For many children, the start of a new school year produces feelings of excitement and anticipation: The idea of seeing old friends again, discovering new subjects, and meeting new teachers makes the prospect of schoolwork seem more like an adventure than a chore (albeit often temporarily). For children with ADHD, however, the idea of returning to school often invokes a ...
Anger is a notoriously infectious emotion, easily setting off the desire to react in like kind. Many of us were not taught how to effectively deal with anger during our own childhoods, so when we experience anger in a child, we struggle to react in the way we feel we ought to. Keeping ourselves calm and judicious may prove possible, ...
Mindfulness is a concept which has, in recent decades, received quite a lot of attention both from mental health professionals and within the media. Mindfulness is generally defined as a process wherein an individual learns to pay focused, mindful attention to his or her internal and external experiences, and so becomes more aware of the present moment. He or she ...
For children with Asperger’s Syndrome and High Functioning Autism (HFA), change is hard; all their lives they have struggled with the confusing and troubling nature of the highly changeable world around them — then suddenly, with the advent of the teen years, the changes become internal, too. Hormonal fluctuations, the quest for self-identity, and the pressure of trying to be ...
Autism has been in the spotlight for many years. In movies, television, and novels, autistic characters are portrayed to have ...
Too often, the emotional side of giftedness is overlooked; for all that we laud the intellectual complexity of giftedness, seldom ...
As a psychologist living and working in Toronto, where 51% of residents were born outside Canada, I deal with immigration related ...
Dyslexia is an old name for a subtype of learning disability related to difficulties in acquisition of reading. While dyslexia is relatively well-known, it is not well understood, largely because educators have yet to agree on what dyslexia truly is. While some experts are convinced it is a simple matter of being unable to accurately process the sounds of letters (...
There can be few things more devastating to a family than a suicide of a child. Not just one person is lost but the whole family loses something that it can never get back. Most suicides, however, could have been prevented. This is why it is so vital for families to learn to identify the signals of potential suicide to ...
Every child differs in his/her developmental capacity and pace. Some children learn to speak earlier than others. Some learn to walk earlier than others. However, there are some milestones which should be reached by every child by a specific age. If babies fail to talk or walk by a certain age, there may be a problem. When a child ...
As popular media started using psychological term 'executive functions', more and more parents are learning about the importance of increasing executive functioning capabilities as a critical developmental stepping stone in virtually every area of child’s life. But what is ‘executive functioning’ and how does it relate to your child’s development into a teenager and young adult? First, executive ...
