A Parent’s Perspective   I have a daughter who is 13 years old, a year younger than Ana Kriegel was when she was cruelly murdered. The early teenage years should be lovely, carefree happy years, those precious years between childhood and adulthood. My mother used to love an old Val Doonican song titled ‘The Special…

I am entering the ‘taxi driver’ stage of parenthood. My little customers have busy schedules and must be ferried at the appointed time to brownies, gymnastics, rugby training, soccer training, GAA training, Irish dancing classes, flute lessons, singing lessons, tin whistle lessons, swimming and weekends away, together with sundry playdates, birthday parties and so forth.…

I am currently organising an event for my mother – or I should say in memory of my mother. Next year it will be fifty years since she died and I believe that it is important to mark that. It seems to me that the best way to do that is to gather her family,…

Ten-year-old kids are complex creatures. There is but a short period in life when you fervently believe in Santa, but also can operate a computer proficiently. If there were a Venn diagram with circles entitled, ‘Computer skills’ and ‘Santa Claus’ the age in the intersection would be 10. A 10-year-old is at a remarkable juncture…

Do you know that our brains are like Velcro for negative experiences and like Teflon for positive ones? That is what a psychologist explained to us recently at training for people working with families. The subject was ‘Supporting parents of an anxious child’ and we were being urged to understand that really, our brains are…

Children’s Corner There are lots of different types of tricks that magicians perform – sometimes they will make objects appear and disappear, saw a lady in half, or read people’s minds. One popular illusion that most stage conjurors still present today is levitation. This is the art of making something float off the ground without…

A Parents Perspective Parents worry about the amount of time that young people spend on social media. I have concerns about the nature of some of the content they might see, the hours of time wasted and the need to measure up to others they see posting online, but I have another misgiving. Being a…

It is the finest sort of autumn morning. The sun shines kindly upon the apple trees, their boughs now heavy with fruit. Clusters of ripe apples gleam red against pale blue skies. The leaves of the beech and sycamore are already turning a golden brown. Yet the ash trees stand defiantly green, in a willful…

Well so far the feet look fine and the hips are still working! Danny and I are four days and about seventy kilometres into the Camino de Santiago. We are also celebrating our twenty sixth wedding anniversary today. So what profound reflections have come to me as we walk through woodlands and vineyards, up boulder-strewn…

For much of the past decade, my wife’s medical training has dragged our family around Ireland and Britain. We have moved house 11 times in 10 years, through Cork, Dublin, Surrey and the Isle of Wight. Thankfully, our nomadic existence is at last coming to an end, as we settle back into where we began,…