Tag: parenting

  • Teen Mental Health Crisis

    May is mental health awareness month. And to contribute to our collective awareness of mental health, I want to discuss a current crisis. I honestly don’t use those words flippantly. The mental health of our preadolescent and teenage students in our country is in severe decline. I want to share with you some statistics that…

  • Mental Health and Technology

    The statistics are quite staggering. The rapid rise in depression, anxiety and suicide are evident when we look at changes of mental heaIth in the past 20 years. We need to respond to these changes with careful evaluation and realistic adjustments. Technology is here to stay. We can’t throw out our iPhones and return to…

  • Accept vs. Alleviate

    ​The mental health arena is rich with references to the stages of grief that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced us to way back in 1969. The final phase of her model is acceptance. When bad stuff happens, we deny, get angry, bargain, become depressed, and according to the model ideally reach a point of acceptance. Yet increasingly much of our culture…

  • Crisis for Children – Texas CPS must Change

    The news stories are happening way too often. Children in the protective custody of the state of Texas are placed in foster homes only to be abused by their foster parents. Victims of maltreatment are revictimized by the system that is supposed to keep them safe.  The data on this problem is disturbing. ​​From 2010 until…

  • Helicopter Parents

    I​t’s time to retire the term “helicopter parents”. Depending on your source, the term was coined by one of two individuals. The psychologist, Haim Ginott, wrote about a child/teen sharing that their parent hovered over them like a helicopter. It then seems that the parenting expert, Jim Fay and Foster Cline wrote about “helicopter parents”…