S. Wray Gregoire
FAMILY VALUES: Don’t Follow Your Heart
When news of Al and Tipper Gore’s split hit a while back, many newspaper pundits chose to put a happy spin on it. Deirdre Baer, writing in the New York Times, urged us “not...
A Graduation Speech
We are not preparing children well for the real world. Want proof? Here’s Exhibit A, the children’s soccer league in Ottawa, which made headlines recently when it changed its rules. From now on, any...
FAMILY VALUES: Too Young to Be Hot
Nothing makes a teenager seem younger than one trying to act like an adult. They may get the lingo right, but watch them for a few minutes and you realize they’re totally clueless about...
FAMILY VALUES: 25 Marriage Tips
With June, the wedding month, peeking around the corner at us, I thought it was time to present you with twenty-five tips for a successful marriage. And so, in no particular order, here is...
Good Manners, Good People
I am not one of those people who rejoices in the intricacies of etiquette. I avoided certain distant relatives for a decade after my wedding in mortal dread that I had forgotten to send...
Grown Ups and Financial Facts
Last week, in New York, the Staten Island Ferry collided with the pier, sending passengers hurling towards the deck. That scene is about to be replayed, all across the Western world. Our ships are...
Doing a Parent’s Job
I love the Ontario Catholic School Boards. We all owe them a debt of gratitude, whether we’re Catholic or not. They took one look at Dalton McGuinty’s new “let’s teach sex explicitly in grade...
On the Other Side of the World
Last month my family and I took a trek to Kenya. We were visiting the Mulli Children’s Family, a home for over 1000 orphaned and abandoned children. My husband was part of a medical...
FAMILY VALUES: Ending Marriage’s Bad Rap
If an alien were to peruse the magazines at the checkout counter, he or she would likely conclude that humans are all masochists: we’re inexplicably drawn to the institution of marriage even though we...
FAMILY VALUES: Following the Plan
Did you follow The Plan? You know the one; our parents drilled it into us. Get an education, get a job, get married, have a baby. And do it in that order! No marriage...
Family Values: Evil and Odd
Around or about 1665, Sir Isaac Newton, so the story goes, was resting outside under an apple tree, when a big red one landed on his big red noggin. Suddenly the Universal Law of...
Family Values: We Aren’t Islands
Many of us long to live in a world where we shouldn’t have to do anything for anyone else. We set the course for our own lives; we decide what paths we will take;...
Family Values: Education is Not Always the Answer
Many in our society are living in a fantasy world that they desperately want to preserve, and that fantasy revolves around the premise that people are basically good.
Our education system and our government are...
Family Values: Capitalizing on the In Between Years
Let me give you the stories of two men. One we’ll call Jim. He married straight out of high school—rather an anomaly today. He didn’t go to college, but immediately took a job at...
Family Values: Do I See What You See?
I have incredible vision. I can see things that nobody else in my family can. If clean, folded laundry is sitting on the stairs, waiting to be transported into the owners’ rooms, I am...
