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 important skills and competencies. Over the last 35 years I (JS) have had quite a few supervisors, have supervised many students, and have attended continuing education workshops about supervision. As internship coordinator for a master’s program I hear about the supervision experience of many students. Based on those experiences, what follows is not meant to…

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 you have a chance to breathe? Not BREATHE (breathing exercises, breath work, using breath to calm yourself) but just breathe. There is a good chance that the answer is no. And you feel stressed. At the same time, what would you give up? With the advent of stress reduction clinics, and an understanding of the…

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 compare to never having had the problem in the first place. This edited excerpt from our book, Working with Parents in Child Psychotherapy, is focused on the best times to have parents intervene with their children. Pregame, Game, Postgame We have identified three intervention points to help parents deal with difficult child situations, the pregame,…

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 of problematic parent-child attachment (Lyons-Ruth, Bronfman, & Parsons, 1999; Bronfman, 1993). This was when I started to look at parental behavior, in molecular ways, as a means to understand the genesis of psychological troubles. I started to see small behaviors, such as parents laughing, in a new way. Karlen’s data set was remarkable for capturing…

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; Sroufe et al., 2005). When mothers were more responsive and comforting to their crying infants their babies cried less over time (Ainsworth et al.,1978). This is in direct contrast to the behavioral expectation that by responding to crying, and therefore reinforcing it, crying would increase. We see nurturing as a need similar to sleep and…

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 patients (Haldeman, 1994). In the United States, in the current political climate, terms signifying mental illness as well as intellectual disabilities are bandied about as weapons in partisan warfare. It is perilous to characterize people with different political beliefs as somehow dumb, evil, or mentally ill. “Trump derangement syndrome” has been coined as a way…

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 not a consensus that 10,000 is a “magic number” (see, for example, Tudor-Locke et al., 2011). When babies are breastfed, they eat as much as they eat and parents and doctors don’t even know how much it is per meal. When we bottle feed, we measure the ounces, monitor their intake, and fret over whether…

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 is engaging in bullying, you should believe it, and then work to understand why your child is acting this way and map out a plan to help. Most parents think their kids behave admirably and wouldn’t engage in behavior that harms other children (at least we hope so). When their parents are present, children may…

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 for you when you got home. Wouldn’t it be great to go out together as a family? Well…maybe not so much. Looking back at the first attempted family night out, what didn’t go wrong? When you tried to visit that new Indian spot down the street, none of the kids liked the options on the…

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 discussed new referrals. I was assigned a teen girl whose presenting problem was that her mother was “too perfect.” There was raucous laughter in this usually dour meeting where major mental illness, depression, and trauma were the regular fare. “What’s the real problem?” My colleagues asked. They suspected we would uncover something truly awful upon…