Thinking of Requesting a Specific Teacher for Your Child? Think Twice

How hard should I push to get my daughter the teachers I think will best fit with her learning style?

There are really two questions here, so I will address them in order. First question: How hard should you push to ensure your daughter is assigned to the teacher you feel is best for her?

Raising a Moral Child

What does it take to be a good parent? We know some of the tricks for teaching kids to become high achievers. For example, research suggests that when parents praise effort rather than ability, children develop a stronger work ethic and become more motivated.

Yet although some parents live vicariously through their children’s accomplishments, success is not the No. 1 priority for most parents. We’re much more concerned about our children becoming kind, compassionate and helpful. Surveys reveal that in the United States, parents from European, Asian, Hispanic and African ethnic groups all place far greater importance on caring than achievement. These patterns hold around the world: When people in 50 countries were asked to report their guiding principles in life, the value that mattered most was not achievement, but caring.

Has psychiatric diagnosis has become way too loose?

Today, 25 percent of Americans meet the criteria for a diagnosis in any given year. Twenty percent of us take psychotropic medication; that’s one in five people. We now have more deaths in emergency rooms from prescription drugs than from street drugs. Pill popping is rampant, along with all the unnecessary side effects of drugs.

Suicide Prevention Sheds a Longstanding Taboo: Talking About Attempts

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The relationship had become intolerably abusive, and after a stinging phone call one night, it seemed there was only one way to end the pain. Enough wine and pills should do the job — and would have, except that paramedics barged through the door, alerted by her lover.

“I very rarely tell the story in detail publicly, it’s so triggering and sensational,” said Dese’Rae L. Stage, 30, a photographer and writer living in Brooklyn who tried to kill herself in 2006. “I talk about what led up to it, how helpless I felt — and what came after.”

What is Executive Function?

Executive Function (EF) refers to brain functions that activate, organize, integrate and manage other functions. It enables individuals to account for short and long term consequences of their actions and to plan for those results. It also allows individuals to make real time evaluations of their actions, and make necessary adjustments if those actions are not achieving the desired result.There are differing models of executive function put forth by different researchers, but the above statements cover the basics that are common to most. Two of the major ADHD researchers involved in studying EF are Russell Barkley, PhD, and Tom Brown, PhD.

Authoritative Parenting Has the Edge

In my practice, when I begin to see family routine tides turning from frustrating and negative to more optimistic and healthy, two shifts are typically happening: 1) parents begin taking responsibility for their actions and get curious on how they can better influence their children’s behavior, 2) parents make less frequent use of practices falling into either the Authoritarian or Permissive parenting category, and instead begin opting for a more Authoritative approach.

Research on Children and Math: Underestimated and Unchallenged

We hear a lot about how American students lag behind their international peers academically, especially in subjects like math. In the most recent Program for International Student Assessment, commonly known as PISA, students in the United States ranked26th out of 34 countries in mathematics. On the surface, it would seem that we’re a nation of math dullards; simply no good at the subject. But a spate of new research suggests that we may be underestimating our students, especially the youngest ones, in terms of their ability to think about numbers.

I Refuse to Be Busy

I’m not busy.

Are you shocked? It feels almost wrong to say, in this moment when all my fellow parents reply to my “Hey, how’s it going?” with “Busy! Always busy!” and even fill in the same response for me: “How are you? Busy, I’m sure!”

But I’m not. I hate being busy. Busy implies a rushed sense of cheery urgency, a churning motion, a certain measure of impending chaos, all of which make me anxious. Busy is being in one place doing one thing with the nagging sense you that you ought to be somewhere else doing something different. I like to be calm. I like to have nothing in particular to do and nowhere in particular to be. And as often as I can — even when I’m dropping a child off here or there, or running an errand, or waving in the carpool line — I don’t think of myself as busy. I’m where I need to be, doing, for the most part, what I want to do.

The Spectrum of Sexual Orientation: Does It Exist?

Depending on who you ask, sexual orientation is either given at birth, learned by nature or discovered over time. Personally I’ve known since I was about five-years-old – it was pretty clear to me. However for many of my bisexual friends, it wasn’t as obvious until later on.

For years I never understood what made us all so different. As human beings we’re stuck in our own realm of understanding. What we know to be true, is. All we have is our experience which ultimately shapes an identity. I never thought the idea of a “spectrum” was authentic. I knew I was gay just as my straight friends knew they were straight. It never occurred to me that people could exist on different levels – you were either gay or straight. But I was wrong.

Viktor Frankl on the Human Search for Meaning

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

Celebrated Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, born on March 26, 1905, remains best-known for his indispensable 1946 psychological memoir Man’s Search for Meaning — a meditation on what the gruesome experience of Auschwitz taught him about the primary purpose of life: the quest for meaning, which sustained those who survived.

For Frankl, meaning came from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty.