Family & Relationships

Encourage your family to take part in spring cleaning while teaching them life skills to create space, reduce stress and anxiety, and boost their overall mood with these five activities.

Take your spring cleaning to a new level by making space in your physical environment and working on your mental wellness with our 31-day calendar.

My daughter is a twenty-two-year-old bio engineering student. She is a hardworking girl, but she takes care of her hygiene poorly and her room is not walkable. Everything is on the floor. She gets mad when I talk to her about hygiene. A little background, my daughter has PCOS. I have spent a lot of money on laser hair removal, with not great results. When she was younger, she was bullied because of her condition and would come home crying. She does not want to go to a therapist. I’m not sure how to help her or what to do for her. 

My neighbor doesn't keep up his yard. In the winter, he never shovels the sidewalk and in the summer, it's the grass. I know it's not my business but it bothers me. Can I say something? How can I get over this when I have to look at it every day?

In this week's Dear Dr. Michelle, we switch things up! Last fall, Jaelyn Arndt's father unexpectedly passed away. Dr. Michelle K. Murray asks Jaelyn how friends and family can best support a loved one who is grieving a loss.

Our readers had a lot on their minds last year, from supporting loved ones to staying positive through the ongoing pandemic. Many of our blogs focused on self-care and gratitude, a topic that is as relevant as ever for parents and caregivers and our world’s increasingly burnt-out workforce.

Our President and CEO Dr. Michelle K. Murray joined KSTP's Minnesota Live to talk about how families can keep it simple in the new year by setting small, specific, and intentional goals.

To many, adolescent and teen boys are a mystery. They are trying to find their place in the pecking order of the world. They are defining manhood, “trying out” the different types of men they’ve seen in society, and how they want to be defined. So how do you communicate with adolescent boys? Take them for a drive.

My siblings and I have good jobs and each of us can take care of ourselves. We all pay our bills, feed our families, and enjoy some extra pleasures. The issue is that I make more money than my parents and my two siblings and this can become awkward at times. Whenever I buy something a little more expensive for myself or others, they ask me how much it cost. Sometimes they insinuate or try to guess my income level to see if I will confirm or deny their suspicions. How do I handle these uncomfortable situations? I don’t want to tell them how much I pay for things, or my income, and I wish they wouldn’t ask.

The holidays are really tough for me. I live far away from my family and this will be the second year in a row I am not able to make it back to see them. I can feel myself starting to push away from my family just to protect myself from feeling left out. I’m sad and I seem to cry at the drop of a hat. What do I do?