Blog posts
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Supervision
Expectations for Quality Supervision: It Takes Two Hands to Clap Despite coursework and training on how to do clinical work, for many there is one subject lacking: how to “do supervision (Falender, 2018).” The APA has published Guidelines on Supervision, meant to “inform the practice of clinical supervision…(2015, p. 34)” which delineate an array of…
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Feel Better by Doing Less
Feel Better by Doing Less Does your life feel frantic?Between jobs, kids, household responsibilities, dealing with parents, seeing friends, working out, meditating, walking every day, chauffeuring the children to activities, making sure that there is every tutor and lesson available, being in a relationship, and whatever other wonderful things your life is filled with, do…
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When to Intervene
Timing is Everything: Effective Times to Intervene when Parenting The Benjamin Franklin quote, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” should be the motto of parenting. No one ever regrets preventing a problem, though they may never know what disasters were averted. We remediate problems presented to us, though no reaction can…
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Don’t laugh when your child is crying: Attachment research guides parenting practice
As an intern at The Cambridge Hospital, I was assigned an international attachment expert, Karlen Lyons-Ruth, as a psychological testing supervisor. During lulls in the testing, we met and discussed her research on infant-parent attachment. In a stroke of enormous good fortune, she offered me the opportunity to work with her data, examining the nuances…
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Creating Nurturing Moments
7 Ideas for Creating Nurturing Moments Imagine the success we would have as parent guidance experts if we were able to increase the number and quality of nurturing moments between children and their parents! Research shows that nurturing environments play an essential role in the prevention of child mental health concerns (Biglan et al., 2012;…
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Political Anxiety Disorder: Time for a new diagnosis
There is a long history of using mental health diagnoses to act out political agendas. This storied history includes: diagnosing women who complained of sexual assault as mentally ill (Bourke, 2012); using patients with intellectual disabilities as part of inhumane experiments (Iacono & Carling-Jenkins, 2012); and using conversion therapy to alter the orientation of homosexual…
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What Do Steps, Bottle Feeding, and Grades Have in Common?: The Stress Caused by Tracking
Do you remember the time before we counted steps, when going out for some fresh air and exercise was the goal in and of itself? Then we started hearing about taking 10,000 steps per day to maintain a healthy body. And now some people “have to get their steps in” every day, though there is…
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Working with a Bully
7 Strategies to Help Your Child When They Are a Bully Imagine getting a call telling you that your child is being bullied. So hard. Now imagine that you receive a call from your child’s school saying that YOUR CHILD is bullying others. Perhaps even worse! When you receive that call saying that your child…