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We’ve all felt financial stress in our lives at one time or another. Dealing with that financial stress can feel like a daunting task when you’re not sure where to begin. 

If you’re looking for ways to manage a financially stressful situation, here are some suggestions for taking charge of your money and feeling better about your circumstances.

1. Figure out where the money stress is coming from

Start by identifying the main sources of money stress. Some common sources of financial stress include:

• Not being able to pay your bills, or not being able to pay your bills on time.
• High levels of debt.
• You don’t have money for emergency expenses, like if your car breaks down.
• You’ve lost your job, or you’re worried that you might be laid off.
• You’re worried that you won’t be able to pay for an upcoming expense.

When you understand the main sources of your financial stress, you’ll be able to better tackle the problem. List out your main stressors so you can brainstorm ways to start addressing those items.

Set aside time two or three times a year to review and revise your list. As you consciously tackle your biggest money stressors, you’re more likely to make positive progress.

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Our evaluations and opinions are not influenced by our advertising relationships, but we may earn a commission from our partners’ links. This content is created independently from TIME’s editorial staff.

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You don’t want to, but sometimes you get angry. The reason? Pick one. You don’t feel heard or respected. You’re seeing bad decisions, i.e., not how you would do things, be made. You’re really tired. It might be more honest to cry or say that you’re scared, but you go with yelling, because that comes off as strong. But it’s rarely a winning move, and it’s never what anyone aspires to.

“Who wants to deal with an angry person?,” says Lesli Doares, licensed marriage and family therapist and author of Hero Husband: Building a Super Marriage with Truth, Confidence, and Authentic Leadership. “We don’t get angry for the fun of it,” she says.

The problem is often what comes next: shutting down. Instead of talking, you sigh, stare, pace around, thinking that people will just…get that something is wrong. You may shut down because you’re overwhelmed and feeling incapable of dealing with the issue. It may also be a defense mechanism you’ve acquired over the years.

Or it may be because you’ve found that “stonewalling” or the silent treatment has worked in the past. But that’s another of those not-winning moves, and it hinges on having empathetic people around you who are patient enough to bring you back. You realize that’s unfair. Ultimately, you don’t want to retreat and go into isolation. But it’s a difficult habit to break.

“We’re not tigers out wandering the terrain by ourselves,” Doares says. “We need others to survive.”

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It’s a hard habit to fight, especially if it’s one you’ve had for a long time. Here’s where to start.

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Last summer, my husband and I drove with our 4-year-old and 2-year-old to his hometown on the east coast of Canada. We were there to bury his parents, a memorial that had been a long time in the making because of the pandemic. It was a heavy, sometimes magical time that, after a few weeks, took its toll.

On the four-day-long drive back home to Toronto, we pulled a U-Haul full of memories and keepsakes behind our aging Honda, praying nothing would fall off or out or something worse we hadn’t even considered. Our first stop along the way was a small town in Nova Scotia, where we pulled into a restaurant for lunch. We were all sticky from the hot car and tired, emotionally fried from the last three weeks, but the kids were faring surprisingly well.

It was one of those casual, pub-food-type places, where nachos and fried foods littered every table and tinny Top 40 blared from the speakers above the bar. We sat down and ordered quickly, but between the lunch rush and understaffing, our chicken fingers and fries took over an hour to arrive. While we waited, the kids joked around with each other at the table, looked out the window next to our booth, danced in their seats to the music playing over the speaker, and generally entertained themselves during the excruciating wait. Just as we were finishing up, an older couple who had been sitting behind us got up to leave. As they did, the wife got close to me and, in a tone anyone would recognize, told me my kids had ruined their lunch.

I admit: I lost it. I looked up at her, heat spreading across my face, and told her we’d just buried my husband’s parents and maybe she could show a bit of compassion. I regretted saying it immediately. What difference should his grief make to this stranger? And how dare I use it to try to win some hypothetical argument? The woman seemed unfazed. I apologized to my husband, and, thankfully, the kids seemed not to notice that this outburst had anything to do with them. We managed to laugh about it afterward, but that feeling, that itchy mixture of anger, guilt, shame, and resentment, sat like a heavy ball in my stomach the rest of the way home.

I’ve since thought about that interaction more than I want to admit. At any moment, like a shitty magic trick, I can conjure up those exact same emotions. Those maybe ten seconds impacted me, probably forever. And now, as school winds down for the year and parents prepare to scramble to entertain their brood for the next few months, that woman has been on my mind even more. Who has a right to exist, to take up space without judgment or reproach? And if it’s not our kids, some of our most vulnerable, then how can we call ourselves a loving society?

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Photo-Illustration: the Cut; Photos Getty Images

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If you want to raise kids who are supportive allies to the LGBTQ community, are sensitive to the challenges they face, and feel safe expressing their own identity, normalize talking about these topics at every age.

I spoke to John Sovec, therapist and author of Out: A Parent’s Guide to Supporting Your LGBTQIA+ Kid Through Coming Out and Beyond, about having big (and small) conversations about these issues with children. These are his top three pieces of advice for raising children who are supportive and secure about sexual orientation and gender identity:

1. Talk openly and often about the experience of LGBTQIA+ people.

2. Be aware of how expressing LGBTQIA+ supportive thoughts, actions, and language influences and shapes how children will develop that same inclusive approach for themselves and their friends.

3. Know that this is an ongoing conversation and as parents, be available for when these questions and curiosities arise.

Understanding terms and acronyms

If you feel like you need your own refresher on LGBTQ lingo, this is a good resource. Remember, language is always growing and evolving. If you or your child hears a term you don’t know, look it up and learn together. Also, lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual can mean different things to different people.

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Photo: Zain bin Awais

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There is no shortage of difficult and even painful conversations we may need to have with our kids throughout their childhood. But telling them their parents are divorcing, changing forever the very structure of their family and their lives, has to be one of the hardest, for them and for you. The messaging necessary in those conversations will evolve over time as they get older, and the behaviors they may display that indicate they’re in distress can look different depending on their age.

But Dr. Joanna Stern, a senior clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute, says that although the way you talk to kids about a divorce will change and grow more nuanced the older they get, kids of all ages need to feel or hear reassurance that they are going to be cared for and supported during and after the process.

“What [parents] really want to communicate to kids of all ages is, ‘We’ve got you,’” Sterns says. “‘Your needs are going to be taken care of regardless of what is happening with us and with the divorce.’”

And just as important, Stern says, is to remember what not to say. Namely, don’t bad-mouth the other parent, even in subtle ways, and even with the youngest of kids. So let’s start there—with toddlers.

How to talk to toddlers about divorce

Obviously, there’s very little a parent can or should do by way of explaining a divorce to a child who isn’t yet verbal. A young toddler, though, is likely to require some kind of explanation if you’re divorcing and one parent is moving out.

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Illustration: René Ramos

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The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. In 2017, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”

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Illustration by Ryan Melgar

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For nearly two decades leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin lived in London in a house at 36 Craven Street. In 1776, Franklin left his English home to come back to America. More than 200 years later, 15 bodies were found in the basement, buried in a secret, windowless room beneath the garden.

In 1998, conservationists were doing repairs on 36 Craven, looking to turn Franklin’s old haunt into a museum. “From a one-meter wide, one-meter deep pit, over 1200 pieces of bone were retrieved”—remnants of more than a dozen bodies,  says Benjamin Franklin House. Six were children. Forensic investigations showed that the bones dated to Franklin’s day.

Franklin was a noted revolutionary and powerful freemason—the Grand Master of Masons of Pennsylvania—so it’s easy to wonder what dark secrets Franklin may have hidden in his basement chamber. But the truth, it turns out, isn’t quite so dark.

“The most plausible explanation is not mass murder, but an anatomy school run by Benjamin Franklin’s young friend and protege, William Hewson,” said the Guardian in 2003.

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Photo by TonyBaggett/Getty Images

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