Too many parents fail to understand that there is a difference between fitting in and being liked, that there is a difference between being “normal” and being happy. High school is temporary. Family is not.

Instead of revamping school policies to welcome every child, many school systems are bent on revamping the students to conform to their schools.

The human brain takes in information from other people and incorporates it with the information coming from its own senses, neuroscientist Gregory Berns has written. Many times, the group’s opinion trumps the individual’s before he even becomes aware of it.

Medicine asked something extraordinary of nurses: to forge intimate connections with another person for hours, weeks, or months, to care thoroughly and holistically – and then to let that individual suddenly go, often never to be heard from again.

It was a relief to inhabit someone else’s life for a while, to get her personal issues for a brief respite. In a play, she knew exactly how all her character’s problems would be resolved. No matter how the cast performed, the end turned out the same. No questions, no worries, no unknowns.

Nonconformists aren’t just going against the grain; they’re going against the brain. Either their brains aren’t taking the easy way out to begin with, or in standing apart from their peers, these students are standing up to their biology.

No student should be encouraged – by anyone – to change himself until he’s “normal,” a term that says everything and means nothing.

My heart broke not only for the daughter who already was forced to become her mother’s alarmingly narrow ideal, but also for the middle daughter who knew that her in mother’s mind she had already failed.

In the midst of a crowd, an individual’s layers of restraint peel away, revealing potentially barbaric instincts and a susceptibility to a “crowd contagion.

A St. Louis oncology nurse quoted Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl to States News Service in 2012: “ ‘What is to give light must endure burning.’ I think people who care for others understand. Caregiving is painful.