Antipsychotic medications, such as Risperdal, Seroquel and Abilify, were developed to treat adults with major mental illnesses including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. But in recent years, their use has extended to treat conditions such as autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and adolescents.
Children learn to lie from about the age of two. The first lies children learn to tell are denials of wrongdoing. From the age of three they also learn to tell “white” lies. But what can we do to encourage children to tell the truth?
Why does a four-year-old play when a 14-year-old creates? It’s often argued that play is central to the lives of young children. Yet the play of older children and adults is often seen as leisure, escapism or even deviance. But there should not be such a binary division between what is educational and what is frivolous.
As a family therapist, I often have the impulse to tell families to go home and have dinner together rather than spending an hour with me. And 20 years of research in North America, Europe and Australia back up my enthusiasm for family dinners. It turns out that sitting down for a nightly meal is great for the brain, the body and the spirit.
A new study finds a link between a good night’s sleep for school-aged kids and better performance in math and languages specifically—subjects that are powerful predictors of later learning and academic success.
In pregnancy and in some cases even before, quite a high proportion of mothers believe they have been in contact with their unborn children. Some of the women studied found their bodies picking up their unborn babies' feelings. "Every once in a while, I have a feeling but I don't know where it comes from. And then I realize that I am not the one having the feeling."
Indigos process their emotions differently than non Indigos because they have high self-esteem and strong integrity. They can read you like an open book and quickly notice and neutralize any hidden agendas or attempts to manipulate them, however subtly.
Teenagers' opinions about when violence is acceptable or not can be influenced by the way they perceive men and women and the relationships between them. Simply telling young people that violence is wrong won’t stop it happening.
To examine a person’s difficulties is to enter into the psychological atmosphere of his or her family. We are marked by their characteristics, but also by their insane ideas, their negative feelings, their inhibited desires, and their destructive acts. All problems have their roots in the family tree.
When you have more than one child, the importance of fairness seems to trump all other considerations, including self-interest. Give a child £1 and she will be happy. But if she finds out that her sibling got £1.50, she will be angry. Take the money away from both and she will be satisfied. Both have lost, but...
Daily interactions require bargaining, be it for food, money or even making plans. These situations inevitably lead to a conflict of interest as both parties seek to maximise their gains. To deal with them, we need to understand the other person’s intentions, beliefs and desires and then use that to inform our bargaining strategy.
Bullying in schools has been recognized as a serious and pervasive problem now for at least two decades. There is now also evidence that traditional forms of bullying in schools have decreased modestly over the last decade or so. This is very likely due to the increase in work to prevent bullying...
As a mother, I have made life choices that can’t always include everything my children want—like hiking the Adirondacks. Here’s how I learned to overcome the guilt...
The secret to learning self-awareness, cooperation, and other “social and emotional learning” skills lies in experience, not in workbooks and rote classroom exercises.
Sitting with clients every day makes me realize that so many people are confused when it comes to the parent-child relationship and what their responsibility is when it comes to being a parent. Some parents think it’s their job to make their children happy and to think for them – but this is not true.
Babies who are breastfed show signs of early brain development, particularly in regions associated with language, emotional function, and cognition.
Sexual liberation has hardly made a dent in our understanding of sexuality during pregnancy. Most of us are unclear even about the basics: Is it really all right to be sexually active? How active? For how long? What about orgasms? Is it normal to feel sexual at some times and turned off at others?
I remember reading years ago about people who used to send their mother flowers on their birthday... What's so special about that you might say. You've also sent your mother flowers on her birthday... ah, but have you...
- By Marc Chehab
Are school children educated, socialized, or indoctrinated? If there’s any wonder remaining in a student after being swamped with established knowledge throughout the day, she or he would have to pursue critical thinking in the evenings.
- By Sylvia Rimm
The complexity of today's parenting makes it important to develop some basic principles to guide parents and emphasize the foundational concepts that can help parents raise happy, achieving children. Here are the top ten steps to summarize the essential principles to assist parents with raising a happy child.
It’s a crisis that’s engulfing all children in the USA, because it starves them of the skills and capacities they’re going to need to transform society in the future. Given that similar forces are at work in the UK and other countries, it’s time that we all woke up to their calamitous effects and joined the movement to reverse them.
Most “training” of children depends on a willful, specific employment of anxiety inducement. This consciously perpetrated crime is “guilting,” an activity with which we are all involved throughout our lives. Guilting is built on fear but requires some language development for its inception...
- By Martha Burge
I’ll be the first to agree that there is something different about the people typically diagnosed with ADHD. However, if the symptoms can be better explained by something else, and if that different explanation makes better outcomes possible, we should be certain to explore that as a possibility.