Unabashedly Authentic

Image based on Lodro Rinzler's book and designed by Daniel Urban Brown of Lithographs. “Mom!!” rings from every corner of my small world. The couch, the top of the bunk bud, the bathroom, the kitchen table, and via Facetime and relentless texts. The 10 year old: “We have two book reports. I thought we only had one book report, and I have only read fiction. I need to read a nonfiction. I like fiction. And my backpack is ripped. I found a new backpack on Amazon; would you look at it now?” The 12 …

Stop walking. Stop talking. Know your audience. A friend of mine has a house rule she developed for her kids when they were preschoolers. It all started over a heated dispute involving waffles, butter, and jam and the order in which the latter two should be applied and in what thickness. She calls it the Tonal Rule. Here is how it works. If you make a request or say something to a sibling, parent, sitter, teacher, the Uber driver, or for that matter, the dog and it is plausible that at the end …

Walmart or Harvard. All other high schoolers should just go home, settle in with their iPads, hide under the t-shirt quilt Aunt Donna had custom-made, and binge watch Game of Thrones. If these are the only options, then it’s winner take all—because stocking shelves doesn’t play well on Instagram. My yoga instructor had a similar idea nearly a decade ago. “We are a nation of extremes; moderation is no longer respected. Sodas are bigger. SUVs are bigger. And some family named ‘Kardashian’ is on T…

Pregnant with Natalie, I found myself on an incredibly demanding project that required me to come up with multiple creative interactive storyboards that would be produced as computer games to explore math concepts.

I’d storyboard hour after hour, and when I found myself exhausted, frantic for an idea, staring at the cursor on the screen, scribbling word webs and making paper chains, knowing all the while I was getting paid for the storyboard, not for my paperclip chain–making prowess, it would …

Got Testing Stress? Having a Crisis of Confidence? We've Got Your Back.

Lauren Cardinale, CH, CPC, Life Coach and Board Certified Hypnotherapist When you think of the SAT or the ACT or the AP Exams or the SAT Subject Tests, what's your response? What's your teen's response? Can you feel the weight of all that PRESSURE?  What do you think this stress is doing to your student's performance? (Let's not talk about the mood at your dinner table.) Many students, of all ages, including my own kids, h…

Image Source: Public Domain Images At a recent college admissions event, a prospective student got up, and a bit nervously asked a panel of admissions officers, “What do you look for in a college admissions essay? What makes one application stand apart from others?” I could feel this teen’s heart beating in his rib cage, the look on his face that begged the panel to help him hone in on which of all of his experiences he should write about, what he should share, to make these people see he was a…

Santiago Salvador Ascui Source: NY Times Subscribing to valuing only one type of college applicant is a disservice to all of us. Do we value only one type of person? And what message are we sending the next generation by perpetuating the everyone-must-be-a-leader ideal? Is this akin to the same vacuous thinking that convinces us that everyone-must-be-a-winner at all times? In this recent article, published in the New York Times, Susan Cain continues a conversation that is decidedly worth having…

Maybe. Maybe not. Source: Bitmoji “I’m not good with this waiting business.” “What if I don’t get in?” “I just want to know.” “When will I find out?” “Why does it have to take so long?”   The above is a sampling of text messages I received from both students and parents over the past eight weeks. Applications to college are out the door, and we now wade through the dark, often angst-ridden middle, what some may consider the most difficult, and perhaps the most nerve-wracking, part. During the w…

                When we dip our toes or perhaps a foot and a hand, choosing to not wholly commit the universe responds in kind, partially. Is there a goal that you've been only willing only to dip a toe? Accomplishments, small and great, require a willingness to let go of the uncertainty of outcome and the courage to dive in, headlong, knowing that sometimes the water will be chilly but the swim exhilarating.