By Karla Downing

Are you wondering if you are enabling your adult child? These five signs will help you to determine whether or not you are helping or hurting. "Enabling" means that your action allows someone to continue to do something they otherwise couldn't do without it. It is also doing something for others that they should be doing for themselves.

By Tracey Wall

Do you often consider how much time and energy you give to your family but never give to yourself? Do you feel you're constantly attending to the needs of others but never your own? Many mums feel their role is solely to care for their family but you cannot do this without looking after your own needs as well. Have you thought about what could happen to your family if you burn out, become unwell or even start to resent what you have?

By Anne Benissan

They have pressure for their kids health, for their children's manners, for the right preschool, for the right school, for the homework, for the right activity, for the right parenting technique, for the right friends etc...

It is a 24/7 job that lasts for long. Everywhere you read how wonderful it is, the truth is that it is not always wonderful. It can be draining.

There was an interesting article in The Atlantic, entitled "How to Land Your Kid in Therapy: Why the obsession with our kids' happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods. A therapist and mother reports."

The article is about the way many parents focus much of their energy on being there for their children, but their children end up feeling lost and empty.

One of the issues I've written about extensively is that half of good parenting is being there for our children, and the other half is being there for ourselves. This article says nothing about parents becoming loving role models of personal responsibility for filling their own emptiness. In fact, these parents, who are obsessed with their kids' happiness, are likely addicted to filling themselves up through their children - not a healthy situation.

This article validates what Inner Bonding is all about - learning how to take responsibility for your own feelings. The problem with these lost adults is that their parents always took responsibility for them, rather than role-modeling how to fill themselves up.

Feeling lost and empty is the result of a lack of love. As the cartoon drawing shows, these kids received an abundance of love from their parents. But they never learned how to fill themselves with love through a personal source of spiritual guidance. They never learned how to access their own higher self to guide them in what is loving to themselves, so they end up feeling lost.

By Margaret Paul, Ph.D

"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you."
-- Kahlil Gibran

Symptoms of enmeshed parenting:

• Your children's good or difficult behavior and successful or unsuccessful achievements define your worth.
• Your children are the center of your life - your purpose in life.
• Your focus is on taking care of your children rather than taking care yourself.
• Your happiness or pain is determined by your children.
• You are invasive - you need to know everything about what your children think and do.

If you identify with one or more of these symptoms, you might be enmeshed with your children.