Category: Parenting

Academic education is valued highly in our Iranian culture. The notion of being someone with university degrees is a yearning that involves many factors such as status, position, opportunities, labels, and power. The education systems that we Iranians come from is strictly competition and ranked based while there are no focus on the applicability of…

Absent fathers in our communities is not a new phenomenon.  Absent fathers in migration time is however a new concept.  Past thirty years we Iranians have lost the notion of nuclear families forever.  As much as the forceful migration is a factor, still we have no idea how much our parenting style has changed to…

The other day I was in the recreation center in my neighborhood here on the North Shore.  Just about the time I was leaving, I heard one woman talking to her seven or eight year old daughter. She was talking to her daughter (in Persian) in a silent mood once she was passing me by…

Gender Identity is a concept we have misunderstood. Even in today’s world, we have many families who literally die to have a baby boy! We have families who believe only a baby boy can carry on the family name and make the generation run! We still have women who are being blamed for giving birth…

  What qualities do we intend to model for our children? What qualities do we teach our children and which ones do we want them to value most? Why do we do that? What are the cultural values we wish to modify or change for the next generation? Too many times, we advise our children…