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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Anxiety is the second most common form of mental health disorder, next to depression. In many cases, though, depressed individuals also struggle with anxiety and many anxious people frequently feel depressed. Upwards of 20 million persons in the US regularly deal with anxiety, it has been estimated. Anxiety often is described as a feeling of tension and/or fear. Some [...]
For the past twenty years when I present to mental health providers on how to develop, manage, and market a private practice I always ask members of the audience to raise their hand if they practice without an assistant. Depending on the group and location, typically half or even more of the providers acknowledge practicing solo When I question [...]
Ironworks Inc. and Acme Steel have been doing business together for twenty-five years. Ironworks manufactures steel widgets and Acme sells raw steel. These two companies have worked together for all this time for two basic reasons 1. They need each other. The money is right. Ironworks believes they are buying their raw materials at a reasonable price and Acme [...]
Depression and anxiety are, by far, the most common mental health problems. Nearly 20 percent of the US population struggles with or will struggle with one or both of these problems. The most common treatment today for these issues is medication—typically prescribed by the primary care physician (not a psychiatrist). This treatment is considered a Biological intervention, as the [...]
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) [...]
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