“Call the Midwife,” beginning in impoverished London in 1957, deals with challenging issues such as illegal abortions, thalidomide, and spousal abuse. And yet, when watching it, I (JS) felt a great longing to be part of the caregiving community living at Nonnatus House, the nurses and nuns who cared for those in the district. What appealed so much to me? These professionals lived and worked in a supportive community of colleagues. They cared deeply, both with skillful competency and emotional concern, for those in their charge, while maintaining professional boundaries. They did not routinely bring young women and children to live with them. They recognized the limits of their roles.…

The kids are grown. In theory, the parents’ job is done. But for many parents, the anxiety regarding their children’s wellbeing continues. Though there are shelves full of books on parenting young children and teens, there is a relative dearth of advice for this stage, which occurs between finishing traditional school and having a career or their own family life. Despite having much less power to influence adult children, parents still hope their children will land that ideal job, find a healthy partner, avoid major disappointments, and live a better life than the parents themselves did. Parents hope to protect their grown children from the vagaries of unfairnesses in the…

The temptation is almost unbearable. A family member has done something ill-advised. A colleague messed something up badly. There are so many situations when it is so easy to say “I told you so.” What situations provoke this comment? Here are some scenarios: An opportunity is lost because someone didn’t check their email when you repeatedly suggested they do so. Despite multiple warnings, a loved one was scammed by a spam phone call. Your partner forgot a needed item for their work get-together, even though you cued them to bring it. A lot of people, including mental health providers, would say these are wonderful opportunities for “natural” consequences, such as…

The simplicity of a television show about a British nanny solving family issues without much difficulty is quite appealing. Supernanny, an American reality tv show, was broadcast on ABC from 2005-2011 and continues to be viewed as reruns and on YouTube. In my own moments of personal stress, I (EB) rely on Supernanny Jo Frost. There’s a peaceful rhythm to her quick dispatch of horrible behavior. The formula is straightforward. A family makes a desperate plea for help via video message to Supernanny. The problems are cartoonishly awful. They hit, bite, throw things, scream, curse, refuse to eat or sleep, or dominate the family by playing video games, or watching…

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…