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 [...]
I left the APA decades ago when I realized that as a clinician the APA was not my friend and certainly was not worth the expense to remain a member. I joined NAPPP as soon as I could. Nevertheless, the APA still plagues me. For more than a quarter century I have presented workshops across the country to mental [...]
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 [...]
The divorce rate nationally hovers at around fifty percent but it is several percentage points higher in Maricopa County, according to census figures. I believe divorce is a national tragedy, as it is terribly stressful and often expensive for the involved adults, quite sad for the parents of the couple, and absolutely traumatic for the children. A major reason [...]
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 [...]
A parent tells their young child to brush their teeth. The child responds, “I don’t want to; I don’t feel like it.” It is perfectly normal for children to believe that they must be in a certain mood state (feel like it) to do something. Most parents, though, tell their child that they are sorry that they don’t feel [...]
For some time the divorce rate in the USA for first marriages has held at about 50%. This is a national tragedy. This statistic also means that many people have subsequent marriages. Common sense suggests that someone who remarries is older, wiser, more mature, has learned from their mistakes, and knows better what they want and need in a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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