Is my child’s behavior a side effect of medication?
“Dust mite allergy,” the allergist told John and Tamara, consulting with them about their constantly scratching 10 year old who now had constant red marks on his arms and the backs of his hands, “You’ll have to wash everything, buy hypoallergenic covers, it’ll take a lot of housecleaning.” This sounded like a perfectly reasonable explanation to the couple, and so they cleaned. “I actually clogged my dryer vent with lint because of the number of loads of bed linens I washed.”
But there was another culprit that the couple had never thought of; a medication side effect.
Listening to Your Child’s Inner Voice
You walk softly past your child’s room at night, lower the light in the hallway, and then you hear it; a quiet song, a joke from TV, or maybe a soft voice repeating something heard at school that day. Listen to the tone, and most of the time you’ll hear a soothing timbre or quiet reasoning, like the tone of a good friend or supporter. Your child’s personal narrative, his or her self talk, serves several crucial purposes in maintaining his or her emotional and psychological health. Let me repeat that, because it is so important – a healthy internal tone is the basis for psychological and emotional wholeness and well-being. Self talk is the voice of social problem solving, helping to work through an emotional exchange or relationship conflict. It serves as a criticizer, a supporter, or a worrier when its role is to interpret something that has happened in the past or to plan a way of coping with the future. Since we are all destined to have this internal companion whispering in our ears for our entire lives, or what psychologists sometimes call the dialogical self, the importance of helping our children develop healthy “inner voices” is apparent and clear.
It’s All About Family Fun
Food? Shelter? A vegetable with every meal? Health insurance? Maybe you think of these as the basics, the essential ingredients of a healthy childhood in a nurturing family. But if you look closely at the list, one of the essentials is missing; family fun. Why does fun deserve to be on the same list as food and shelter? Research by psychologist Peter Gray published in the American Journal of Play suggests that play is an important adaptive survival activity in groups, and has been since the days of early humankind. “Free play,” he says is particularly important to children, and there are indications that this type of play has dwindled in most children’s lives.
Mirror, Mirror, in the Brain
Most of the time, when a colleague or co-worker calls me over to watch a video on Youtube, my first thought is to look at the time length of the video so I’ll know how long I’ll spend with a quizzical look on my face. But even I could not escape the hypnotizing cuteness of the “Talking Twin Babies” video. If you haven’t seen it, the clip shows a set of twins facing off babbling and gesturing like two old companions that are so in-tune they could finish each others’ thoughts. The toddlers break through the developmental boundaries of pre-language to share humor, coordinate dance steps, and converse about something that looks extremely funny and interesting to both of them.
Bridging the Communication Gap Between Parents & Children
When did talking to kids become so hard?
It shouldn’t take a Ph.D. in Human Relations and ten years of college debate-team experience to communicate with your kids, but sometimes your kids may make it feel that way. Blame social media, Multiple Electronic Screen Disorder, or the way we parent, but the point is that the social landscape of childhood has changed, leaving us to cross a communication territory that seems more complicated than the territory we crossed when we were children. But in reality, the pathway from parent question to child answer has never been straight.
Forming a Stronger Parent Unit
It’s possibly the most over-used gag on family sit-coms spanning the TV airwaves from the days of Leave it to Beaver till our own 8 Simple Rules: a parent tries to lay down a message of authority to a errant child, and the other parent uses the opportunity to joke about the parent’s own childishness. The reason we laugh at this joke over and over is that it reflects the tension we often feel in our own family situations. But don’t laugh to hard, because the issue reflected by the joke can be one of the most serious threats to successful parenting.
“For a long time, I didn’t know how to put it into words,” Megan recounts of her co-parenting struggle, “My husband is so logical, all the time. When I’d make a decision about one of our kids, he’d always give me a ‘look’ and have some comment about not seeing the bigger picture. I realized after awhile that what he was causing my kids to see me as less intelligent and less capable of making good decisions. He still has a hard time admitting that it was having a bad effect on our family.”
Family research strongly supports Megan’s view that these kinds of communication messages have a negative impact on the entire family system. Jouriles and Murphy’s (1991) study of 87 families noted a connection between acting-out behavior in boys and parental disagreement. Other researchers have found similar results. The issue is not that parents have disagreements about child-rearing, it is how those disagreements are expressed in front of the children.
Teen Cyberfights
I was looking over my 13 year old son’s shoulder the other day (or, as they say in teen cyberlanguage “POS” for Parent Over Shoulder) and watched his fingers quickly slip toward the enter button on the keyboard. His post,… Continue reading
Encouraging your child’s vegetable eating
It’s a parenting dilemma struggled with for generations, or at least since the first blob of mustard greens or lentil loaf was spooned out onto a toddler’s plate: how to get them to eat their vegetables.
Before going into the cute ideas that might help, like carving radishes to look like a head of each member of the family, let’s take a look at what science has found out about the problem. You didn’t think scientists haven’t been paying attention have you, after all, there are quite a few scientists that are mothers as well. A recent study conducted by Mildred Horodynski, a researcher with a Ph.D. in nursing, set out to uncover the factors in families that had a strong impact on child vegetable eating. Looking at families that were at risk for lower veggie intake overall, two influences at the dinner table emerged. The first, of course, was role modeling. The researcher found that children whose mother ate fruits and vegetables as a bigger part of their own diet also had kids that ate more fruits and vegetables. Surprising? Not really when you think that what mom likes might show up on the table more often, and that kids do pay attention to whether or not we have eaten our carrots just like we have been paying attention to them.
Autism and Freeways: more questions than answers at this point.
Findings of a new study conducted by autism researchers at the Saban Research Institute at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles have created a buzz in the autism community. Their study has found that children born to parents living near… Continue reading
The Anti-Aging Message and our Kids
Cosmetics industry analysts report that expenditures for anti-aging products have created a 15 billion dollar market for creams, injections, and compounds that promise to slow or reverse aging. We might think that the focus of this industry push are the… Continue reading
