(NYTimes, 5.11.13)
On this Mother’s Day, Madeline Levine, psychologist and author of “Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success,” writes about the profound ways mothers change over the span of decades during which infants grow into fully fledged adults. Alongside the pain of loss, she writes, is the awareness that our children’s independence and self-sufficiency is the sign of a job well done.
The following is a selection from her longer New York Times opinion piece (5.11.2013).
The following powerful poem by Khalil Gibran (1922) speaks to the notion of allowing our children to own their own dreams. We must guide and support them, while at the same time allowing them to discover their own ambitions, identity and purpose and to chart their own life paths.