For parents and teens alike, adolescence is a nerve-wracking time. Given the succession of rapid physical and psychological changes teens go through, it’s understandable that they tend to be anxious and pensive from time to time. For some teens, however, this anxiety becomes chronic and even debilitating. If your teen is one of the 25% who live with an anxiety ...
For gifted children, relaxation is often hard to come by. Not only can their bright and creative minds conjure up endless reasons to worry, these children are often perfectionists. They’re prone to being highly critical of themselves and can therefore become unhealthily driven. Alternately, they may be immobilized by fears of failure and rejection. It is therefore little wonder ...
If you are the parent of an anxious child, you probably find yourself occasionally wondering whether or not you have done something “wrong,” something that made your child develop a perpetually worried mind. While such concerns are normal, you can rest assured that the answer is likely “no”; an elevated level of vigilance is simply endemic to the minds of ...
Having your child sometimes wake up and cry out in fear, or come running into your room desperate for you to protect him from a "monster" is a troubling yet relatively common experience. Though basic parental support and comfort (i.e. the offering of physical affection and assurances of safety), is often enough to allay a child's fears temporarily and ...
The human brain processes all sensory information whether or not you are fully aware of it. Most children are able ...
As a psychologist living and working in Toronto, where 51% of residents were born outside Canada, I deal with immigration related ...
As children grow older, their behaviours change dramatically. While a hysterical tantrum over something minor is completely normal at two ...
There are many theories trying to explain why we see such a rapid increase in the rates of anxiety among children. Regardless of the explanations, the fact remains that child anxiety is on the rise and we now see more and more young children - often as young as 5-6 years old - with clinical levels of anxiety. Parenting chronically ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
