The term “helicopter parenting” was coined in 1969, thirty years after the invention of helicopters in 1939. But the dynamic is as old as the hills. My grandma hovered over my mom and the whop-whop-whop of my parents' chopper blades formed the soundtrack of my life. To helicopter or not to helicopter has been discussed, deliberated and debated. Articles have gone viral. ...
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 ...
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), ...
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 ...
As children grow older, their behaviours change dramatically. While a hysterical tantrum over something minor is completely normal at two ...
While most of the issues adopted children face while growing up differ little from the challenges experienced by non-adopted children, ...
The last two years have been a period of prolonged stress and isolation for many people, leading to an increase ...
For many parents, the last leg of their journey feels like the hardest of all; as teens rebel against many of the rules, values, and principles that they have been taught, it can easily feel as though all of one's hard work is slipping away. During this trying time, emotions often run high, tempers fray, and life can begin to ...
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 ...
Before human beings learn to communicate verbally, they communicate physically; as infants, we point to objects we wish to have in our possession, we cry to express distress, we smile and laugh to show joy. Gestures, eyes contact, and other forms of body language are an integral part of the early relationships we form, both with family members and with ...
It's natural for parents to desire that their children be driven to achieve; given how obsessed our culture has become with rigorous testing and tough competition for college admissions, this capacity for high levels of self-motivation may seem essential to a child's long-term success. What many fail to realize, however, is that when a driven attitude is allowed to progress ...
