I have to say that I was very surprised to see the strong response to my last column. Clearly I offended Steve Oakey with some of my statements on the topic of suicide. I like Steve, and agree that there is great value in public...
As I drove home from the office Saturday I picked up the Standard Journal (Nov 5) and was saddened to see the cover story about the young boy who took his own life, and his mother’s efforts to find some meaning in the loss and...
“Ice Bucket Challenge” fever swept the nation this year. Time magazine reports that Americans donated 115 million dollars to the ALS foundation to fight a disease most had never really thought about before. So why the big response? It seems we want, even need, to be...
I am writing this week’s column from exotic Richfield, Utah where Ruth and I have spent a couple of days with Trevor and Miranda—our oldest son and his wife—and their 3.4 kids. (Child number 4 is due in April.) We brought our six-year old granddaughter,...
Working closely with young gang members in Southern California helped me to better understand the drive many feel to “get even”. Revenge seems to offer protection from being hurt, something we all desire. A young lady recently told me, “Nice people get walked on. If I...
In 1990 I sat in my office with five or six young men, aged 16 to 18. We had been talking about the gang activity that led to their being sentenced to the residential treatment program where I worked, and where they lived. A little...
Over the years I have taught parenting classes to an assortment of groups and in a variety of venues. But the most memorable has to be the series of classes i taught to “a captive audience” in Lompoc Federal Penitentiary. I learned a great deal in...
“You can never get enough of what you don’t need, because what you don’t need cannot satisfy you.” This observation discussed here two weeks ago (Sept 16) has many applications and implications, and goes a long way toward explaining how we can easily become stuck...
Several weeks ago I wrote about discouragement—the condition in which one finds it difficult to move toward a worthy goal for fear it may not be accomplished as hoped. In that column I discussed ways of helping our children to overcome discouragement. But as a...
If you are interested in reading about Kevin Durant’s contributions to the game of basketball, you might want to skip this article and turn to the next section of the paper. But if you are interested in true heroism—doing something brave and admirable in the...