Description: Imagine that you are having a bad day, though I hope you are not. Imagine that demands are rising, things are not going in your desired directions and your stress and anxiety levels are climbing up towards the roof. What would be one thing you could do that could lead to you feeling significantly… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Families and Peers
Should Misophonia be a Disorder?
Description: Are there particular sounds that bother you? Some sounds CAN be unpleasant or annoying like the hum or rattle of a neighbor’s air conditioner when we are trying to relax on our balcony or in our backyard and some sounds can be truly awful. For example even thinking about the sound of fingernails on… Read more »
Temperament: The Start of the Social/Emotional You
Description: Consider this quote from John Watson, one of the founders of Behaviorism: “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist,… Read more »
Digital Fentanyl? Hmmmm….
Description: You cannot have missed the increasing level of discussion and concern regarding the possible impacts of social media use on the mental health of teens and youth in recent years. The available new coverage of this topic ranges widely from articles that seek out and dive into recent, population level research on social media… Read more »
Life and Health Are Collective Endeavors
Description: I was not intending to post three conceptually focused pieces (another one, a third one) when I sat down at my computer this week. By conceptual, I mean looking at articles that ask us if we are looking at or thinking about some aspect of human psychological functioning properly or whether a different conceptual… Read more »
Big Picture on Child Abuse: Risk and Protective Factors
Description: Imagine, just for a moment, that we have just now decided to take seriously and to do something about physical child abuse. With any ‘from scratch’ effort to design an intervention a first step is to see what you can find out about both risk and protective factors in relation to whatever it is… Read more »
What Are and Are Not Causes of Obesity?
Description: Consider this general statistic: in the years between 1975 and 2016 the rate of obesity globally has almost doubled. Why might this be? Without doing any online digging, just think about what you have heard and about what you know about factors that contribute to obesity and about how these factors have increased, multiplied,… Read more »
Screen Time is Too Vague a Variable
Description: How much time should toddlers and preschoolers be allowed to spend in front of screens, including televisions, computers, tablets, smartphones etc.)? Based on detailed reviews of current research the advice of the Canadian Pediatric Society used to be no more than 1 hour a day due to the lack of physical or cognitively challenging… Read more »
Treat Anxiety in Children Like a Phobia
Description: Face your fears! Sounds like a pretty basic piece of advice but for children with deep anxieties over often basic things like eating or being alone offering them such advice does not tend to work. There are therapeutic approaches that can work. Exposure Therapy, based on classical conditioning and linked to the much-discussed work… Read more »
Kids and Small Screens: The Big Picture
Description: Way way back when I was a child there was a limited amount of television programming aimed at young children (The Friendly Giant, Mr. Dress-up, but no Sesame Street). That’s sort of programming was aired on weekday mornings (so for preschoolers) and, at least on the CBC, was run without ANY ads. Even in… Read more »
Books for Success!
