My Mum gave me some great parenting advice recently. She said: 'When I look back on how I raised you, I wish I had realised that it would have been better for me to do chores with you, rather than send you off to do them on your own'.
This is solid advice - most of us get progressively more sad on our own (unless it is a conscious choice to have some 'alone time') and doing chores alone is even worse. But doing chores with family members is important bonding time - time to gently chat whilst doing something useful.
I spoke to a lovely psychologist last week who works with Indigenous Australian youth. He doesn't do formal, sitting in an office, talking about your feelings type sessions with his clients. They head out to the park and do stuff together and, whilst they are kicking a football, moments will arise when the young person shares something important.
So doing those chores with your teenager is a wonderful opportunity to create a space where an important conversation can flower - relish it. They grow up and leave us so soon.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes encourage women to make a 'scapecoat' that represents all the wounds, scars, insults and trauma they have endured through their life. To somehow record all the times when they have made poor choices or felt overwhelmed and without hope. She expected women to want to destroy this symbol of so much pain and shame but she discovered that, instead, women want to keep them as 'proof of the endurance, the failures and the victories'. She hung her own scapecoat in her hallway and whenever she walked past it she found herself:
