Family
One of Our Most Important Jobs as Parents Is to Teach Our Children How to Suffer
Like it or not, teaching our kids how to suffer is a key part of parenting. If teaching our children to suffer doesn’t seem like a crowd-pleasing, headline-grabbing parenting tip, I get it. Suffering is, well, suffering. The belief that suffering not only can be avoided but should be avoided is so powerful that the very idea of suffering as something that needs to be encouraged feels possibly…
Jul 11, 2024
Siblings Can Have Different Stories of Childhood: Family Therapy Can Help Complicate the Narrative
Even though they might have the same parents, siblings can have wildly differing narratives of the same family experiences. These discrepancies can have a lasting effect on adult siblings’ relationships, sometimes perpetuating years of conflict. Our Director of Supervision and Training Kelly Scott spoke with NPR about how working through these diverging stories in family therapy can be clarifying…
Jun 26, 2024
Parental Ambivalence Is Real and Complicated and We Need to Talk About It More
Parents can sometimes regret having children—they love their children, but they hate the job (and at times, they struggle with liking their children because they hate the job). As explored in a recent article in Time Magazine, these are painful and complicated feelings. However, they’re not as uncommon as society would have us assume.Society likes to only see the positive side of parenthood; the…
Jun 25, 2024
Lying Isn’t All Bad: Why and How to Be Curious When Your Kids Don’t Tell the Truth
Therapy with children: Kids lie for many reasons and parents should be curious about what lies communicate. We all lie—to ourselves and, in turn, to others. Adults lie for many different reasons, whether denying or avoiding a truth, convincing ourselves of something we want to believe, or protecting ourselves from a painful reality. So too with kids. In my therapy with children, the reasons why…
May 22, 2024
How to Not Raise Spoiled Kids: Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist in The Huffington Post
Some of the hardest work for parents is to tolerate that their children can both be wonderful and do things that aren’t so wonderful. However, this fact, along with the need to name and, when necessary, give consequences for bad behavior, is a key piece of raising kids who aren’t spoiled. Our Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist recently spoke to The Huffington Post on how parents can…
Mar 05, 2024
We Encourage People to Break up with Abusive Partners: We Should Do the Same for People Estranged from Families
In a culture that advocates for people to separate from abusive partners, estrangement is still taboo. “Tell me about your family. Are you super close with them? What are your parents like? Siblings?”“Actually, I’m not really in contact with my family of origin…I’ve been estranged from them for the past several years.”“Oh…” Desperate to change the subject, no one knows what to say—the person who…
Dec 20, 2023
Your Teenager Is Cooler Than You
Teens’ interests that parents see as odd are not just one of the greatest sources of life force: They’re also profoundly cool. In my work as a therapist to both teenagers and their parents, parents frequently express concern—or roll their eyes—about their teens’ “weird” niche interests, styles, or views about the world and worry about what other kids at school will think. However, I have…
Dec 11, 2023
Going Home for the Holidays: Advice From a Therapist on Not Just Enduring Your Crazy Family
Painful family dynamics reemerge during the holidays: Reflect on them rather than just enact them. Every year around the holiday season, patients shrug and say to me, “My family is crazy,” or, another variation, “My family is weird,” before setting out to simply endure the holidays. Of course, those little words—“crazy” and “weird"—can stand in for a whole lot of harm. Crazy sometimes indicates…
Nov 21, 2023
Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist Addresses Parents’ Complicated Feelings About Their Young Adults’ Return to School on All Of It with Alison Stewart
Excitement, loss, anxiety, relief—parents can wrestle with a whole host of complicated emotions when their young adult child leaves home for college. Our Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist returned to WNYC’s All Of It with Alison Stewart to discuss how parents can make room for all of their sometimes conflicting feelings as their kids gain independence and return to school.In the…
Sep 07, 2023
How Parents and Adult Children Can Navigate Living Together: Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist in Healthline
Since the pandemic, an increasing amount of parents and adult children have decided to live together. While there is often much discussion about these relationships grating on both the adult children and their parents, these arrangements can often be beneficial. However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t need to be navigated with clarity and care. Our Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist…
Jul 05, 2023
Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist Featured on NPR
As family therapists, including family therapy for aging parents, we’ve witnessed the emotional impact on families when an older parent with dementia or other cognitive difficulties struggles to maintain their own finances. Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist appeared on NPR to explain what money issues can mean emotionally for an older parent and the family as a whole.The segment “An…
Jan 31, 2023
Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist Featured in The Wall Street Journal and WESA
Whether about finances or health, having big conversations with parents as an adult child can be challenging. The dynamics between a parent and child remain, no matter what age, and this can be a barrier to discussions, particularly when parents need more help as they get older. Our Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal and WESA to address how…
Jan 05, 2023Browse all Tribeca Therapy topics
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