Posts by Tali Shenfield

Dr. Tali Shenfield holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Toronto and is a licensed school and clinical psychologist. She has taught at the University of Toronto and has worked at institutions including the Hospital for Sick Children, Hincks-Dellcrest Centre, TDSB, and YCDSB. Dr. Shenfield is the Founder and Clinical Director of Advanced Psychology Services.

Helping Anxious Children to Overcome Fear

Dr. Tali Shenfield

If you've ever been so overwrought with worry that your patience fell short, or snapped at someone else because something unnerved you unexpectedly, you've experienced the intrinsic connection that exists between fear and anger. Just as fear can, when it is chronic, in effect bully the person experiencing it—constantly telling him what he can and cannot do—it can ...

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How to Effectively Talk to Your Teen about Marijuana

Dr. Tali Shenfield

Emerging research has demonstrated that even the use of “soft” drugs such as marijuana can have a deleterious effect on developing brains, including those of adolescents. Marijuana use directly alters the parts of the brain responsible for memory, learning, and attention, and may be capable of permanently lowering a person’s IQ and interfering with other aspects of their neurological ...

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What Not to Say to Your Child or How to Avoid Damaging Phrases and Habits

Dr. Tali Shenfield

With the best of intentions, many parents get into the habit of repressing what they are feeling - bottling up their annoyance and frustration in an attempt to indulge their children's needs, energy, and enthusiasm, or to handle their bad behaviour with grace. While this practice seems noble at first (we all want to set a good example, after all), ...

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Resisting Peer Pressure: How Parents Can Help

Dr. Tali Shenfield

  When a child suddenly starts insisting on owning certain items or picking out his or her own clothing, there is often far more than youthful stubbornness or greediness at play. While many parents believe that peer pressure only truly gets intense as children enter their teens, in reality, many children deal with it while still in primary school—usually ...

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How Screen Time Affects Your Child

Dr. Tali Shenfield

Parents today are inundated with alarmist headlines alerting them to the myriad supposed dangers of modern life; everything from plastic baby bottles to radiation from cell phones to the preservatives in our food are purported to be cause for concern. In this fearful social climate, it's often difficult to determine what truly poses a risk and which issues have been ...

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Navigating a Disturbing World: Talking to Children about Terrorism

Dr. Tali Shenfield

It is a shocking paradox that despite all our advances in knowledge and scientific progress, our life in the 21st century is as unsafe as ever. Just a week ago, the humanity was suddenly shaken up by the terrible news of a terrorist attack that claimed the lives of more than a hundred innocent people gathered in Paris for music ...

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The Imaginative Mind: Testing Children for Creativity

Dr. Tali Shenfield

Many parents are shocked by the idea that one might be able to “test” for creativity; how, they wonder, can such a magical and intangible quality possibly be measured and quantified? The answer, of course, is “imperfectly”, but emerging neuroscientific research has given us a fairly accurate glimpse into both the regions of the brain responsible for producing creative thought ...

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“The Talk” – How to Discuss Sex Topics with Your Child

Dr. Tali Shenfield

Talking to your children about sex is the very archetype of an awkward conversation, so many parents may find themselves tempted to outsource this task to either educators or online search engines. Likewise, they sometimes assume that the latter two resources are superior sources of knowledge anyway, or that they ought not “rush” their child and let him or her ...

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Popular Articles

Psychological Issues Faced by Adopted Children

While most of the issues adopted children face while growing up differ little from the challenges experienced by non-adopted children, ...

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How To Help Your Child Lose Weight And Preserve His Self-Esteem

For the parents of overweight children, every day is a balancing act; on one hand, there is the natural desire ...

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Understanding Emotional Complexity of a Gifted Child

Too often, the emotional side of giftedness is overlooked; for all that we laud the intellectual complexity of giftedness, seldom ...

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