Blog posts

  • 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…

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  • So You Want to go Out to Dinner as a Family

    You used to love going out to eat. You know relationships change once kids come along (Doss & Rhoades, 2017). You’ve managed some date nights since then. You lined up the babysitter and went to your favorite spots. You had a nice meal and tried not to worry about what potential chaos would be waiting…

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  • The Perils of Having a Perfect Parent

    Who would have thought that having a “perfect parent” would be a liability? And, if you doubt that there is such a thing as a perfect parent, so did I until I met her! In the group practice where I worked as an early career child psychologist, we had a weekly team meeting where we…

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