Learning how to cope with adversity is an important part of healthy child development. When we are threatened, our bodies prepare us to respond by increasing our heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormones, such as cortisol. When a young child’s stress response systems are activated within an environment of supportive relationships with adults, these physiological effects are buffered and brought back down to baseline. Read more ›
Teens face numerous challenges to getting consistent, restorative sleep. Recognizing those challenges helps teens and their parents make a plan so that teens get the sleep they need. Read more ›
Anxiety can feel like the enemy. However it shows up — a tightness in the chest, a knot in the stomach — it’s easy to want to obliterate those feelings. Read more ›
Parenting a neurodivergent child can be exhausting. The stress, the worry, the ongoing lists of extra things to monitor and manage can seem endless. Often it feels like there’s no spare moment to do anything other than be on constant guard for what is coming or might be coming. Read more ›
From the moment we wake up each day, we’re faced with a continuous stream of choices. When there are too many options, we tend to feel overwhelmed, anxious, stressed or otherwise out of sorts. This is decision fatigue, a state of mental overload that can impede our ability to make additional decisions.
Even if you’ve never heard of decision fatigue, you have probably experienced it, especially during the pandemic, which has added a new layer of complexity to the everyday choices we face. Read more ›
Does your child seem unusually sad, irritable or quiet lately? Such changes in mood could be due to a temporary stress in life. But how do you know if it’s something more? Read more ›
Rates of childhood depression have been rising in the last several years. Yet, information and awareness about childhood depression has not caught on at the same rate. Many well-intentioned adults still believe that children ‘can’t get depressed. They are so young- what do they have to be depressed about? Read more ›
As the 32nd Summer Olympics came to a close, the TV aired hours of footage from the previous two weeks in Tokyo. The highlight reel featured medal-winning moments in every sport from badminton, beach volleyball and BMX freestyle to swimming, skateboarding and surfing. But it was something else that held my attention, something that has been in short supply over the past 18 months—publicly displayed, unmasked emotion. Wonder, gratitude, passion, determination, belief, bonafide hope. Read more ›
With so much to do, buy, and organize, parents might overlook another crucial way of equipping kids for school — getting them mentally prepared. Karen Stewart, MD, adult and child and adolescent psychiatrist for Kaiser Permanente in Georgia offers 5 tips for reducing back-to-school anxiety. Read more ›
For those children that struggle with anxiety in school, in particular, school closures provided a natural escape from having to face their fears. Many with performance anxiety found temporary relief in the transition to open note testing and pass-fail grading systems, and those with social anxiety seized the opportunity to turn off their cameras and retreat from the classroom. Read more ›
