As we start a new year under the umbrella of COVID-19, Delta, Omicron, or IHU as parents, educators, and mental health professionals we are pondering the impact of COVID on children from infants to young adults. Lockdowns, cancellations, virtual, and asynchronous learning has shown us that reframing life day by day is our new normal. The impacts of COVID-19 on children ...READ MORE »
Becoming a mother is one of the biggest changes that someone will go through in their life. A woman’s brain goes through several neurological changes once she becomes pregnant and then again once her baby is born. According to a review of research on the maternal brain, Dr. Jodi Pawluski found that during pregnancy and postpartum, women’s brains are at ...READ MORE »
What is Parent Management Training? Parent Management Training (PMT) is an evidenced-based psychotherapy intervention, designed specifically to teach parents behavioral interventions they can use at home when dealing with unwanted behaviors, emotional outbursts, or general defiance. PMT was developed in the 1960s by Alan Kazdin at Yale University. It has been thoroughly researched, particularly over the last 40 years. The most ...READ MORE »
This blog is a sequel to last week’s blog written by our Clinical Director, Amanda Good, LICSW who wrote on August Scaries, which is about how to cope with feeling fearful during this month’s transition back into pandemic protocols and school year routines. As a family therapist in Washington, DC and a parent myself, I have been thinking about ...READ MORE »
This blog serves as a summary of the last two blogs on how parents can self-assess their parenting needs as they transition out of the pandemic, and ways that they can attempt to recover from the demands of the past year and a half. By offering a sample Parent Development Plan that parents can complete and execute on their ...READ MORE »
This blog follows last week’s post on Pandemic Hangovers for Parents. It offers a checklist for a PARENT CHECK-UP that parents can use to assess their needs and form better plans for themselves as they emerge from pandemic restrictions. Recently, I was meeting with a school counselor who supported hundreds of kids and almost twice that many parents during ...READ MORE »
I’m writing today about a topic that has come up in most of my sessions with parents over the past 30 days. Parents and kids are excited about summer. Families have travel plans booked. Some kids are headed off to camps. Parents are anticipating more normal work routines and benefitting from their social lives returning. Yet most parents I ...READ MORE »
With the world reopening and social connections blossoming, it’s a good time to think about one of the more dreaded parent topics: The Birds and The Bees, a.k.a. Sex. As a Child & Adolescent Therapist and Sex Educator, it is my goal to help parents get more comfortable with having these talks with their children. Talking to kids about sex, ...READ MORE »
As a child and adolescent therapist in Washington, DC, I often find that parents are desperate to better understand the thoughts, feelings, and most of all, the behaviors of their developing teenager. Parents often want to build their understanding of this time in development and also crave strategies to help them and their child feel confident and prepared for this ...READ MORE »
I don’t know about you, but 2021 has brought hope and the realization that this has been a long long haul so far. I’m not someone who tires easily or gets discouraged quickly. And 10 months into this pandemic, I now feel it more than ever. While January 2021 brought hope as many started the vaccine process, it also ...READ MORE »
