January 2, 2025

By Courtney Wise

Happy New Year, MindSite News readers! In this newsletter, we continue our roundup of MindSite News parenting stories you may have missed, including some past answers from our popular Ask Barbara feature, book reviews and films about families, children and mental health, and more. Enjly!

Ask Barbara: My husband dotes on our two beautiful girls. Why do I feel a little jealous? (March 2024)

Dear Barbara,

I have been married for five years and thought that I married the right man, but now I am not so sure so I need your help. During the course of the past five years, many things have changed. My husband and I have two beautiful children, now ages 2 and 4. They are beautiful and healthy girls, and we adore them. We have an excellent nanny for which we are grateful because we don’t have to worry about the kids while we are at work. Five years ago, I started a job that I love and have since received two promotions for which I am very grateful. I have a lot more responsibility, and I manage a staff of 30. My husband has a good job but has not received the promotions that he had hoped for. I continue to encourage him as he is smart and very capable.

Here is my problem. At the beginning of the marriage, my husband used to provide me with a lot of praise, compliments, and reassurance. I used to feel seen by him and very understood. Since the promotions and the kids, my husband has been less attentive in so many ways. He doesn’t anticipate my needs the way he used to. He allows me to make important decisions on my own with very little input. This feels very passive, and it sometimes makes me feel like I don’t really have a partner and that I am in a relationship with myself. When he is with his friends, he behaves differently, often making the final decisions on plans for when and where they get together. I witness this frequently. My husband is also very good with the girls. He is clearly in charge of them and dotes on them. I am ashamed to admit that I am a bit jealous.

I need your help figuring out what is happening here. I want the decisive and attentive version of my husband back. Please help.

Read Dr. Barbara Greenberg’s full response here.

You may also want to see her advice for navigating life with a teenager who is rude, lazy and selfish; a mom’s worries about her ‘perfect child’ and another parent’s anxiety over her daughter’s obsession with her weight;  how to comfort a friend contemplating divorce, and difficulty controlling anger toward family members who won’t help with chores, among others. You can find more great columns from Dr. Greenberg here. 

The Night Parade: A genre-bending memoir that helps reshape the cultural narrative on bipolar illness, grief and family (from January 2024)

Debut author Jami Nakamura Lin has always struggled with what she calls “the tidy arc of the typical mental illness memoir, the kind whose trajectory leads towards being ‘better,’ though the writers usually don’t pretend they are fully healed.”

Small wonder that Lin’s own memoir The Night Parade – about her bipolar disorder, her family, and her father’s death – is anything but typical. Stories about bipolar illness, Lin observes, often focus on the worst moments, “crisis’s hot center.” And though she recounts her suicide attempt and hospitalization in a psychiatric ward when she was 17, Lin writes compellingly of the everyday hum of living with her mental illness.

Labeled as a speculative memoir, The Night Parade is an inventive and genre-bending book that excavates illness, grief, and lineage – and suggests a cultural sea change in how we view them. Written nonlinearly and bolstered by research, it employs different points of view. One chapter is a letter to Lin’s daughter. Another is an imagined conversation between Lin and her grandparents as they travel through time.

Lin weaves her own story with folktales from her Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan heritage. Each chapter opens with an illustration of yōkai or similar supernatural creatures and spirits, painted by her sister Cori Nakamura Lin. Often ghostly and sometimes monstrous, the yōkai historically personified unaccountable phenomena in the tales of Japanese storytellers. Now, they are a way for Lin to make sense of her own personal history.

Melissa Hung spoke to Lin over Zoom. Read the full interview here. 

Other MindSite News book reviews you may have missed this year include American Madness, The Connection Cure: Exploring the Physical and Mental Health Benefits of Movement, Nature, Art, Service and Belonging, and  How Not to Kill Yourself, among others.

You can read more here, as well as film reviews, on our arts and culture channel. Among our favorites from earlier years you may have missed are Intergenerational Trauma and Healing: Why Encanto Resonates with Latino First-Gens, Turning Red: A Quirky Coming-of-ge Story of Breaking Through Intergenerational Pain, and Prince Harry and His Decade of Magical Thinking.

We also bring you one of our favorite series, these sci-fi memoirs about fantasy fiction and mental health of teens and youth: From Fahrenheit 451 to Harry Potter, The Power of Fantasy Fiction for Youth Mental Health, No Illusion: Fantasy Fiction Is My Safe Space, and Hope Was Still Waiting for Me: Finding a Sanctuary in Fantasy Fiction. And be sure to let us know about films and books we should review.

Meet the New Generation of Unarmed Responders in this New Podcast Series (from August 2024)

It is a lot safer to call a crisis response team for your child’s mental health crisis if team members aren’t carrrying weaspons. What does it mean to be an unarmed responder to crisis 911 calls, and how do mental health advocates and others convince the police to let them respond? Listeners to “The Fifth Branch,” a podcast from Tradeoffs and The Marshall Project, hear answers to those questions and more. Over the course of three episodes, the podcast examines this growing alternative to respond to 911 crisis calls through the eyes of the Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team, or HEART,  in Durham, North Carolina. Listen to all three episodes here.

In other news…

Caregiving as a young adult: Young caregivers, defined by the National Alliance for Caregiving as adults between 18 and 26 years old, make up about 25 percent of family caregivers in our nation today. Nearly half are men, mostly Latino and Black. They also face even less support than caregivers generally, largely because they’re overlooked. “They fall into every potential crack that exists,” Melinda Kavanaugh, one of the few social workers researching this population, told NPR. In terms of resources, “Nothing is targeted for a 22-year-old. Nothing.”

Beyond a lack of support, research shows that caregiving in youth can reverberate through all other areas of life, essentially shaping it. Amanda Kastrinos was already in grad school for health communication when she learned her father had advanced cancer. His diagnosis shifted the focus of her research. She’s now a postdoctoral fellow at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, helping us to see and understand young caregivers, long unseen.

If you or someone you know is in crisis or experiencing suicidal thoughts, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and connect in English or Spanish. If you’re a veteran press 1. If you’re deaf or hard of hearing dial 711, then 988. Services are free and available 24/7.