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.
Positive Praise for your Child’s Pride
Praising a child correctly is important to the development of positive behaviors. It’s a great way to encourage constructive future behavior. When you give praise you are giving your child a feeling of positive feedback, which increases their sense of confidence, self esteem and abilities. When you praise your child, you are pointing out the way they’ve acted, an action they’ve taken, or simply who they are. When your child looks good, tell him so. When your child does anything that pleases you, let him know. You should also praise a child’s effort to do well, even if it doesn’t come out so good in the end. You should find something each day about your child to praise.
Video Game Addiction, Obsession, or Habit: How Much is Too Much?
I am often asked some variant of this question, and a few of my recent cases have stimulated me to explore more evidence-based answers to improve the quality of my response. As it turns out, many have written fairly extensively on the subject of how much video gaming is too much. It has been proposed that two to three hours per day of playing the games is now an average amount of time for the average adolescent to play video games or spend time on the computer (APA Task Force, 2008).
There are many reasons for parents to be concerned about their child’s seeming obsession with video games, and the amount of time that their children are playing them. Initial concerns were that the games, which were largely played by adolescent males, stimulated aggressive instincts and increased the likelihood of violence in the, again, largely, male population who played the games. These concerns were fueled and heightened by the massacre at Columbine, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, in which two high school students went on a killing rampage. These two students had reported that they spent a great deal of time playing “Doom,” a gory video game with a great deal of violent and aggressive themes. It was also inferred that the boys had spent a great deal of time watching violent movies–which may inspire another article at a later date.
Importance of Family Time on Kids Mental Health and Adjustment to Life
The goal of every parent is to raise a happy and well-adjusted child. There are thousands of books which provide information and advice on raising children successfully. Experts in their respective fields strive to give parents the most up to date information whether it is about health, nutrition, child development, education, or parenting. However, one simple truth is often overlooked: Children from birth to adulthood need time and attention from their parents. Sometimes parents become so anxious to raise a “successful” child that they overlook the importance of spending time interacting personally with their child or children. This does not mean rushing from school to extracurricular activity to supervising homework. Interactive time is that spent with both child and parent fully engaged in an activity together. The importance of this time is multifold:
Coping with Holiday Stress, Depression, and Grieving
Holiday stress is fast becoming as frequent a topic as holiday shopping. Just type “holiday stress” into any search engine on the Internet, and you get approximately 10,000 hits for information on the topic. Parents are especially vulnerable candidates, as their stress is compounded by their children’s stress around the holidays.
Just as students often have final examinations, indecision as to how to spend their holiday vacations and with whom, and hoping that Santa, or someone, is going to find a way to fill that Christmas list, parents have to minister to their children’s needs and deal with their own holiday stressors simultaneously.
Stress-Busting Tips for Teens
Stress itself is a person’s reaction to life changes, and there is hardly a time in one’s life with more changes than the teen years! Added on to all these life changes is the fact that there is a lot going on in the life of the average teen – concerns about appearance, extracurricular activities, friends, school projects, social events, and so forth can all converge on teens at once. Here are some tips for parents to share with their teens.
Deep Breathing Really? Just breathing deeply makes everything go away? Not exactly! But deliberate, slow, deep breathing exercises can significantly increase your body’s coping mechanisms, sources say. This is why deep breathing is so often a component of meditation.
Learning Disabilities and Extreme Patterns of Thinking
In addition to classroom challenges, one of the challenges facing students with learning disabilities or challenges is learning to curtail extreme thinking patterns. Child Psychologist, Dr Thomas Achenbach has used the term “Externalizer” to refer to children who anger easily, deny or lie about their wrongdoing, blame others for their problems, or minimize the seriousness of what they did. Hence, Externalizer refers to the child’s tendency to externalize the blame for their problems, as opposed to accepting responsibility for them. Interestingly, these children appear to have no difficulty accepting responsibility for the good things they do. So, if they do a good deed, they deserve credit, to their way of thinking. On the rare occasions that they will admit they did a bad deed, they will either blame someone else for having “caused” them to do the bad deed, or to be caught doing the bad deed.
Teens Cutting and Other Self Injurious Behavior in Children and Adolescents
Most parents believe that the transition from child to pre-teen to adolescent is fraught with behavioral and emotional challenges due to a variety of causes – hormones, peer influences, and rebelliousness to name a few. However, the vast majority of children transition through adolescence relatively unscathed and go on to live happy and productive lives. The individuals who struggle during adolescence often have underlying psychiatric disorders and are experiencing stressful environments such as family, social, health, or academic issues.
Self-injurious behavior is one maladaptive behavior that has increased in frequency in adolescents. Self-injury, “cutting,” or “self-cutting” is defined as purposeful self-harm without the intent of suicide. Cutting is usually accomplished with sharp objects (razor blades, knives, or broken glass for example) but can also include burning oneself (using fire or through friction such as rubbing an eraser repeatedly on the skin), self-biting, pinching, or punching. It is almost always a repetitive behavior, and contrary to popular belief, it is not usually an attention-seeking behavior. Research has shown that the location of the self-injury is usually in areas that are hidden by clothing such as the arms, abdomen, inner thighs, feet, genitals, and torso (especially near the breasts in females).
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.
A Quick Guide To Understanding Your Child
Understanding your child is one of the most important things that you should learn as a parent. It is very helpful in becoming effective in guiding and nurturing your child as they grow and mature. You need to bear in mind that your child has a unique personality trait that remains consistent throughout life.
One of the ways you can understand your child is by observing them as they sleep, eat, or play. Look for the consistent traits. Which activities do they like best? Is adjusting to changes easy for them or do they need time to become familiar with these things? These things are the normal characteristics of a child and your child may not be an exception.
As much as possible, have time to talk to your children as this is crucial to gaining information and understanding. In the case of young children, they require less verbal language and more facial expression and body language in order to understand their thoughts and feelings. Asking them questions will allow them to share their feelings to you.
For example, rather than asking them what they did in school, ask them what they built with their blocks today. Instead of asking them if they played with their playmate, focus on the game they played.
