Training Parents to Parent: A Five-Way Win for Schools

Schools today are required to provide more services than ever before.  For example, many schools across the nation offer a free hot breakfast and lunch to students.  Some schools serve as a community mental health center and some even supply medical services to the neighborhood. One service I believe schools can and should provide is parenting training.  Most parents [...]

2020-02-19T22:13:16-07:00February 17th, 2020|Categories: Education, Mental Health, Teens|Comments Off on Training Parents to Parent: A Five-Way Win for Schools

Making Your Parent-Teacher Conference More Effective

The parent-teacher conference can be an efficient tool to communicate with your child’s teacher.  Below are a few tips on how to make that meeting more productive: 1)  Show up:  My wife, now retired from teaching fourth grade for 28 years, often said that the parents with whom she most needed to talk rarely scheduled a conference. Children perform [...]

2020-02-17T17:56:00-07:00February 17th, 2020|Categories: Education, Family, Mental Health, Teens|Comments Off on Making Your Parent-Teacher Conference More Effective

Academic Success In Teens Is Equal To Their Ability To See The Future

Jason, 14 is like most male adolescents.  He is into video games, hockey, and, of course, hanging with his friends.  If you ask him the classic question adults love to ask teens, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  Jason will reply, “I don’t know—maybe a lawyer or an engineer.” Like many of his peers, Jason [...]

2020-02-17T16:08:06-07:00February 17th, 2020|Categories: Teens|Comments Off on Academic Success In Teens Is Equal To Their Ability To See The Future

Why I Feel Badly for the Young Adults Involved in the College Admissions Scandal

This scandal hits many folk’s “hot button”:  The rich keep getting richer; the discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots continues to deepen; the law is applied differently to the super rich; and, of course, the blatant unfairness that a deserving student will be supplanted by someone who bribed their way in.  I get it. I submit, though, that [...]

2020-02-17T21:42:42-07:00November 1st, 2019|Categories: Children, College, Education, Student, Teens|Comments Off on Why I Feel Badly for the Young Adults Involved in the College Admissions Scandal

Nine Mistakes Parents Continue To Make Over My 40 Years In Practice

I have been working with children and their parents for 40 years.  I began my career as a staff member for a boys’ home in the late 1960’s, taught “emotionally handicapped” teens in 1971 and 1972, served as a school psychologist for the Scottsdale (Arizona) School District from 1973 to 1979, and have since conducted a private clinical psychology [...]

2020-02-17T20:10:26-07:00February 17th, 2018|Categories: Children, Family, Mental Health, Teens|Comments Off on Nine Mistakes Parents Continue To Make Over My 40 Years In Practice

Are We Really More Communicative?

The amount of on-going communication today is staggering. With email, the cell phone, texting, and social networking etc., the number of messages sent each day today is probably more than 100 times the number of messages sent per day compared to 20 years ago.  With all this additional communication, are we as a society any better off? I don’t [...]

2020-02-18T17:25:00-07:00October 18th, 2016|Categories: Children, Couples, Family, Mental Health, Student, Teens|Comments Off on Are We Really More Communicative?

Changing Undesirable Behavior In Our Kids

Back in my undergraduate years I took a required course for all psychology majors entitled Experimental Psychology.  Early in that course in a lab we were each instructed to train a white rat to turn right in a T-maze.  (A successful trial was defined as the rat not going past a line on the left side of the maze [...]

2020-02-17T16:17:05-07:00September 21st, 2015|Categories: Children, Teens|Comments Off on Changing Undesirable Behavior In Our Kids

Video Games: The Newest Plague

Video games are like crack cocaine to today’s youth.  Many children, especially boys between the ages of 11 and 16, spend untold hours involved with these electronic games, often from the time they come home from school until they finally go to bed.  Far too many kids spend essentially entire weekends (and most of their holiday and summer breaks) [...]

2020-02-19T18:16:20-07:00March 19th, 0208|Categories: Children, Mental Health, Teens|Comments Off on Video Games: The Newest Plague