It’s not the kind of thing you’re supposed to admit in polite company.  But I know from my practice–and my own life–that it’s more common than we want to think.

Say, you’re home with your daughter all day; your husband works full-time.  You get more time with her, which he envies; he gets more time with adults, which you envy.

When does envy become full-blown jealousy?  When it is a problem?

In graduate school, I was told that in therapy, the relationship is a primary source of healing.  There were studies that said interns got as good (or better) results than more experienced therapists, because their clients felt so cared for.

I like that idea.  It rings true with a lot of my professional experiences.

But I’m wondering if it’s less and less true.  Is the healing relationship an antiquated notion, out of touch with where our culture is going? Take the experience I had last week, for example.

I started out calling this post “Building Kids’ Self-Esteem”, but then I realized I really want to talk about something else.  Esteem is really about how other people see us, while worth is about feeling innately, inherently worthy.

I talked in my last post about the Catfish phenomenon, and how I believe it is fueled by low self-esteem on both sides.  But maybe I was wrong.  Maybe it’s about low self-worth on both sides.

Urban Dictionary defines “catfish” as “someone who pretends to be someone they are not online; to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.”  I just watched the “Catfish” documentary (I know, I’m a little behind), which first brought widespread attention to the phenomenon, and it got me thinking:

Why do some people grow up to behave this way?  How do we protect our children from catfish, but also from becoming catfish themselves?

I received a comment on my previous post about maternal gatekeeping that pointed out how it negatively impacts child development.  (My blog was, admittedly, focused more on the parent doing the behaviors, than on the children affected by them.)

Maternal gatekeeping comprises the beliefs and the behaviors that make mothers more primary than their partners in taking care of the children–essentially, it’s a form of control that makes mothers feel overly responsible and overloaded, while the other parent is marginalized.

What does that mean to the child, from an attachment perspective?

I was listening to a radio interview with Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook COO whose book “Lean In” is apparently inspiring and provoking women in equal measure.  But that’s a story for someone else’s blog.

Anyway, what grabbed me–in the interests of my blog–was her mention of something called “maternal gatekeeping.”  It means (some) mothers are reluctant to relinquish control and as a result, fathers do less in housekeeping and child-rearing.  According to one study, gatekeepers do, on average, an extra five hours of family work a week.

So, are you a gatekeeper?

You might have seen the 60 Minutes piece about Newtown parents who’ve become activists for gun control.  They started with the Connecticut legislature, and now eleven families of Newtown shooting victims took Air Force One to the capitol to try to impact the process there, armed only with the photos of their dead children.

One mother spoke about how the lawmakers who are threatening to filibuster (essentially, to stop gun legislation from even getting a vote) need to look not only in her eyes, but into the eyes of her daughter.  The strength and resilience of these families is phenomenal.  What does it say to the rest of us?

We learn to parent, to a large extent, by having been the children of particular people.  What I mean is, we saw what parenting looked like up close throughout our childhoods.  Once we’re parents ourselves, we get a chance to imitate, or to do it differently.

This can often be more fraught than it sounds.

It’s a crucial relationship commandment: Know thy partner’s buttons.  What I mean is, learn what provokes a strong reaction in your partner (even if it makes no sense to you, especially if it makes no sense to you.)

I wrote in a previous post about my 14-month-old daughter’s first tantrum/meltdown, seemingly ahead of schedule.  She went for a repeat performance yesterday in a much more contained environment: the car.

It’s a frequent experience among the parents of toddlers, an example of the competing needs parents have to juggle, and decisionmaking under stress.