Parenting Our Children

In today's world of mounting pressures and continuous change, we need to take a few minutes to reset our perspectives and figure out what matters most.

In this series we have covered many of the major ways to understand what makes a teenager tick. Now it's time to put all the pieces together and work towards restarting the relationship between you and your teenager.

What’s the connection between women and shame? Why does it seem like women have so much more guilt than men?

Many people confuse the concepts of self-esteem and ego, assuming that if you believe in yourself you are automatically egoistic and arrogant.

All of these small changes work their way into the framework of the elephant and the rider because they are helping the elephant move forward.

“If you don’t stand straight, you’ll never get a husband.”

With language, children with autism often speak late and when they do its in a monotonous tone.

When surrounded by books on a range of topics from science fiction and World War II to graphic novels and deep sea exploration, students will uncover a thrilling and electrifying world.

It’s easy to “misdiagnose” this condition and call it laziness, but that would be a terrible shame.

Anyone who has been a parent for a while understands that children will most likely display imperfect behavior from time to time. But how do you determine if your child has a serious problem with her/his behavior, one that is more than just a passing phase of rebelliousness? And once you've properly assessed the condition, how do you go about treating it so that he/she can become a respectful and productive member of society?

In a recent New York Times article, Robert Lipsyte, a sports author, posed the following question: “Boys and Reading: Is There Any Hope?” For years, I have been dealing with this question in my office. In fact, the U.S. Department of Education’s reading tests for the last thirty years show boys scoring worse than girls in every age group, every year.

“So, Mrs. Cohen, we spoke on the phone about why Baruch is coming in today, but Baruch, why don’t you tell me why you think you are here?” “I’m bad at school,” Baruch said, barely glancing in my direction.“ Do you mean that you don’t get the grades you would like?” “No, I’m just not good at school. My teachers don’t like me, my tests are horrible, and my friends think I’m dumb.”

Children are not given choices and thus cannot shield themselves from failure; we expect them to be competent, if not expert, in a whole array of school basics.

Dena was the star of her nursery class. All the kids loved her and the teachers gushed to her mother, “Dena is so kind. She shares with everyone and is so inclusive. When we have circle time, she sits attentively and she is always ready with a detailed and fun answer.”

There is something to be said about hearing a story with a yiddishe ta'am (taste). However, when the context changes, and the cultural inflection and accent are omitted, the panache wanes. Such was my recent experience after having heard a well-known tale modified to suit the eclectic assemblage of the audience. For you, my dear readership, though, I offer the original version as I heard it many years ago (for a deeper experience, as you read the text imagine how these characters would sound and look).

Two months into the school year, Shonnie's enthusiasm for school inexplicably took a nose dive. Her morning routines seemed to take her forever. The 7 year-old reacted to her mother's exasperation by turning sulky and tearful. With increasing frequency she missed the bus and needed to be driven to school.

If NVLD is misunderstood, these children can develop more serious emotional problems such as depression, anxiety, and phobias.

Unconditional love means that you love your children and even as you set high expectations for them, you understand that they will make mistakes and you will love them regardless. Children need to understand this as well.

“Worrying is carrying tomorrow's load with today's strength – carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn't...

The secret to being more productive is understanding how to manage your brain better.

I have often talked about parenting the “explosive child” or a child who struggles with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). In that context, I often mention Dr. Ross Greene’s groundbreaking work on using “Plan B.” Both in my office and in my columns, I have great responses to my work with explosive children using Dr. Greene’s techniques. However, recently, another approach has been gaining popularity, both in my office and in parenting circles. This approach is from Daniel J. Siegel, MD and is often used to promote “the whole-brain child.”

She says that most people believe that making friends is an art.

Don’t “should” yourself. In times of uncertainty, it’s incredibly important to be kind to yourself. There is really a “should” when you don’t know what the future will bring.

"I've collected that data all along, and what I've learned about surviving hurt has saved me again and again. It saved me and, in the process, it changed me.”

Using your successful relationship with your parents as a guide, you will be better equipped to maintain long-term relationships in the future.

Our experiences quite literally shape us – and more specifically – shape our brains.

Sometimes, it’s hard not to view parenting as a chore. But, if you approach parenting as a burden, you will ultimately stumble because it is impossible to happily carry a burden for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for a lifetime.

With Pesach behind us, what better time to take a closer look at the annual burst of intensity that propelled us, in the weeks and days leading to the yom tov, into a frenzy of cleaning? That sustained embrace of scrupulous cleaning offers insight into a subject that has lately received a great deal of attention in psycho-educational literature. The topic, OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, might be understood by comparing it with that exhausting endeavor from which many of us are just starting to recover.

A compulsion is a repetitive action. But what underlies the compulsion is an obsession or fear.

Keep in mind that isolated symptoms are not an indication of dyslexia. Rather, it is only manifest when three or four symptoms consistently appear as a part of a pattern.