Ask Marja

[Editor’s note: Our archives contain several years of excellent articles, most of which remain relevant and important to today’s young people and the adults who work with them. This one is a “Director’s Choice” that

  [Editor’s note: Our archives contain several years of excellent articles, most of which remain relevant and important to today’s young people and the adults who work with them. This one is a “Director’s Choice”

  I have a guilty pleasure. I watch reality television. I know, I know…and the only thing I can say in my defense is that until recently, I almost exclusively limited myself to cooking shows

  As parents, we spend a lot of our time worried about our children’s mental health. Is their self-esteem (how they think about themselves) strong enough to withstand the risks and challenges that are coming?

  Dear Marja, I sit here across from the TV, and I hear screaming, crying, yelling, grief. Gun violence at another school, this time in Georgia–12 or so kids, babies really, shot by a 14-year-old.

  [Editor’s note: Our archives contain several years of excellent articles, most of which remain relevant and important to today’s young people and the adults who work with them. This one is a “Director’s Choice”

  [Editor’s note: Our archives contain several years of excellent articles, most of which remain relevant and important to today’s young people and the adults who work with them. This one is a “Director’s Choice”

There are those moments many of us experience as parents when parenting feels hard, even painful. Our children, our tweens or teens, may become surly, disrespectful, or sometimes even downright mean to us. Surely, this

Your words have power…even beyond what you might already realize. Sure, we know a lot about tone, inflection, and volume, and we think we are aware of our word choices, but are we really? Beyond enabling