Snow White Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Why do certain diminutive descendants of humankind get to act like little green monsters?

Actually, I shouldn't say that because it gives green monsters a bad name.

There are kids who hold court like Henry VIII--or, to be more precise, like Richard the Third.

These children will neither have fun nor be fun as they grow up. Their parents do them no favors by indulging them and regarding their selfish behavior as "independence" and their nastiness as "personality." Read More

Loss makes room in us. We lose a lover or mate and discover in ourselves a storehouse of independence. We no longer have a certain friend in our life but we form an alliance with someone we might otherwise never have known. We lose a parent only to find, paradoxically, a renewed sense of their influence and tenderness in our lives.

What can you do to what is gone-- except to let it go? Perhaps the only thing is to remember that if life is about loss, it is also about discovery.

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I taped "The Dr. Phil Show" in Los Angeles last week--the show aired today-- and the whole process was actually enormous fun. It would be very easy to be all academic and snobby about the experience but since I enjoyed myself thoroughly to pretend otherwise would be entirely disingenuous.

The topic was revenge. It was delicious. Read More

I didn’t have the privilege of making them into the strong, smart young men they turned out to be: I give that honor to both their parents, their mother and father, who put in those long and unrecorded hours early on. Surely those times count most profoundly and I bow to their significance. I also give credit to these young men who did not avail themselves of the myriad excuses offered to them, as if at a banquet, to screw up. They went through their bad times, not around them; like good gamblers, they played -- successfully -- the hands they were dealt. Read More