affect the future, but I really didn’t think we were that important. Also, I hadn’t had any sleep for fifteen hours. And to tie it all up, I think that we are about to be bombed. Eek.

there is nothing generic about a human life. When I was little, to get to my bus stop, I had to cross a field that had so much snow my parents fitted me with ski pants and knee-high thermal boots that were toasty to forty degrees below zero. I am excellent in the stern of a canoe, but I never got the hang of riding a bike with no hands. I have seen the northern lights because my parents always woke up the whole house when the night sky was painted with color. I love the smell of clover and chamomile because my sister and I used to pick both on the way home from swimming lessons. I spent weeks of my childhood riding around on my bike saving drowning worms after a heavy rain. My hair is my favorite feature even though it’s too heavy for most ponytails, and I still can’t parallel park. There is no life in general. Each day has been a collection of trivial details—little intimacies and jokes and screw-ups and realizations.

He heard the back door open and close. Carol, of course. Smelled her before he could see her. He’d never asked them when the affair began but always presumed it ran along invisible tracks parallel to his parents’ marriage. Mum had the painting and he had Carol. Truce. /It’s hard being born here, breathing this air. It becomes part of you, whether you want it to or not. Those lights become dawn and dusk. Mum used to say that. Did she? We were friends once. I never knew that. In the early days, we were. But the she seemed to withdraw. Rarely went out with your dad anymore. Maybe it was being a new mum. I reckon you were enough for her. Lucky Dora, we used to say. Ellis put his arm around her shoulder./ It was hard for us, wasn’t it? Getting to know each other? We know each other now, said Ellis. Yeah. And you know you’re too good for him. I know, said Carol, and they laughed. Do you think he’s alright? said Ellis, looking back to the house. Course he is. He’s just used to being a bastard. He’s one of them men who discovered later on that he’s got a heart.

In fact, I didn’t know how much Chris had done in Fallujah until he came home. We were at a car wash place one day when someone overheard his name called and went up to him. “Are you Chris Kyle?” asked the man. His haircut and build made it clear he was military. “Yes.” “I was in Fallujah,” said the young man, who turned out to be a Marine. “You saved my life.” “Y’all saved my ass plenty of times, too,” said Chris, referring to Marines. Others came over, including the father of one of the Marines. He had tears in his eyes when he shook Chris’s hand. “Your husband saved my son’s life,” he said to me. “Thank you.” What an incredibly small world it is, I thought. For all of these people to have been together so far away, and now just meet by chance in the oddest place. Or was it part of a cosmic plan? A way of showing Chris that he was appreciated? I felt proud of him, but I also felt sadness--I imagined being the parent of one of these young men, worried about their welfare and yet unable to do anything to protect them. It was an impotence with few parallels. Chris just took it all in stride, smiling and waving as he left to get the car.

His message delivered, Gabriel departed, leaving the chosen Virgin of Nazareth to ponder over her wondrous experience. Mary's promised Son was to be "The Only Begotten" of the Father in the flesh; so it had been both positively and abundantly predicted. True, the event was unprecedented; true also it has never been paralleled; but that the virgin birth would be unique was as truly essential to the fulfilment of prophecy as that it should occur at all. That Child to be born of Mary was begotten of Elohim, the Eternal Father, not in violation of natural law but in accordance with a higher manifestation thereof; and, the offspring from that association of supreme sanctity, celestial Sireship, and pure though mortal maternity, was of right to be called the "Son of the Highest." In His nature would be combined the powers of Godhood with the capacity and possibilities of mortality; and this through the ordinary operation of the fundamental law of heredity, declared of God, demonstrated by science, and admitted by philosophy, that living beings shall propagate—after their kind. The Child Jesus was to inherit the physical, mental, and spiritual traits, tendencies, and powers that characterized His parents—one immortal and glorified—God, the other human—woman.

Within the huge trade unions, a similar managerial officialdom, the “labor bureaucracy” consolidates its position as an elite. This elite is sharply distinguished in training, income, habits and outlook from the ordinary union member. The trend extends to the military world, the academic world, the non-profit foundations and even auxilliary organizations of the U.N. Armies are no longer run by “fighting captains” but by a Pentagon-style managerial bureaucracy. Within the universities, proliferating administrators have risen above students, teaching faculty, alumni and parents, their power position expressed in the symbols of higher salaries and special privileges. The great “non-profit foundations” have been transformed from expressions of individual benevolence into strategic bases of managerial-administrative power. The United Nations has an international echelon of manager entrenched in the Secretariat. There are fairly obvious parallels in the managerial structures of the diverse institutional fields. For example, managers in business are stockholders as labor managers are to union members; as government managers are to voters; as public school administrators are to tax-payers; as university and private school administrators are to tuition payers and fund contributors.

More than anything, we have lost the cultural customs and traditions that bring extended families together, linking adults and children in caring relationships, that give the adult friends of parents a place in their children's lives. It is the role of culture to cultivate connections between the dependent and the dependable and to prevent attachment voids from occurring. Among the many reasons that culture is failing us, two bear mentioning. The first is the jarringly rapid rate of change in twentieth-century industrial societies. It requires time to develop customs and traditions that serve attachment needs, hundreds of years to create a working culture that serves a particular social and geographical environment. Our society has been changing much too rapidly for culture to evolve accordingly. There is now more change in a decade than previously in a century. When circumstances change more quickly than our culture can adapt to, customs and traditions disintegrate. It is not surprising that today's culture is failing its traditional function of supporting adult-child attachments. Part of the rapid change has been the electronic transmission of culture, allowing commercially blended and packaged culture to be broadcast into our homes and into the very minds of our children. Instant culture has replaced what used to be passed down through custom and tradition and from one generation to another. “Almost every day I find myself fighting the bubble-gum culture my children are exposed to,” said a frustrated father interviewed for this book. Not only is the content often alien to the culture of the parents but the process of transmission has taken grandparents out of the loop and made them seem sadly out of touch. Games, too, have become electronic. They have always been an instrument of culture to connect people to people, especially children to adults. Now games have become a solitary activity, watched in parallel on television sports-casts or engaged in in isolation on the computer. The most significant change in recent times has been the technology of communication — first the phone and then the Internet through e-mail and instant messaging. We are enamored of communication technology without being aware that one of its primary functions is to facilitate attachments. We have unwittingly put it into the hands of children who, of course, are using it to connect with their peers. Because of their strong attachment needs, the contact is highly addictive, often becoming a major preoccupation. Our culture has not been able to evolve the customs and traditions to contain this development, and so again we are all left to our own devices. This wonderful new technology would be a powerfully positive instrument if used to facilitate child-adult connections — as it does, for example, when it enables easy communication between students living away from home, and their parents. Left unchecked, it promotes peer orientation.

He did not understand that if he waited and listened and observed, another idea of some kind would probably occur to him some day, and that the development of this would in its turn suggest still further ones. He did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold of ideas is to go hunting expressly after them. The way to get them is to study something of which one is fond, and to note down whatever crosses one's mind in reference to it, either during study or relaxation, in a little note-book kept always in the waistcoat pocket. Ernest has come to know all about this now, but it took him a long time to find it out, for this is not the kind of thing that is taught at schools and universities. Nor yet did he know that ideas, no less than the living beings in whose minds they arise, must be begotten by parents not very unlike themselves, the most original still differing but slightly from the parents that have given rise to them. Life is like a fugue, everything must grow out of the subject and there must be nothing new. Nor, again, did he see how hard it is to say where one idea ends and another begins, nor yet how closely this is paralleled in the difficulty of saying where a life begins or ends, or an action or indeed anything, there being an unity in spite of infinite multitude, and an infinite multitude in spite of unity. He thought that ideas came into clever people's heads by a kind of spontaneous germination, without parentage in the thoughts of others or the course of observation; for as yet he believed in genius, of which he well knew that he had none, if it was the fine frenzied thing he thought it was.

Basically, attention follows attachment. The stronger the attachment, the easier it is to secure the child's attention. When attachment is weak, the attention of the child will be correspondingly difficult to engage. One of the telltale signs of a child who isn't paying attention is a parent having continually to raise his voice or repeat things. Some of our most persistent demands as parents have to do with their attention: “Listen to me,” “Look at me when I'm talking,” “Now look here,” “What did I just say?” or most simply, “Pay attention.” When children become peer-oriented, their attention instinctively turns toward peers. It goes against the natural instincts of a peer-oriented child to attend to parents or teachers. The sounds emanating from adults are regarded by the child's attention mechanisms as so much noise and interference, lacking in meaning and relevance to the attachment needs that dominate his emotional life. Peer orientation creates deficits in the child's attention to adults because adults are not top priority in the attention hierarchy of peer-oriented children. It is no accident that attention deficit disorder was initially considered a school problem, a child's failing to pay attention to the teacher. It is also no accident that the explosion in the number of diagnosed cases of attention deficit disorder has paralleled the evolution of peer orientation in our society and is worse where peer orientation is most predominant — urban centers and inner-city schools. This is not to suggest that all problems in paying attention stem from this source and that there are no other factors involved in ADD. On the other hand, not to recognize the fundamental role of attachment in governing attention is to ignore the reality of many children diagnosed with ADD. Deficits in attachments to adults contribute significantly to deficits in attention to adults. If attachment is disordered, attention will also be disordered.

IN HIS 2005 COLLECTION of essays Going Sane, Adam Phillips makes a keen observation. “Babies may be sweet, babies may be beautiful, babies may be adored,” he writes, “but they have all the characteristics that are identified as mad when they are found too brazenly in adults.” He lists those characteristics: Babies are incontinent. They don’t speak our language. They require constant monitoring to prevent self-harm. “They seem to live the excessively wishful lives,” he notes, “of those who assume that they are the only person in the world.” The same is true, Phillips goes on to argue, of young children, who want so much and possess so little self-control. “The modern child,” he observes. “Too much desire; too little organization.” Children are pashas of excess. If you’ve spent most of your adult life in the company of other adults—especially in the workplace, where social niceties are observed and rational discourse is generally the coin of the realm—it requires some adjusting to spend so much time in the company of people who feel more than think. (When I first read Phillips’s observations about the parallels between children and madmen, it so happened that my son, three at the time, was screaming from his room, “I. Don’t. Want. To. Wear. PANTS.”) Yet children do not see themselves as excessive. “Children would be very surprised,” Phillips writes, “to discover just how mad we think they are.” The real danger, in his view, is that children can drive their parents crazy. The extravagance of children’s wishes, behaviors, and energies all become a threat to their parents’ well-ordered lives. “All the modern prescriptive childrearing literature,” he concludes, “is about how not to drive someone (the child) mad and how not to be driven mad (by the child).” This insight helps clarify why parents so often feel powerless around their young children, even though they’re putatively in charge. To a preschooler, all rumpus room calisthenics—whether it’s bouncing from couch cushion to couch cushion, banging on tables, or heaving bowls of spaghetti onto the floor—feel normal. But to adults, the child looks as though he or she has suddenly slipped into one of Maurice Sendak’s wolf suits. The grown-up response is to put a stop to the child’s mischief, because that’s the adult’s job, and that’s what civilized living is all about. Yet parents intuit, on some level, that children are meant to make messes, to be noisy, to test boundaries. “All parents at some time feel overwhelmed by their children; feel that their children ask more of them than they can provide,” writes Phillips in another essay. “One of the most difficult things about being a parent is that you have to bear the fact that you have to frustrate your child.

• No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable. We will talk about almost anyone about our physical health, even our sex lives, but bring depression, anxiety or grief , and the expression on the other person would probably be "get me out of this conversation" • We can distract our feelings with too much wine, food or surfing the internet, • Therapy is far from one-sided; it happens in a parallel process. Everyday patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves, • "The only way out is through" the only way to get out of the tunnel is to go through, not around it • Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of "feeling felt" • Attachment styles are formed early in childhood based on our interactions with our caregivers. Attachment styles are significant because they play out in peoples relationships too, influencing the kind of partners they pick, (stable or less stable), how they behave in a relationship (needy, distant, or volatile) and how the relationship tend to end (wistfully, amiably, or with an explosion) • The presenting problem, the issue somebody comes with, is often just one aspect of a larger problem, if not a red herring entirely. • "Help me understand more about the relationship" Here, here's trying to establish what’s known as a therapeutic alliance, trust that has to develop before any work can get done. • In early sessions is always more important for patients to feel understood than it is for them to gain any insight or make changes. • We can complain for free with a friend or family member, People make faulty narratives to make themselves feel better or look better in the moment, even thought it makes them feel worse over time, and that sometimes they need somebody else to read between the lines. • Here-and-now, it is when we work on what’s happening in the room, rather than focusing on patient's stories. • She didn't call him on his bullshit, which this makes patients feel unsafe, like children's whose parent's don’t hold them accountable • What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? • Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons, that cause them to mimic others, and when people are in a heightened state of emotion, a soothing voice can calm their nervous system and help them stay present • Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth. • The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at • How easy it is, I thought, to break someone’s heart, even when you take great care not to. • The purpose on inquiring about people's parent s is not to join them in blaming, judging or criticizing their parents. In fact it is not about their parents at all. It is solely about understanding how their early experiences informed who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits) • But personality disorders lie on a spectrum. People with borderline personality disorder are terrified of abandonment, but for some that might mean feeling anxious when their partners don’t respond to texts right away; for others that may mean choosing to stay in volatile, dysfunctional relationships rather than being alone. • In therapy we aim for self compassion (am I a human?) versus self esteem (Am I good or bad: a judgment) • The techniques we use are a bit like the type of brain surgery in which the patient remains awake throughout the procedure, as the surgeons operate, they keep checking in with the patient: can you feel this? can you say this words? They are constantly calibrating how close they are to sensitive regions of the brain, and if they hit one, they back up so as not to damage it.

A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions. Although Carolyn is a figment of our imagination, many real people turn out to be choice architects, most without realising it. If you design the ballot voters use to choose candidates, you are a choice architect. If you are a doctor and must describe the alternate treatments available to a patient, you are a choice architect. If you design the form that new employees fill out to enrol in the company healthcare plan, you are a choice architect. If you are a parent describing possible educational options to your son or daughter, you are a choice architect. If you are a salesperson, you are a choice architect, but you already knew that. There are many parallels between choice architecture and more traditional forms of architecture. A crucial parallel is that there is no such thing as a neutral design.

The obvious alternative to blaming the parent is to conclude that there is something amiss or lacking in the child. If we are not given to doubt our parenting, we assume the source of our trouble must be the child. We take refuge in the child-blaming thought that we have not failed, but our children have failed to live up to the expected standards. Our attitude is expressed in questions or demands such as Why don't you pay attention? Stop being so difficult! Or, Why can't you do as you're told? Difficulty in parenting often leads to a hunt to find out what is wrong with the child. We may witness today a frantic search for labels to explain our children's problems. Parents seek the formal diagnoses of a professional or grasp at informal labels — there are, for examples, books on raising the “difficult” or the “spirited” child. The more frustrating parenting becomes, the more likely children will be perceived as difficult and the more labels will be sought for verification. It is no coincidence that the preoccupation with diagnoses has paralleled the rise in peer orientation in our society. Increasingly, children's behavioral problems are ascribed to various medical syndromes such as oppositional defiant disorder or attention deficit disorder. These diagnoses at least have the benefit of absolving the child and of removing the onus of blame from the parents, but they camouflage the reversible dynamics that cause children to misbehave in the first place. Medical explanations help by removing guilt but they hinder by reducing the issues to oversimplified concepts. They assume that the complex behavior problems of many children can be explained by genetics or by miswired brain circuits. They ignore scientific evidence that the human brain is shaped by the environment from birth throughout the lifetime and that attachment relationships are the most important aspect of the child's environment. They also dictate narrow solutions, such as medications, without regard to the child's relationships with peers and with the adult world. In practice, they serve to further disempower parents.

Parents, in essence, have to train themselves to sidestep their child’s schemes by avoiding content, and moving toward real dialogue, or sharing feelings.

I studied with fresh interest the origination of the boiling bubbles in the Revere pan as I waited to pour in the Ronzoni shells: at the very beginning of boiling, grains of mercury broke free and rose upward only from special points on the floor of the pan, requiring a little scratch or irregularity in the metal to harbor their change of phase; later several beaded curtains of midsized spheres streamed where the parallel curves of the electric coil were most completely in contact with the pan's underside; later still, as glutinous, toad-like globes of hard boiling took over, my glasses misted—and I was reminded of being awakened by my parents years earlier from dreams in which I been trying to drink very thick shakes through impossibly slender straws.

I studied with fresh interest the origination of the boiling bubbles in the Revere pan as I waited to pour in the Ronzoni shells: at the very beginning of boiling, grains of mercury broke free and rose upward only from special points on the floor of the pan, requiring a little scratch or irregularity in the metal to harbor their change of phase; later several beaded curtains of midsized spheres streamed where the parallel curves of the electric coil were most completely in contact with the pan's underside; later still, as glutinous, toad-like globes of hard boiling took over, my glasses misted—and I was reminded of being awakened by my parents years earlier from dreams in which I had been trying to drink very thick shakes through impossibly slender straws.

Initially, von Neumann was referring to physical machines. The idea that he first presented in a lecture in Pasadena, California, in the 1940s was very complicated. Stephen Levy, in his book, Artificial Life, describes the basic components that made up von Neumann’s theoretical self-replicating machines, which he called kinematics (but which are mostly called von Neumann machines today). The system consisted of raw materials in a lake, along with four components required for this self-replicating machine labelled: A, B, C, and D. Component A was like a factory, which scooped up raw materials from the lake and used them in ways that were dictated by some data, which we might call a computer program today. Component B was a duplicator that read and copied information from the first machine to its duplicates, in the same way that DNA is passed down from parents to children. Component C was like a computer and controlled who did what, like a central processing unit. Component D was the actual data, or instructions, which in those days von Neumann envisioned as a very long tape.

Here are some questions to get you started, to ask yourself after any tough moment: What is my most generous interpretation (MGI) of my child’s behavior? What was going on for my child in that moment? What was my child feeling right before that behavior emerged? What urge did my child have a hard time regulating? What is a parallel situation in my life? And if I did something similar, what might I have been struggling with in that moment? What does my child feel I don’t understand about them? If I remember that my child is a good kid having a hard time . . . what are they having a hard time with? What deeper themes are being displayed underneath this behavior?

I read a book on the topic and was uncomfortable with how many parallels there were between me and the stereotypical “dominant parent.” For a week, I made a sincere attempt to modify my behavior, but was driven absolutely crazy by the stupid decisions Grant and Sophie made when they were unsupervised and undirected. I decided that, for the good of the family, some dominant behavior was warranted, and the consequences? Oh well.

All went smoothly for the first fifteen minutes--my mother was, after all, very adept at making people comfortable. She chatted, though not excessively, primarily with me. As I had predicted, Narian was silent and observant, letting me carry the conversation while he tried to get a feel for the woman across from us, not quite trusting that she was on our side. He was never rude, and never short with her; he simply hid himself behind good etiquette. During a natural pause in conversation, my mother perused Narian and me, and her mood became contemplative. “When was it that you fell in love?” she asked. “Was it right under our noses?” “More or less,” I said with a laugh, glancing at Narian. “We became friends when he first came to Hytanica. All those trips Miranna and I made to Baron Koranis’s estate were really so I could see him.” Mother smiled and Narian glanced at me as if this were news to him. Then she picked up the thread of the conversation. “I remember falling in love,” she mused, and I wondered how far she would venture into her story, knowing it was not a wholly happy one. “I was fifteen, going through the very difficult experience of losing my family in a fire. I was brought to live in the palace, for I’d been betrothed for years to Andrius, Alera’s uncle, who later died in the war before we could be married.” I realized she was not talking to me, and that, though he was still aloof, she had captured Narian’s interest, for his deep blue eyes were resting attentively upon her. “At the time, I was so lost and alone and frightened. And then Andrius and I grew close. With him, my life made sense again. I had something to hold on to, something to steady me. What was the worst time of my life became the best.” There was a pause, and she innocently met Narian’s gaze. But her story was not innocent at all. If I could recognize the parallel she was drawing to his life in the aftermath of learning of his Hytanican heritage, then he surely could, as well. He didn’t say a word, however, and she dropped the veiled attempt to connect with him before it became awkward, turning to me instead. “I’ve told you before, Alera--Andrius lives on in you. I see him in you every day.” I smiled, tipping my head in acceptance of the compliment. “And in you--” she said, once more turning to Narian, tapping a finger against her lips in thought “--I see Cannan.” She was lightly cajoling him, exactly as a parent would do. I couldn’t imagine what was going on in his mind, but he was no longer eager to leave, his eyes never once flicking toward me or the door.

One AS husband wrote me the following very powerful e-mail (I have excerpted parts.):       I guess your heart probably sinks just a little when you get a message from an AS man. However, I’ve just read your book and I’d like to thank you for its honesty and indeed bravery.       I’ve been with my NT partner . . . for 25 years and have inflicted many distressing incidents on her similar to those you describe. But I can honestly say that none of them were ever designed to hurt. This feeling has probably made things much worse [for her]! I doubt I would have become so angry and defensive if I didn’t believe myself to be ‘innocent’ of the crime of intention. Hopefully I am coming to realise that I need to do more than just not intend to do harm. . .       . . . Reading your book I think I see parallels here between my fear of being overwhelmed in social or conflict situations. But I also see similarities to those feelings when my partner expresses her frustrations and needs - to admit to her point of view seems sometimes like I would be ‘destroyed.’ I mention this because I get the strong feeling that you equate spirituality and loving relationships. I feel that between myself and . . . there is something very important to us both, beyond companionship. For me there seems to have been a chance given that I would never believed I would have had. . .

I’ve been with my NT partner . . . for 25 years and have inflicted many distressing incidents on her similar to those you describe. But I can honestly say that none of them were ever designed to hurt. This feeling has probably made things much worse [for her]! I doubt I would have become so angry and defensive if I didn’t believe myself to be ‘innocent’ of the crime of intention. Hopefully I am coming to realise that I need to do more than just not intend to do harm. . .       . . . Reading your book I think I see parallels here between my fear of being overwhelmed in social or conflict situations. But I also see similarities to those feelings when my partner expresses her frustrations and needs - to admit to her point of view seems sometimes like I would be ‘destroyed.

St. Gregory (A. D. 240), bishop of Neo-Cæsarea in Pontus, was another celebrated Christian Father, born of Pagan parents and educated a Pagan. He is called Thaumaturgus, or the wonder-worker, and is said to have performed miracles when still a Pagan. [413:4] He, too, was an Alexandrian student. This is the Gregory who was commended by his namesake of Nyssa for changing the Pagan festivals into Christian holidays, the better to draw the heathen to the

In many ways, God’s rest on the seventh day of creation is paralleled by the birthing process and the period after birth, when the labor is finished yet the bonding begins. The mother and father gaze endlessly at their child, who is distinct from the parents because she is no longer merely in the mind and the womb of the mother, but external and separate. She is no longer solely in the imagination or deep in the womb; she is finally released to be held in the arms of the parent. This attachment brings mother and child into a bond that, if secure, will last through thick and thin, heartache and loss, and provide the child with an assurance that all will be well.11

My name is Kyran. You look like an honorable woman,” he whispered, practicing what he would say to any prospective mate. “I have a home with my parents and my brother. There we will live and you will be part of our family. Would you like to give me many children?

By the time the draft constitution for the expanded European Union was finished and ready to be submitted for ratification by the member states, "Europe" as a political entity resembled nothing so much as a teenager who had just gone through a tremendous physical growth spurt but without a parallel growth in intellectual and moral maturity: physically an adult but spiritually stuck in adolescence. . . . Connoisseurs of political texts will note that the European constitution approved in June 2004 contains some 70,000 words (almost ten times the length of the U.S. Constitution). Yet the one word that could not be fit into the constitution for the new Europe--"Christianity"--is the embodiment of a story that has arguably had more to do with "constituting" Europe than anything else. What is going on when this story can't be acknowledged? Is it a case, as suggested above, of an adolescent engaging in a typically adolescent rebellion against parents? Is that rebellion in service of a particular (and particularly adolescent) understanding of the freedom that Europe's new constitution is meant to celebrate and advance?

play stages: parallel (“I play this while you play that”), cooperative or crossover (“If we use your bricks and mine we can build a bigger house”), sociodramatic (“I’ll be the witch and you can be the little boy in the woods”), and game play (“Let’s say that if someone touches the line, they’re out”).

Bowlby viewed attachment as relevant “from the cradle to the grave.”9 He said that adult romantic relationships function as reciprocal attachment bonds, where each partner serves as an attachment figure for the other. Bowlby conceived of the parent-child attachment relationship as having four essential features: proximity maintenance, separation distress, safe haven and secure base. We can see many parallels between the parent-child attachment relationship and the adult-adult attachment relationship. For instance, adults seek physical contact with each other, engage in dreamy eye-gazing, and even use baby talk or cooing sounds to nurture and encourage bonding. We feel separation distress when apart, and we turn towards our romantic partners as a safe haven in times of need. We also see them as a secure base from which to explore the world and our sexuality, and we feel able to share important discoveries with them.10

But after ten minutes of crying, Alicia didn’t feel better. It was a scary feeling, being shunned by an adult who was responsible for your care. Alicia was used to people being delighted by her. Grammy, obviously. All of Grammy’s friends. Her teachers at school, her friends’ parents. In her world, people were warm and friendly and kind. This place felt like a horrible parallel universe.

The pamphlet compiled essays from those who work in queer spaces or study them academically, or both. One contributor, Joe Parslow, wrote an essay that refers to the critic José Esteban Muñoz’s paralleling of the word stage in the sense of a platform for performance with stage as a phase that queers are told to get over—as when parents contend it’s just a blip. In 2009, Muñoz wrote, ‘Today I write back from that stage that my mother and father hoped I would quickly vacate. Instead, I dwell on and in this stage.’ Parslow explains how he was inspired to think from the stage outward when he designed his own venue, Her Upstairs, one of those few places that opened against the wave of bar closures; it shut down after only a short spell. In his listing application for the RVT, Ben Walters offered another symbolic interpretation of the stage. When Pat and Breda McConnon took over the tavern in 1979, they made the decision to put an end to the messy tradition of bartenders serving drinks between the legs of the drag queens atop the curving bar. But rather than cancel the entertainment, they renovated the interior, removing that bar and installing a bespoke stage. Walters points out the meaningfulness of this move. Performing on the bar had meant that a drag queen could be swiftly cleared away and the performance denied at the sign of a police raid. The McConnons permanently ensconced queer performance in the materiality of the building. Their stage was not a phase.

Generations also connect us to our families because they remind us that we all have forebearers who encountered this season of history at some phase of their lives. We may wonder how their location in history affected what happened to them as children, what happened to the children they raised, or what happened to alter the direction of their lives at a critical moment. We may be able to draw parallels between them and ourselves, our children, or our parents.

If you’ve ever suffered the accusations of people who objectified you as an emblem of darkness, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been haunted by the opinions of your friends, it wasn’t your fault. If they’ve ever assumed the worst of you, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been judged by your own parents, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been treated as an outcast, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever made a decision based on an opinion, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been labeled, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been stuck in the middle of a love triangle, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been heartbroken, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever cried yourself to sleep, it wasn’t your fault. As you suffered and grew up, your soul got stained, your heart got shattered and your body paralyzed, which drove you into a deep state of slow sleep. As you opened your eyes, the atrocities of your past were glistening over your eyes and you knew, you had lost yourself in a place of utter darkness, but there was learning to be done in the cold dark. Like seeds of plants shaded by dirt, you twitched with the want to rise. As you grew tired of the shadows, you climbed into a world that was finally making room for light. Room for you and for all your truth. You ignited not in the light but in the distant shadows of the dark. In your chaos, you found clarity. In your suffering, you found purpose. You didn’t ignore the pain. You gave it reason. You used it. You reveled in it. As you began your journey to redefine yourself in misery and pain, your heart grew fonder but you didn’t give up. As stones of suffering came to dance, your feet took flight, the sun tried to burn you down, but God threw a shadow over the horizon and you saw a ray of hope and chased your way over the mightiest slopes. For a long time, you thought being different was a negative thing; but as you grew older, you started to realize that you were born to stand out, not blend in. Now, when people put a label on you, you find comfort in your true self because, in the end, you are proud to be who you’re. You’re a survivor. You and I come from completely different places, our world is a parallel space and we speak different languages, but one thing I’m sure of is that my heart beats the same as yours. At end of the day, we’re all meant to be who we are; Our True Selves.

The first thousand pictures were taken by my parents Parents were involved in the majority of the pictures Pictures are full of smiles, cries, shouts, screams, and playing Playing and sleeping were parallel during the early days Days were full of fun while fun-filled the days Days were the best days with Parents Parents Exist

Trust me, it wasn't your fault If you’ve ever suffered the accusations of people who objectified you as an emblem of darkness, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been haunted by the opinions of your friends, it wasn’t your fault. If they’ve ever assumed the worst of you, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been judged by your own parents, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been treated as an outcast, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever made a decision based on an opinion, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been labeled, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been stuck in the middle of a love triangle, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been heartbroken, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever cried yourself to sleep, it wasn’t your fault. As you suffered and grew up, your soul got stained, your heart got shattered and your body paralyzed, which drove you into a deep state of slow sleep. As you opened your eyes, the atrocities of your past were glistening over your eyes and you knew, you had lost yourself in a place of utter darkness, but there was learning to be done in the cold dark. Like seeds of plants shaded by dirt, you twitched with the want to rise. As you grew tired of the shadows, you climbed into a world that was finally making room for light. Room for you and for all your truth. You ignited not in the light but in the distant shadows of the dark. In your chaos, you found clarity. In your suffering, you found purpose. You didn’t ignore the pain. You gave it reason. You used it. You reveled in it. As you began your journey to redefine yourself in misery and pain, your heart grew fonder but you didn’t give up. As stones of suffering came to dance, your feet took flight, the sun tried to burn you down, but God threw a shadow over the horizon and you saw a ray of hope and chased your way over the mightiest slopes. For a long time, you thought being different was a negative thing; but as you grew older, you started to realize that you were born to stand out, not blend in. Now, when people put a label on you, you find comfort in your true self because, in the end, you are proud to be who you’re. You’re a survivor. You and I come from completely different places, our world is a parallel space and we speak different languages, but one thing I’m sure of is that my heart beats the same as yours. At end of the day, we’re all meant to be who we are; Our True Selves.

If you’ve ever suffered the accusations of people who objectified you as an emblem of darkness, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been haunted by the opinions of your friends, it wasn’t your fault. If they’ve ever assumed the worst of you, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been judged by your own parents, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been treated as an outcast, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever made a decision based on an opinion, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been labeled, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been stuck in the middle of a love triangle, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been heartbroken, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever cried yourself to sleep, it wasn’t your fault. As you suffered and grew up, your soul got stained, your heart got shattered and your body paralyzed, which drove you into a deep state of slow sleep. As you opened your eyes, the atrocities of your past were glistening over your eyes and you knew, you had lost yourself in a place of utter darkness, but there was learning to be done in the cold dark. Like seeds of plants shaded by dirt, you twitched with the want to rise. As you grew tired of the shadows, you climbed into a world that was finally making room for light. Room for you and for all your truth. You ignited not in the light but in the distant shadows of the dark. In your chaos, you found clarity. In your suffering, you found purpose. You didn’t ignore the pain. You gave it reason. You used it. You reveled in it. As you began your journey to redefine yourself in misery and pain, your heart grew fonder but you didn’t give up. As stones of suffering came to dance, your feet took flight, the sun tried to burn you down, but God threw a shadow over the horizon and you saw a ray of hope and chased your way over the mightiest slopes. For a long time, you thought being different was a negative thing; but as you grew older, you started to realize that you were born to stand out, not blend in. Now, when people put a label on you, you find comfort in your true self because, in the end, you are proud to be who you’re. You’re a survivor. You and I come from completely different places, our world is a parallel space and we speak different languages, but one thing I’m sure of is that my heart beats the same as yours. At end of the day, we’re all meant to be who we are; Our True Selves.

Lacking the essential internal resources necessary for adult life: problem-solving, delayed gratification, internal motivation, resiliency, emotional regulation, and self-discipline. Many of these kids may even feel out of control. lily As soon as Lily, who’d just turned seventeen, stepped off the truck and into the wilderness-therapy program, she sat down on the side of the road: “I’m just going to wait until my mom and dad come to get me,” she said. “Because this must be a mistake. My parents would never send me to a wilderness

We can return now to an important parallel between the love for one’s parents and the love for God. The child starts out by being attached to his mother as “the ground of all being.” He feels helpless and needs the all-enveloping love of mother. He then turns to father as the new center of his affections, father being a guiding principle for thought and action; in this stage he is motivated by the need to acquire father’s praise, and to avoid his displeasure. In the stage of full maturity he has freed himself from the person of mother and of father as protecting and commanding powers; he has established the motherly and fatherly principles in himself. He has become his own father and mother; he is father and mother.

I honestly cannot think of a single situation where this would be a good joke in a relationship. It’s too deflating and demeaning. But as Sophie recognized later, her mother and Jerry had a lot in common in their insensitivity to people’s feelings. Every time Sophie tried to tell them how she felt, she ended up feeling invalidated. In therapy, Sophie began to see the parallels between her mother’s lack of empathy and Jerry’s emotional insensitivity. She realized that in her relationship with Jerry, she had reentered the emotional loneliness she’d felt as a child. She now saw that her frustration with Jerry’s emotional unavailability wasn’t something new; it was as old as her childhood. Sophie had felt that sense of unconnnectedness her whole life.

But I was stuck for a long time by myself at Abraham Lincoln's portrait, standing in the middle of the huge hall as people moved all around me with mostly children. I felt as if time had stopped as I watched Lincoln, facing him, while watching the woman’s back as she was looking out the window. I felt wronged, so much like Truman from the movie, standing there in the middle of the museum alone. I was wondering what would Abraham Lincoln do if he realized he was the slave in his own cotton fields, being robbed by evil thieves, nazis. I had taken numerous photos of Martina from behind, as well as silhouettes of her shadow. I remember standing there, watching as she stood in front of the window; it was almost as if she was admiring the view of the mountains from our new home, as I did take such pictures of her, with a very similar composition to that of the female depicted in the iconic Lincoln portrait looking outwards from the window. I hadn't realized how many photographs I snapped of Martina with her back turned towards me while we travelled to picturesque places. Fernanda and I walked side-by-side in utter silence, admiring painting after painting of Dali's, without exchanging a single word. Meanwhile, Luis and Martina had got lost somewhere in the museum. When I finally found her, she was taking pictures outside of the Rainy Cadillac. We both felt something was amiss without having to say it, as Fernanda knew things I didn't and vice versa. We couldn't bring ourselves to discuss it though, not because we lacked any legal authority between me and Martina, but because neither Fernanda or myself had much parental authority over the young lady. It felt like when our marriages and divorces had dissolved, it was almost as if our parenting didn't matter anymore. It was as if I were unwittingly part of a secret screenplay, like Jim Carrey's character in The Truman Show, living in a fabricated reality made solely for him. I was beginning to feel a strange nauseous feeling, as if someone was trying to force something surreal down my throat, as if I were living something not of this world, making me want to vomit onto the painted canvas of the personalised image crafted just for me. I couldn't help but wonder if Fernanda felt the same way, if she was aware of the magnitude of what was happening, or if, just like me, she was completely oblivious, occasionally getting flashes of truth or reality for a moment or two. I took some amazing photographs of her in Port Lligat in Dali's yard in the port, and in Cap Creus, but I'd rather not even try to describe them—they were almost like Dali's paintings which make all sense now. As if all the pieces are coming together. She was walking by the water and I was walking a bit further up on the same beach on pebbles, parallel to each other as we walked away from Dali's house in the port. I looked towards her and there were two boats flipped over on the two sides of my view. I told her: “Run, Bunny! Run!

Peter and Paul, there to be baptized and forever snatched from the gaping maw of everlasting fire and death. Because November 11 was St. Martin’s Day—the feast day of Saint Martin of Tours—the child was given the saint’s name, a common enough practice at that time. But unbeknownst to Luther’s parents, there was a detail of this saint’s life that would one day form an eerie and seemingly prophetic parallel with the career of the newborn that day named for him. Saint Martin lived in the fourth century. He was born in what is today Hungary; grew up in what is today Pavia, Italy; and spent most of his adult life in what is today France, all three of which at that time were within the borders of the Roman Empire. He became a Christian at an early age, despite his father’s disapproval, and was enlisted in the Roman army. One day while in the Gallic provinces—it was in the town of Borbetomagus, in what is today central Germany—the future saint was ordered to participate in a battle. But in the belief that shedding blood was not consonant with his deep Christian convictions, Martin bravely declared, “I am a soldier of Christ. I cannot fight.”1 For this shocking refusal to submit to this duty assigned him, he was imprisoned and charged with cowardice, but he turned this charge on its head by then volunteering to go to the front lines unarmed, because he did not fear for his life, only that he might take the life of another. In the end, the battle did not take place, and he was released from duty, shortly thereafter becoming a monk. The Roman city called Borbetomagus where this Martin took the death-defying stand for his faith that set him on his path of sainthood would in the future become known as the German city of Worms. Thus, eleven centuries from when this first Martin took his Christian stand against the Roman Empire, the second Martin would take his Christian stand against the Holy Roman Empire—in precisely the same place.

After the turmoil of the sixties, many people thought that it was so much better when the universities quieted down in the early seventies. I could have wept. The young people had been right in their analysis, though wrong in their solutions. How much worse when many gave up hope and simply accepted the same values as their parents—personal peace and affluence. Now drugs remain, but only in parallel to the older generation’s alcohol, and an excessive use of alcohol has become a problem among the young people as well. Promiscuous sex and bisexuality remain, but only in parallel to the older generation’s adultery. In other words, as the young people revolted against their parents, they came around in a big circle—and often ended an inch lower—with only the same two impoverished values: their own kind of personal peace and their own kind of affluence.

Fascist regimes set out to make the new man and the new woman (each in his or her proper sphere). It was the challenging task of fascist educational systems to manufacture “new” men and women who were simultaneously fighters and obedient subjects. Educational systems in liberal states, alongside their mission to help individuals realize their intellectual potential, were already committed to shaping citizens. Fascist states were able to use existing educational personnel and structures with only a shift of emphasis toward sports and physical and military training. Some of the schools’ traditional functions were absorbed, to be sure, by party parallel organizations like the obligatory youth movements. All children in fascist states were supposed to be enrolled automatically in party organizations that structured their lives from childhood through university. Close to 70 percent of Italians aged six to twenty-one in the northern cities of Turin, Genoa, and Milan belonged to Fascist youth organizations, though the proportion was much lower in the undeveloped south. Hitler was even more determined to take young Germans away from their traditional socializers—parents, schoolteachers, churche —and their traditional spontaneous amusements. “These boys,” he told the Reichstag on December 4, 1938, “join our organization at the age of ten and get a breath of fresh air for the first time; then, four years later, they move from the Jungvolk to the Hitler Youth and there we keep them for another four years. And then we are even less prepared to give them back into the hands of those who create our class and status barriers, rather we take them immediately into the Party, into the Labor Front, into the SA or the SS . . . and so on.”117 Between the end of 1932 and the beginning of 1939, the Hitlerjugend expanded its share of the ten-to-eighteen age group from 1 percent to 87 percent.118 Once out in the world, the citizens of a fascist state found the regime watching over their leisure-time activities as well: the Dopolavoro in Italy and the Kraft durch Freude in Germany.

Institutionalization and ‘special housing' At the time of the passage of the ADA, states still had laws on the books requiring people with mental disabilities to be institutionalized. Not even slaves had been so restricted. "Spurred by the eugenics movement," write legal historians Morton Horwitz, Martha Field and Martha Minow, "every state in the country passed laws that singled out people with mental or physical disabilities for institutionalization." The laws made it clear that the state's purpose was not to benefit disabled people but to segregate them from "normal" society. Thus, statutes noted that the disabled were segregated and institutionalized for being a "menace to society" [and] so that "society [might be] relieved from the heavy economic and moral losses arising from the existence at large of these unfortunate persons." "The state of Washington made it a crime for a parent to refuse state-ordered institutionalization," they wrote; "once children were institutionalized, many state laws required parents to waive all custody rights." Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in the 1985 Cleburne Supreme Court decision (the decision saying that people with mental retardation did not constitute a "discrete and insular" minority) that this "regime of state-mandated segregation and degradation [had] in its virulence and bigotry rivaled, and indeed paralleled, the worst excesses of Jim Crow. Massive custodial institutions were built to warehouse the retarded for life." Yet they continue today. In 1999, the Supreme Court in its Olmstead decision acknowledged that the ADA did in fact require states to provide services to people with disabilities in the "most integrated setting"; but institutionalization continued, because federal funds  -- Medicaid, mostly  -- had a built-in "institutional bias," the result of savvy lobbying over the years by owners of institutions like nursing homes: In no state could one be denied a "bed" in a nursing home, but in only a few states could one use those same Medicaid dollars to get services in one's home that were usually much less expensive. Ongoing battles were waged to close down the institutions, to allow the people in them to live on their own or in small group settings. But parents often fought to keep them open. When they did close, other special facilities cropped up.

What went on in that head of his? I would soon come to understand that he gave voice to only a fraction of the thoughts that swam behind his eyes. It was not nearly so clean and smooth in there as it seemed. Other lives were housed in that mind, parallel worlds. Maybe we’re all built a little bit that way. But most of us drop hints. Most of us leave clues. My father was more careful. When I think now of that moment in the kitchen, an almost unbelievable thought comes to my mind: There was a time when those two people - that man hunched at the table and that woman shouting in a bathrobe - were young. The proof was in the pictures that hung on the living room walls, a pretty girl and a bookish guy, a studio apartment in a crumbling Hollywood building overlooking a courtyard and a kidney-shaped pool. This was the mythical period before I was born, when my mother was not a mother and was instead an actress who might make it someday/. How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointment, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible. I like to think about how my parents’ lives once shimmered in front of them, half hidden, like buried gold. Back then the future was whatever they imagined - and they never imagined this.

Nonetheless, by the time we arrive at the eighteenth century and the time of the founders, marriage and the family came to look very much as Aristotle had pictured it. In the previous centuries, Lutheran reforms had lodged marriage into the civil structure of society and made it more a concern of civil law,11 but, joined by Calvin, Protestantism retained parental control over the right of children to marry. John Locke, however, saw marriage as contracted political society, and thus his image of the family as a commonwealth made up of combined individuals parallel his image of the formation of the larger political commonwealth as well.12 Furthermore, Locke declares that parents are, “by the law of nature, under an obligation to preserve, nourish and educate” their children.13 Since government is instituted to enforce the laws of nature, Locke states that government should make laws that enforce “the security of the marriage bed.’’14 What

It left a hole in me. When a child's parent is not there, even if the reasons are completely legitimate, that child interprets the absence exactly as I did: I don't matter enough for you to show up for me. I'm not important. And in those early years when I was forming my identity, I took on a belief parallel to that interpretation: If you don't value me, then I must not be valuable. A big part of my journey has been about changing that view, as well as getting clear on the other beliefs passed on to me by my parents.

Stalin’s “quasi-Islamic” fanaticism was typical of the Bolshevik magnates: Mikoyan’s son called his father “a Bolshevik fanatic.” Most41 came from devoutly religious backgrounds. They hated Judaeo-Christianity— but the orthodoxy of their parents was replaced by something even more rigid, a systematic amorality: “This religion—or science, as it was modestly called by its adepts—invests man with a godlike authority . . . In the Twenties, a good many people drew a parallel to the victory of Christianity and thought this new religion would last a thousand years,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam. “All were agreed on the superiority of the new creed that promised heaven on earth instead of other worldly rewards.

What is my most generous interpretation (MGI) of my child’s behavior? What was going on for my child in that moment? What was my child feeling right before that behavior emerged? What urge did my child have a hard time regulating? What is a parallel situation in my life? And if I did something similar, what might I have been struggling with in that moment?

Those paid only $1 for their lie (and hence needed to reduce their dissonance about what they had told their peer) rated the task as relatively enjoyable.V This process can be seen in numerous areas of everyday life. People who freely choose an occupation that offers low pay for difficult work (think of schoolteachers) or uncertain rewards in a field where talent is no guarantee of success (think of artists, musicians, novelists) feel compelled to justify or rationalize their choice. Although they may continue to grumble about the low pay or the life of uncertainty, they also tell us how much they love their work and how fulfilling it is, and why other careers would have been unsatisfactory. Many people have noted a parallel in the experience of parenting. Raising a child inevitably involves difficult moments and continuing challenges—sleep deprivation, pronounced menu restriction, endless chauffeuring, and later, as John Updike put it, “the odorous, clamorous throng of dermatological disasters” who come to woo one’s daughters. But parents very often say that raising a child is the most gratifying experience of their lives. Might the very price parents pay to raise a child be one of the reasons they say it’s so rewarding? A dissonance theorist would certainly think so. Support for the idea comes from the fact that in previous eras, when children were thought of as valuable contributors to a family’s economic well-being, relations between parents and children were less affectionate than they are today. As one of Tom’s former students, Richard Eibach of the University of Waterloo, put it, “Children’s emotional value began to be culturally idealized just as their economic value to families declined.”23 That trend, of course, is just what dissonance theory would predict.