My brother cut off all contact with my parents the night before Thanksgiving. He was 25 at the time. "I'm not coming this year,'' he told my mother while she was spreading the Butterball turkey's legs to receive her Dayton-wide famous stuffing. "I need some time away from you and...

I saw this caption in a recent New Yorker cartoon and thought that it captured the way that so many of today's parents feel about their grown children. Have children become lazier? I don't think so. When I was growing up, you didn't have to go to college to be...

Dear Dr. Coleman,

My children have refused to communicate with me for several years and I'm considering cutting them out of my will. Why would I be generous to children who won't have anything to do with me?

Dear Reader,

I would certainly sympathize...

In the past 100 years we have gone from seeing children as robust and benefiting from the rigors of life to seeing them as fragile and in need of protection. In addition, while parents in the early 20th century wanted their children to conform, respect the parents' authority, and to...

I assume that in my lifetime, I'll see more than a few terrorist attacks like the one that occurred on 9/11. Some will be large, others small. I'm afraid of them, but more in the way that I'm afraid of falling off a cliff when I go hiking up a...

Studies show that people typically wait six years too long to get into couple's therapy. I am an eternal optimist, but waiting to get help is a dangerous undertaking. It allows too much time to build up new experiences of hurt, resentment, or alienation; experiences that can weaken the long-term...

Being a stepmother is hard, and often, thankless work. While some stepmothers are able to establish close and comfortable relationships, many struggle with the role. In addition, children are typically more tolerant and accepting of stepfathers than stepmothers. Here are some important reasons why stepmothering can be such a struggle:

Jamie Lee Curtis recently wrote in the Huffington Post that the problems with Paris, and, presumably, Britney and Lindsay, can be explained by bad mothering. According to the numerous posts about her article, most people found her analysis spot on. I could see why: Paris's mother laughed at the...

As a psychologist, I am privy to the gaping distance of understanding that so many parents feel with their adult children. Many of these parents are in enormous pain. In some cases, their children have cut off contact with them for years, while others for only a few months. Some...